Teen Blogging: The Anti-Drug

“We exist because of suburbia. Suburbia is a freak’s dreamworld, a world of extra rooms upstairs and long, lazy afternoons with no interference. A place where you can listen to your LPs for hours on end. You can live in your room, your own rent-free corner of the universe, and create a world of pleasure and interest entirely centered on yourself and your interior aesthetic and logic.”

—Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia

Look, I know, TOTAL white girl problems; a very wise decision on the filmmaker's part to give the main character epilepsy.

If there's one thing that my A in Writing the Essay has confirmed for me, it's that I'm really unnecessarily good at analyzing things. But while this skill can be helpful and therapeutic if learned early on in a high school setting where it's possible to decode social dynamics, it is actually totally crippling when applied in the real world. I'm 18 years old, and I hardly know anything. Nor should I expect myself to. And in a way this makes me worry that maybe I actually did peak in high school, but if the clarity I achieved during the end of my senior year was a "peak" of sorts, I only got there because I really struggled at first, having gone through this whole period of self-doubt over potentially wasting my adolescent years looking to grow up too fast. I don't want to make this mistake a second time in college, and this is precisely why I must retire from teen blogging (or as I like to call it, "blogging about my feelings"). Yes, I'm still a teenager, but I'm not in high school anymore, and while I am totally in love with going to school in New York City, doing so also means being totally stressed out each and every day by the sheer measure of power and wealth and raw talent that exists within it. It's not easy figuring out how to best live in the present, but to me it means taking my time, and not getting ahead of myself, no matter how tempting. I don't know exactly what I want to do with my life anymore, but I keep telling myself that's okay. It's fine to look to others' successes for inspiration, but there are no formulas to be followed, nor are there finish lines worth crossing in life. And I think I've come to realize that it's not so much the disillusionment that's worth romanticizing, but rather the fuck ups that remind us we're only human. As of now, I'm still holding on to illusion with all my heart.

-Leah