As a seventeen-year-old coping with the strains and jolts of
high school, I can not help but to sometimes forget who I
am. The life of a Junior is so swelled and so
overly-stressful. It is easy to get lost in a world of
illusive Bagrut's and trifling competitiveness; to look only
forward without leaving time for reflection of the past.
This aspiration for success and self-improvement is good, I
suppose, but I feel it is so unhealthy to be constantly
moving, working, and operating like a gray, tempestuous
locomotive. It is so important to stop once in a while and
remember a life without the stress; a time before the
ruthless strife of a college-bound mentality. If we were
never to look back, what would become of us? Surely, we
would get completely lost in a hazy and obscured focus; we
would forget to simply enjoy life.
      I would be a very different person if I didn't
strive, not for the future, but to return to a point of my
past. I, like Jay Gatsby of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The
Great Gatsby, can not help but to look back on my past and
long for those slivers of happy memories to someday be real
again. How I yearn to feel the way I once felt about myself,
my community, and my world. Only a few years ago, my entire
self-concept was completely different than it is today. When
I was fourteen I was so confident, so defiant, so well,
perfect. My life was perfect because I was happy in my own
skin. Now, I feel as if that fourteen-year-old boy is only a
blurry memory of color; a distant dream of many nights ago.
I find that I now hate things about myself that I once was
proud of. Aspects of my society that I once took pride in
now fill my mind with a bare revulsion for social class and
economy all together.
      And yet, nothing has really changed. My town, my
family, and the issues of the world are all the same as they
were three years ago. It is I that has changed. My morale,
my psyche, my soul¦ Something deep within me has evolved. A
reaction has occurred inside the core of my inner-self; the
catalyst being an age, a phase of life that twists my mind,
juicing rotten emotions, which I never knew existed, through
the crevices. Or perhaps the catalyst is awareness of the
world and all its tribulations, crises, and clashes of life
swarming within the boundaries of an arid earth. Whatever
the catalyst may be, it has triggered a stream of smoke that
fills my mind, blurs my thoughts, and prevents me from being
the Me that I once was. And I miss that Me; that happy,
carefree, ignorant little Me who cared about nothing but the
happiness of loved ones and the celebration of Life. I do
not celebrate Life too often anymore because I am too aware
now. I sometimes fear this is the point of no return for
happiness because why should I be happy when there is so
much sadness in the world? As a wise screenwriter once
wrote, "Ignorance is bliss". Knowledge of truth seems to
lead to sorrow.
      I feel sadness now because I have learned the truth.
The truth is that a life of both awareness and happiness is
uncommon, and it is a very painful time in one's life when
this realization is made. But hopefully I can move on and
not dwell on the facts, but enjoy it for all it's worth.
Maybe one day I will break away from the depression of
reality and appreciate that there's no time in this short
life for dwelling. Living Life and finding some source of
happiness in an unhappy world is all anyone can do to get by
without going completely insane. But I suppose that first
one must experience the awful stage of realizing all these
things in order to build on them. This ugly phase of human
life is what many call "adolescence".
      A personal change can be a very ugly thing. Finding
feelings within myself that I've never felt before, such as
hate, misery, and depression, feels terribly different and
scary. I have to keep telling myself not to fear. I am not
really losing my sense of happiness; that area of my brain
is just a little numb right now. Change is something
everyone goes through and everyone overcomes with time, with
experience, with age. An age as ugly as seventeen can be
dreadful and coarse, but there's nothing to do but to
remember my true Self without the label of "Angry Teenager"
and to build on these new feelings in order to create an
intricate, delicate, and well-earned future