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I just finished watching Lost and Delirious. It was really good. The best way for me to describe it is to say that it is, in a lot of ways, the female equivalent of Dead Poets Society.
I can't believe it hasn't even been ten years and I'm already so completely removed from the powerful passion of my teenage years. I watched the torrent of emotions flood through the characters in Lost and Delirious and wondered idly where that hydropower of youth goes when you become a twentysomething. I've been thinking a lot about my adolescence lately or, more to the point, my distance from it.
Whenever I talk with Emmy I am stunned at how quickly I remember the way that I felt when I was her age, the emotions that coursed through me like fire in high school. I was so sure that everything I felt was truth and certainty. I was so sure that every dream I had could become a reality. I was positive that I would never be as real as I was right then.
I was so right.
Something happens when you "grow up" and leave the freedoms of blissful experimentation. Somewhere in the quagmire of adolescence and early adulthood we feel that it is necessary to dull our emotions, and we strive to do so. We call ourselves mature, enlightened, content. Are we? Have we merely settled? Did we give up when we told ourselves that every event wasn't life-shattering, that every emotion could move a mountain?
When I was in high school, I was so full of raw angst and pain, and there is nothing in the universe that would make me want to feel that anguish again. At the same time, though, there is no comparison, even now, to the amount of pure, unadulterated idealism that I exuded at sixteen. I believed that every cause worth fighting for could be won. I believed that everything I felt strongly about was right. I believed that anything at all was possible with hard work.
There is still a great deal of idealism in me, perhaps moreso than most people my age, many of whom have fallen prey to the world of business and industry, to the almighty dollar, slaves of the timeclock. I am an idealist, yet I am a far cry from my youthful exuberance. I doubt my abilities to save the world, I am unsure about love and passion being enough, I worry that I am not always right even when I feel such a strong resolve.
Do you have to have the intense agony of defeat in adolescence in order to survive the mundane-ness of adulthood? Or does the agony of unbridled passion, unrestrained emotion, dull us into becoming twentysomething automatons?
Something to think about, I suppose. When my head's no longer pounding, that is.
I can't believe it hasn't even been ten years and I'm already so completely removed from the powerful passion of my teenage years. I watched the torrent of emotions flood through the characters in Lost and Delirious and wondered idly where that hydropower of youth goes when you become a twentysomething. I've been thinking a lot about my adolescence lately or, more to the point, my distance from it.
Whenever I talk with Emmy I am stunned at how quickly I remember the way that I felt when I was her age, the emotions that coursed through me like fire in high school. I was so sure that everything I felt was truth and certainty. I was so sure that every dream I had could become a reality. I was positive that I would never be as real as I was right then.
I was so right.
Something happens when you "grow up" and leave the freedoms of blissful experimentation. Somewhere in the quagmire of adolescence and early adulthood we feel that it is necessary to dull our emotions, and we strive to do so. We call ourselves mature, enlightened, content. Are we? Have we merely settled? Did we give up when we told ourselves that every event wasn't life-shattering, that every emotion could move a mountain?
When I was in high school, I was so full of raw angst and pain, and there is nothing in the universe that would make me want to feel that anguish again. At the same time, though, there is no comparison, even now, to the amount of pure, unadulterated idealism that I exuded at sixteen. I believed that every cause worth fighting for could be won. I believed that everything I felt strongly about was right. I believed that anything at all was possible with hard work.
There is still a great deal of idealism in me, perhaps moreso than most people my age, many of whom have fallen prey to the world of business and industry, to the almighty dollar, slaves of the timeclock. I am an idealist, yet I am a far cry from my youthful exuberance. I doubt my abilities to save the world, I am unsure about love and passion being enough, I worry that I am not always right even when I feel such a strong resolve.
Do you have to have the intense agony of defeat in adolescence in order to survive the mundane-ness of adulthood? Or does the agony of unbridled passion, unrestrained emotion, dull us into becoming twentysomething automatons?
Something to think about, I suppose. When my head's no longer pounding, that is.
