The American teenager is an outsider. They all are, in one way or another. They are outsiders in their houses or their schools or their minds. The American teenager feels like everything is important always. What dress you wear to the spring dance determines how your night will go. The video game system you have determines whether or not people will like you. Your hormones are going crazy and you can't think straight. Everything seems urgent and important and you need that new phone right now and if Ashley still isn't talking to you today then you're going to die. Everything is changing in your world: your body, your friends, the world itself, and you change as well, trying desperately to find yourself in the tangled mess of your thoughts and the pressures of society and the feeling that you might be loosing yourself in the madness of your world. You're afraid that you aren't normal, even if you know in your mind that conformity isn't going to make you happy, yet still you'll try anything to be happier, to stop these horrid doubts from invading your mind every night when you cannot sleep, or to find some direction in the chaos around you. Everyone expects something from you. Your friends, your parents, your teachers, they all want something and sometimes it feels like it would only take a feather to break you under the pressure and yet you keep going until it gets better or you really can't anymore because to tell them what's wrong would reveal that you're not normal, that you have issues and that you can't handle your life, and that is the last thing you want. You try to seem in control at all times, even though there are so many aspects of your life that you have no control over whatsoever and sometimes you just want to scream because you are a person and you are mature you swear it and if they would just trust you a bit more then you could make your life better. But then you remember the pressure and you wonder if you really could make your life better at all, or if more responsibility would only mean more pressure and then everything could easily spiral out of control.
You can't wait until high school is over and your life can begin.
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