ramblings #1
My mother always told me if she had a time-machine, she'd go back to her teenage years. Because that's when she made trustworthy friends and did not have to deal with utility bills or work 9 to 5 everyday or raise a hormonal and grouchy teenager who's beginning to have a mind of her own.
And I couldn't wait to become a teenager; I wanted to see for myself the beautiful colours in this garden called youth and taste the sweet smells and dip myself in the cooling fountain of young adulthood.
But no one told me that this garden was also distorted and filled with painful thorns and vines that would strangle you till you did not have a single breath left and all you could see was wilting flowers, all droopy with nothing but death.
I don't know what my mother had experienced, but being a teenager is a pitch black nightmare filled with crushed dreams and deceptive facades that you can't even discern. School takes over my life and everyday is just a routine of studying and absorbing information that teachers push down your throat till your voice drowns out and no one can hear your cries. You make friends and you love them, but then you can't because you're put in the gladiator's pit to see who will emerge as the victor in the battle for good grades and who will have a sword put through their heart because they just weren't good enough.
Being a teenager also means being a cast of a new gameshow called 'Who's a Freak?' This is especially popular in girls' schools, because everyone is going to look at you from head to torso to toes and mark you with labels ranging from 'gorgeous' to 'slut' and 'ugly'. When we were kids no one really cared about being an ugly whale or a bamboo stick; in a beautiful era known as adolescence every girl out there suddenly equates being skinny to beauty; and no one tells them that's fucked up. It's a cruel circus show of ugly beauty and contorted bodies, toilets filled with the vomit of girls purging and razors sitting by the sinks.
The horrific thing is that schools don't teach us how to deal with our bodies and insecurities, but all they do is constantly break us down with expectations and doctrines of perfectionism; society seems to think that youth is a period of effervescence and frolicking but they don't see that we are all like blood red apples on the outside, but rotten and infested in the core.
There are so many things that we want to do but we are forced to be 'pragmatic' and 'realistic' because dreaming to be a florist in a quaint little town is labelled as being idle and non-ambitious. We are so brainwashed into thinking that success is graduating from some elitist university and becoming a high-flyer in corporate giants. No one gives a shit if I want to lead a simplistic life as juxtaposed to someone else who wants to go to Harvard and become the next Steve Jobs; they expect us to plot out the map of our lives when the world is still so nebulous to us.
If I ever have a child, I'm never going to tell her the best years were my teenage years because as far as I can tell, it's like spiralling into a vortex of tears and uncertainties and being forced to pretend that growing up is a saccharine sweet process when in truth it feels like a dagger is lodged in your heart while no one tries to save you from drowning in your own blood.