Individuality and Love

It strikes me sometimes that there are countless lives that co-exist outside of me.  Other people contemplate things that do not touch my consciousness or make any impact at all on my mind.  They are truly individual, with their own thought patterns, experiences, and external events.  Occasionally when I am in a room and somebody leaves, I imagine that the camera is following them instead of me, that their vantage point is the preferred one, and leave myself behind for a moment.  I wonder what their psyche contains, what the air currents grazing their face feel like, what their immediate senses and instincts are.  I wonder how it can be possible for my state of being to be so apparent to me but completely shut off from theirs.  This makes me feel alone.

The concept of individuality becomes more complex when you apply it to love.  Love begins with the desire to share your individuality with someone else.  Another person causes in you such a stir of emotions that you start to admire their life and desire their identity as part of your own.  You wish to convey to them the things that exist within you, things that nobody could know unless you told them; and by telling them, you hope to free those feelings from the private cell of your mind and create a common pool of consciousness.

In a relationship, our lives are like asymptotes on an axis, which get infinitely close to each other but never converge.  Even when we can predict each other’s moods, habits, and cycles, we still maintain a basic individuality that assures us that our bodies feel distinctly and our minds may differ.  Yet there are times when, whether during a brief reunion or a longstanding partnership, we are chemically aligned in a way that seems to melt away our individuality.  These moments occur when two people allow themselves to be vulnerable, leaving behind distrust and fear of outside opinion, and allowing for absolute comfort.  It is then, when one can truly forget that one is an individual, that love is most affirmed. 

The Place At The End Of The Earth

One night as I was lying in bed, I saw the place at the end of the earth.  It was a hill, blanketed in virgin snow, at twilight.  At the edge of my vision, the branches of a pine tree hung calmly, lending their aroma to the cool, comfortable air.  On top of the hill was a log cabin with a chimney from which wisps of smoke drifted out into the purple-grey sky.

Beyond the hill was a slope that tapered off into the vast chasm of eternity.  Yet I was not afraid, because I knew that no one could ever fall into it against their will. 

Inside the log cabin was a crackling fire and a cozy hearth, covered in a soft, round, red carpet.  And on that carpet, there I was, a child of four years old.  I had no expression on my face for I was in complete security, without fears, wrapped in the assurance that I was cared for and could never be hurt. 

A force, not unlike the love of my parents, but stronger, coming from an ultimate life source, permeated my presence, granting me perfect serenity. 

I felt all the blurry beauty of nostalgia, but it was real. 

Connecting With Your Fantasy World

In a society where the vast majority of people act adultlike, it helps to have a fantasy world - a place that nobody can ever see or influence no matter what is happening in your physical environment.  Keeping such a place inside you, hidden away from everything else, can greatly counterbalance all the external events that are out of your control. However, even those who regularly use their imaginations to escape often do so in a passive way, minimizing the benefit of their mental hideaway.

Maintaining an active relationship with your fantasy realm requires affirmative upkeep.  It means retreating to that mental hideaway often and engaging it willfully and boldly.  If you can accept the fact that you – an individual above the age of six – possess a private realm where anything can happen, then your escapes will be far more fruitful.  And if you do it often, always searching for new subject matter to play with, you will enter your own world more easily.

It is also important to keep your cognitive channels open and clear of pollution. There will always be many outside events in your life, and your ability to filter these outside events has great consequences. If you allow doubts, stress and other negativity into your life, they can stop up your lines of communication with your internal world. 

A fantasy world, when facilitated properly, is a tool with which to enjoy our lives. It makes up a large part of the sense of freedom we feel.  When we can fully utilize our gift of mental creation, we can revel in the ideas we love most, and ultimately, use those ideas to color our external world as well.

Using Time To Our Advantage

Time is one of the largest ideas we never truly understand.  It is a concept of the same magnitude as space and energy, but unlike them, it cannot be physically witnessed; time is simply something we believe in. 

Time is, fundamentally, a change of events.  We recognize time to have passed only when something changes - a person takes a step, a gust of wind blows, our leg itches.  Even the least impactful event, such as the tremor of a hand, is considered a passing of time.  And, by definition, if no event occurs – if no water flows in a river, if no blood circulates in the body – then time has not passed.  But something always seems to happen, and thus time always passes. 

Our society teaches us to group these micro-events into clusters, or macro-events, such as meetings, football games, and vacations.  Clock time is the most obvious example of aggregating micro-events into macro-events.  It is easier to say “I went to the mall for three hours” then “I walked 8,000 steps, my heart beat 10,800 times, my retina collected 48,616 visual stimuli,” and so forth. 

Yet, although it is clear how convenient these macro-events are for communication, they have caused an adverse effect in our lives as well.  People are apt to make themselves busy, outwardly or inwardly, in order to distract themselves from the true issues they are concerned about.  Although they may not realize it, being busy is just the act of causing many events to occur, and thus causing one’s time to pass quicker.

Once we realize that time is merely a succession of micro and macro-events, we can use it to our advantage.  Rather than making many events occur in order to speed up our perception of time, we can make fewer events occur - slowing down time - and giving us a better ability to reflect on and appreciate our lives. 

Defining What Is Right

All of us are under some pressure to do what is right, whether from ourselves, our family, or society.  We do our best to stick to the right side of things because we feel immoral doing otherwise.  Yet most of the time, we accept this ambiguous word – “right” – simply because we haven’t really thought about it.  There will never be a shortage of people to opine on what the right behavior is, and yet very rarely do people admit to the subjectiveness of their beliefs.  For many, it only becomes clear that there is no correct point of view when two people they respect have completely opposite opinions.  Even then, one will usually relieve oneself of the discord of not knowing who to believe by taking a side.  All the while, it should be clear that neither side is right: each person is merely stating his own opinion, and the only way to figure out what is right is to ask yourself.

Invisibility

It is a small fantasy of mine to become invisible.  My desire to be unnoticed usually presents itself when the pressures of life bear down on me so much that I instinctually retreat into my subconscious.  When I feel the need to withdraw from reality, some aspect of the environment I am in becomes my secret hideaway.  If I am in the bathroom washing up, it is down in the shadows between the bottles of moisturizer, shaving cream, and hair gel.  If I am in the park, it is the recess between the roots of a large tree.  It is usually a place that is small, dark, and cozy.  There, I wish I were lying safe, where no one could find me. 

My desire to not be found comes from a barely conscious longing to experience the sense of safety I had as a child - to regain the feeling of certain surroundings filling me with comfort and security, as a five year-old who climbs into his parents’ bed after a bad dream.  Somewhere in time we lost the inviolable security we had as children, and I often miss it, and resent that I must now take full care of myself.

The inevitability of becoming a noticeable entity that is constantly at the whim of its environment is difficult to accept.  Invisibility tempts me with its promise to provide a complete respite from the worries and fears of the outside world.  While I do value my self-dependence, sometimes it would just feel good to wrap myself in the security of anonymity, and let everyone and everything go. 

Blocking Out The World

The world is filled with things we cannot control.  We put ourselves out there, aware of the risk that bad things might happen, just to give ourselves the opportunity for good things to happen. We hope for the best and try to avoid the undesirable vagaries of nature.  But when we depend on people, careers, or events in our lives, we are opening ourselves to possibilities we cannot foresee. 

Although it is necessary to confront the randomness of the outside world most of the time in order to participate in socialized life, there are moments where we eliminate almost all chance of disappointment and wrap ourselves in the protection of our own mind.

Sinking into your subconscious is the subject of one of my other writings; what I emphasize here is specifically facilitating a lack of connection with the outside world.  It requires active thinking to recognize thoughts that are tied to the outside world, since those thoughts are all classified as “normal:” I wonder if my mom is mad at me. I hope I got an ‘A’ on that test. It would be great if I met someone at tonight’s party.  But separating out thoughts that are bound to circumstances you can’t control can be crucial.

When things are going well for a day, a week, or a moment, it doesn’t seem necessary to retreat from the outside world.  But when things are going poorly, all you want to do is get away from the source of the negativity.  It is important to know how to do that.  There are already things that are built into your life that are constant and very much under your control.  Use those things to comfort yourself.  Savor them.

When I was taking midterms in college, I used to relish the few moments after I got under my bed covers but before I went to sleep.  I often found myself smiling involuntarily the moment my weight sank into the mattress.  Shuffling off the stress of the day and slipping into my own personal world felt incredible.  Even now, I sometimes think to myself how much I enjoy those last conscious moments, and how it’s too bad they’re so close to sleep as to render themselves blurry in my memory.

Other ways I block out the world temporarily are through writing, video games, and music.  The last is probably the most common way people temporarily secede from the world.  And in a way, all art is a form of escape – an escape that is so fundamental to human living that every culture from every time period has participated in it. 

It is important to vivify your mental alone-time, to recognize and seize upon it.  The respite you’ll receive from blocking out the world once in a while could sweeten your life experience.

The Paradox Of Writing

I write for you.  With every sentence I type, I pass my words through a filter of how I think you’ll react.  If your opinion didn’t matter, I wouldn’t be distributing my writing; I would keep to journals, in which I could scribble and dabble and review every few years to see how my identity had evolved.  Or, I wouldn’t write at all.  Yet there is an excitement which I believe all writers feel in the prospect of creating something that translates an emotion so well that it can reach the quick of another person.

Still, the very foundation of writing is honesty.  If I were to write solely for other people’s benefit, my work would be inauthentic, noticeably lacking in that glimmer of originality that gives a piece its impact.

Therein lies the paradox of writing – remaining true to your feelings within the boundaries of your audience’s tastes.  In life, too, we adapt our behavior to the people and situations we encounter, which is why writing often tells us so much about who we are.

Narcissism And Peter Pan Syndrome

A classic characteristic of Peter Pan Syndrome is narcissism.  The truth about Peter Pans is that they are self-absorbed, but not in the negative, uncaring way that narcissism connotes.  They simply feel a dreamy, imaginative comfort inside of their own minds – an attraction to introspection that is positive and well-meaning. 

Everyone has some level of self-involvement.  After all, life is constantly impacting us and is impossible to ignore.  We experience emotions, sensations, desires, and the sense of our own mortality.  Although other people play a crucial role in our lives, we cannot possibly relate to them as well as we can to ourselves.  Their feelings cannot resonate in our nerve centers in the same way our feelings can.  Thus, we must dwell on ourselves from time to time. 

Peter Pans accept this reality but enjoy it more than most.  They live vicariously through their own lives as if they were the protagonist of a story.  Their relationship with themselves is like a reader’s relationship with a sympathetic narrator. 

Yet “narcissisism” with all of its unpleasant connotations continues to be the word of choice for describing Peter Pan Syndrome.  It makes sense that the same people that consider childlike characteristics a “syndrome” would err in their characterization of Peter Pans.  Many of the people who disseminate knowledge in our society - especially psychologists, journalists, and religious leaders - are set on standardizing people’s lives and minds. They have lost touch with the unbridled imaginational freedom of childhood; the very concept that life’s possibilities may be endless stands in stark contrast to their work. 

Ultimately, most people do succumb to the prescribed order of things, forgetting what they knew as an idealistic child.  But that is why it is so important to have a subset of people who draw from their own raw, creative energy to remind us of how colorful life really is.

Narcissism translated as inspired self-immersion, as it is with Peter Pans, is not only positive, but necessary to our world.  When life seems to have lost its original purpose amongst societal responsibilities, a connection with the vast and limitless mindscape of childhood may be the only antidote.

Living Life Consciously

Forty years from now, you will nostalgize about today.  You will think back to the present moment, recalling how youth was full of choices and hopefulness.  You will marvel at how blissfully uninformed you were about what the future held in store for you.  The life you live right now will be a distant, golden memory. 

Knowing how much you will value these days when you are older, how can you allow yourself to hurry through life?  How can you not realize that every shred of your short existence is valuable?  Each time you notice your days disappearing into an anonymous past, it should become more evident that you need to be living life as consciously as possible. 

We all wonder sometimes about the purpose of life; often, we do so because we are searching for a way to justify death.  And yet, the only way to understand death is to fully experience our everyday lives.  Living life consciously involves thoughtful observation – not just of the outside world, but of our inner life.  We should be taking note of our sense of identity at a particular time – our level of confidence, our anxieties, our far-flung wishes.  If we have some record of our state of being at a given point in time, we can observe our personal evolution and ultimately gain some insight into our patterns and purpose. 

And yet, as arduous as it may seem to keep track of all of our internal and external events, the feat can be achieved easily if we simply relax our definition of time.  If we can view time as an invention of humans – and therefore not as linear and infinitely-accumulating as it seems in the abstract – we realize that life, and memory, are our collage to paste together however we wish.  All the clues we need to figure out life’s meaning come from examining the collage as a whole and finding patterns of passion, compulsion, and purpose. 

Therefore, experience the present vividly as it unfolds.  In an ecstatic moment, allow the chemicals in your brain to percolate.  Taste the pleasure as it pours out.  In a bitter moment, allow the pins of pain to push through you.  Fight the urge to close your eyes.  Imbibe and absorb your emotions as if you were a child experiencing them for the first time.  It is only through active involvement in your life, however exciting or mundane, that you can start to draw conclusions about why you are here. 

In the end, this kind of conscious existence will give you far more solace than even the most successful unexamined life.  For only those who have a clear vision of living can accept their passage into the next expanse. 

The Problem With Having Too Many Responsibilities

Adults’ lives seem to go by very quickly because of all the chores that distract them from their inner life.  Adults pay taxes, apply for mortgages, climb corporate ladders, and attend superficial social functions.  Their lives are structured, so much so that even their vacations follow a schedule.  And yet, even though taking on responsibilities appears undesirable, adults become dependent on them.  How many working mothers, for instance, embody the cliché of the harried modern parent, simultaneously preparing breakfast for their kids, scheduling a doctor’s appointment, and checking their makeup in the mirror before leaving for work?  Even if they were to rid themselves of all their responsibilities for a day, they would still be unable to relax because of their need to be “busy.”

“Busy” itself has become a fashionable word, indicating a dedication to the external world and a loss of touch, at least temporarily, with one’s self.  Because our society can demand a lot from us, and because executives and dedicated working parents have been glorified in the media, it is easy to embrace the stereotype of the “busy person.” Yet more often than not, this persona is a cover-up for a discomfort with self-reflection.  It has become very difficult to be alone with yourself; hence the popularity of mind-dulling drugs. 

I cannot excuse this state of affairs as inevitable, saying passive things like “Well, what can you do?  Life happens.” That’s precisely the point: life does happen and it is a sacred thing – it deserves to be remembered.  If you overcommit yourself, the days of your life will fly by you, unexamined and unrecognizable.  It is a basic human instinct to contemplate existence, to dream, and to fantasize.  Yet we are stuck distracting ourselves. 

People would be far more content if they devoted more time to self-reflection.  I feel that there are four basic ways to spend time: goal-oriented time spending (work, school, sports, games), emotional immersion (friendship, love), sensory gratification (sex, eating, drugs), and philosophical contemplation.  The last is the rarest, and one of the most valuable ways to occupy yourself, for it centers you around your existence and gets you closer to your connection with birth, life, and the energy that envelopes everything. 

I, like everyone else, am in love with the external life – the one that is filled with subjective judgments and fashions, where people win and lose at competitions, where social rituals can lead to ecstasy or extreme disappointment.  Yet I realize its transience.  Those who cannot confront the larger meaning of life are avoiding an essential realization – one that can be frightening if it is avoided for years, and, once recognized, can be a calming and satisfying act in all its wonder and complexity. 

So do not overburden yourself, take time to think and be, and realize that getting a lot done won’t necessarily make you feel more content.  The external world is filled with uncertainties – but the internal world, the one that can only be accessed when the mind is quiet, is the only place where you can truly feel at peace.

The Ability To Concentrate

Expressing oneself intelligently requires the synergy of many forces. One must harness one’s mental energy into an idea; compare and combine that idea with other available ideas; translate the results into an intelligible form of communication; and express that communication. Most people are able to do all these steps fairly well individually. The problem is holding each step together in one’s mind long enough to use it in the next step and come to a coherent end-product. In other words, it is not brainpower that is lacking; it is the ability to concentrate.

If you ask the average intelligent person to divide 6 into 125,809 in their mind, they simply won’t be able to sustain a mental image long enough to produce the answer. However, when given paper, they could tell you the answer in seconds. They have no trouble performing the separate arithmetical calculations; it’s visualizing the entire process piece by piece and remembering each calculation long enough to apply it to the following one that is the issue. Inevitably, thoughts disperse.

Contrary to what you may have absorbed from the media, difficulty focusing is not limited to those with ADHD. It affects all people. If we were always able to attain a high level of concentration, our true intelligence would come out and all of our latent ideas – the ones we know we have but can just never seem to put into words - could finally be exploited. The difference between those who get As in schools and those who get Cs, between those who gets 1100s on their SATs and those who get 1600s, between those who discuss insights with their friends and those who write great books, easily comes down to the ability to concentrate.

What kind of a solution exists? Again, popular wisdom would have you believe that drugs like Ritalin and Adderall are the only known antidotes to this mental blurriness. But I believe that there is another, more natural solution. It stems from the fact that difficulty concentrating usually comes in two forms: simple interference by outside thoughts and a more subtle attrition due to background stress. In the first case, which is common to all people, outside thoughts like what you’re having for dinner or a recent spat with a significant other, replace the subject matter you’re currently studying. In the second case, which becomes more common the older you get, your ability to focus is slowly worn away by stresses that you don’t even realize you have. That unpaid telephone bill, or the fact that you don’t have enough romance in your life, or worries about global warming, distract you from the material in front of you.

The problem with drugs like Ritalin and Adderall, to the extent they do improve concentration, is that they do not address this second factor, background stress. Rather, they simply dull your mind to all but the material in front of you, which can be helpful, but also comes with undesirable side effects like a general lack of enthusiasm. Even if they were helpful, these drugs are marketed for people with ADHD and thus are not legally obtainable by the average person who could use a boost in focus.

If we could somehow remove this background stress, concentration could be improved and many more people would magically “become” intelligent. Other than years of therapy, what could possibly dispose of these deep-seated worries? I’ve found that the answer lies in immersing oneself in unreal worlds. Imagination, which can come from reading books, writing, or simply dreaming up fantastic situations, is a valuable tool in improving concentration. By conjuring up fanciful worlds like you used to do as a child, you isolate yourself from real world worries, placing yourself on a different plane.

Reading fictional books, for instance, immerses you in a place far away from the one in which you physically dwell. This actually relaxes you. Have you ever wondered why reading tends to put you to sleep? Well, I’m sure there’s some scientific reason relating to the soporific side effects of visually scanning words on paper, but I believe that the real reason is that reading takes you out of the real world. Stress keeps you awake; fantasy relaxes you, causing you to drift off into your subconscious. So if you’re going to try reading as a means of improving your concentration, remember not to read a newspaper. The real world events contained in a newspaper only increase background stress. The key is relaxation.

Again we find that children, whose lives contain so much more imagination than those of adults, have the advantage. To the extent that mentally healthy children have difficulty focusing, I’d say that outside interference of ideas - thoughts of frolicking around in the playground – are the sole cause. So if we can present children with interesting subject matter, giving them good reason to concentrate on what’s in front of them, we can fully utilize their ability to concentrate.

And for the adults, try taking a lesson from the children. If you have a presentation or an exam tomorrow, don’t cram and worry yourself even further; immerse yourself in fantasy. Separate yourself from real-world worries. Suddenly, you may just find yourself with a lot more clarity.

Peter Pan Syndromers As Overachievers

Peter Pan Syndromers are usually painted as grown-ups who cling to their childhood due to a fear of adult responsibility. But emotionally stunted underachievers make up only a small percentage of the Peter Pan population. Dan Kiley, author of the Peter Pan Syndrome concept, never accounted for Peter Pan overachievers: eternal children whose competitive instincts compel them to achieve high standing in the very society that they secretly shun. These people learn how to game the adult world by conforming to its conventions, all the while secretly plotting to escape as soon as they have attained the resources to do so.

In fact, many of the big kids I know are actually successful businesspeople who retain a childlike world view. A lot of the celebrities we see in the media are merely big kids who use their fame and fortune to attempt to live their childhood dreams. The ambition that comes from refusing to lead a standard, 9-5 life, has created many colorful characters. After all, it is impossible to underestimate a Peter Pan Syndromer’s fear of normalcy.

The self-imposed pressure Peter Pan overachievers bring upon themselves dates back to their first concepts of good and bad. As toddlers, they learned how to behave by gauging their parents’ reactions. Good actions garnered praise, giving them a positive and affirming feeling - so they kept trying to be good. But as the Peter Pan Syndromers became toddlers, their standards for good behavior changed. No longer was listening, eating your food, and going potty enough. The onset of school brought with it the notion of competition, and now, they had to do better than others. They were graded – albeit in areas like sharing, relating to peers, and respecting elders – but still graded. In later years, the competition got stronger. Classes became stratified by skill level, and tests separated kids into discrete intellectual categories. By the time high school and college came around, these individuals were so programmed to compete that finally, one day, a realization occurred – “What is all this hard work even for? Is it all going to lead to happiness somehow, or am I just trapped in a cycle of working towards endless theoretical goals? What happened to the good old days when people were proud of me just for being nice to others? Everything has gotten so complicated.”

This is the point at which a Peter Pan Syndromer learns that he has Peter Pan Syndrome: when the world seems to spin out of control with falsely alluring goals, and all he wants to do is return to the simplicity of childhood.

Yet few others understand. Society runs like a well-oiled machine. The media enforces its ethics and people become intoxicated with normalcy. Meanwhile, the stubborn Peter Pan Syndromer is wondering what is going on around him. Why is everyone walking the same way, wearing the same clothing, using the same expressions, believing in the same philosophies? He feels the need to find someone like him, another eternal child with whom he can run away, back to the simple land of laughter and imagination. To do so he must escape from the land of taxes, bills, and bosses. So he works hard. He pretends to be normal, playing by all the rules. And he makes money. One day, he will use that money to emancipate himself from the rigid limitations of the world. Even if he has to wait until he is old, he will eventually become a kid again.

In every large company and organization, there is at least one Peter Pan Syndromer. He’s dressed like a drone but he wishes he weren’t. He wants to be free. And he will be – someday. 

The Wonder Of Crushes

Having a crush is one of our original human impulses - it is the feeling of seeing in another person characteristics that compliment your being so well that you feel impelled to join their life with yours. It is a strong, passionate longing for a partnership with a person that has something you don’t have and could never possess. It is a magnetic desire for an image of beauty fetched from youth. It is a flood of emotion so mentally overwhelming that it affects your physical being.

Thinking of your crush directly causes a rush in your chest and a noticeable increase in your heartbeat. The tragedy of knowing that your crush might not reciprocate your feelings fills you with depression and hopelessness. All you can do is fantasize about your crush becoming a part of your life, of linking your experiences with theirs, of assimilating their magical existence into your mundane world.

Having a crush is a euphoric, desperate, compulsive state of being. It is truly a life-affirming experience. 

Does True Love Really Exist?

The question of whether true love really exists cannot be answered without first clarifying what true love really is. However, the concept of “true love” has already absorbed so many qualities from literature, television, and magazines that it can no longer be approached with any objectivity. Trying to consider true love freshly at this point would be like trying to taste a wine while you are eating a hot dog.

The image that comes to mind when someone mentions true love is of two inspired individuals, fatefully drawn to each other and ready to risk their lives for the other person’s sake - in essence, Romeo and Juliet. Despite the prevalence of this perception, I have never actually witnessed such a perfect relationship in real life. The closest thing I can think of is something I term “pure love”: love that contains the boundless excitement that only a child can experience.

Pure love happens to some people many times, to others only once, and to still others not at all. The ability to experience pure love depends upon the strength of your idealism. You are more likely to feel it if you are a fourteen year-old girl who believes in fairies, and less likely if you are a forty year-old investment banker who rejoices when the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates. However, no matter how old you are, you can experience pure love if you suspend your adult feelings for a while and allow yourself to be completely vulnerable.

I experienced pure love during the summer after I turned fifteen years old, before I had ever kissed a girl. I met Melissa on a family vacation, on a cruise boat called The Inspiration. I first saw her inside the disco while I was with my family. She was sitting off to the side with a group of people I didn’t know. I eventually got the courage to go over and ask her to dance, and even though she hesitated, we were soon on the dance floor together. As it turned out, we both hated dancing, so we went outside and hung out on the steps for the rest of the night. We talked for hours, until it was time for her curfew. I remember standing up and giving her a hug goodnight, and my whole body tingling with joy once she had disappeared into the elevator.

There wasn’t a single moment I didn’t think about her for the next twenty four hours. The following night we met back at the disco. It was formal night, and she was in a velvety black dress. We skipped the dancing part this time and went to walk around on the upper level of the ship. Earlier that day, I had asked my dad for advice on how to kiss a girl and he told me to use “gentle persuasion”: to lightly lift the bottom of her chin and guide her lips toward mine. That evening, though I was looking good in my best suit, I was more nervous than I had ever been in my life. So, when she stopped walking and asked me if I wanted to go over to the balcony and watch the waves, I could feel a deep pounding inside my chest. The wind was whipping through her hair, causing it to fly about wildly, and this intensity was the only comfort I could find at that moment, for it mimicked the frenzy inside of me. After a few minutes, she asked if we could go back to her room so she could change out of her formal dress.

I was sure our moment had been ruined. But when she emerged from her stateroom a few minutes later, newly clad in jeans and smelling of some tantalizing body spray, my hope was renewed. On her suggestion, we went back up to the observation deck and returned to the exact same spot. We talked about a few ordinary things for a while, and then all at once my fear sank to the bottom of my chest like a single, dense weight, and I heard myself say “Melissa, I really like you.”

“I really like you too, Evan.”

And with that, I raised my bloodless arm, placing my hand underneath her chin, and kissed her. I tried to remember to open and close my mouth slowly, but my vision was black, and I had no feeling in my entire body. Perhaps a minute later, I regained some composure and started concentrating on what I was doing. I felt the moistness of her lips and tasted her saliva with life-affirming euphoria.

When we finally separated for a moment, she said “Wow - you’re a really good kisser.”

We spent the last four days of the cruise together. I remember the simple and expressive way she told me that she liked me, the intensity of her eyes after we kissed, and the specialness I felt when we walked around together at night, holding hands.

After the vacation, we wrote each other letters with gifts enclosed every week. We traded pictures from the vacation in one of them, she sent me a bottle of her shampoo (I worshiped the smell) in another, and I wrote her poetry in others. We called each other as much as our moms would let us. She lived ten hours north of me, but I didn’t care. I would have seen her every weekend if I had a car or the money to fly.

Meeting Melissa ushered in the worst period I had ever had in my relationship with my mom. She thought the idea of having a long distance girlfriend was impractical, and that it would only lead to disappointment for me. We fought constantly about whether I was allowed to fly out there, and although I ultimately lost the battle, I did everything short of running away from home to try to see her again. In one heated fight, I screamed at my mom: “You’ll regret this when Melissa and I get married one day and I don’t invite you to our wedding!”

About a month after the cruise, on a Tuesday night, I was sitting on the floor of my room using the twenty-minutes-every-other-day long distance time my mom had allotted me. Melissa and I were talking about how much we missed each other. Then she told me about something she had been feeling.

“I don’t know if it’s love, but I feel something...it’s like fireworks inside of me” she said.

“Really?...I do too.”

“Do you think it’s all right to say it?”

I paused. “Yeah. Let’s say it.”

“Okay, you first.”

“I...love you.”

“I love you too.”

That moment changed something chemical inside of me. I became obsessed; I started to save allowance money so I could buy calling cards and sneak extra calls to her from the pay phones at school. We planned secret times to call each other when our moms weren’t around. This went on for a few weeks.

But our parents had no intention of tolerating our unrealistic romance any longer. About three months later, after a final, climactic fight with our moms (and even a conversation between them), we agreed it was best not to talk.

The rest is history. She eventually got a boyfriend, and I started dating someone else too. Although we kept in touch for years, we never got a chance to be together. But the feelings I had during those four days on The Inspiration and afterwards for three months were as vivid and real as any feelings I have ever had. That was pure love.

My experience with Melissa is the closest thing to “true love” that I know. There are many possible interpretations, though. Some would call the impassioned excitement of a new relationship “true love,” and others would say that true love is the comfort of being with someone who understands you intimately well. To me, these states represent meaningful emotions; and indeed, there are as many types of love as there are couples. But the pure type of love that I felt when I was fifteen is different. It was life-changing and infinitely painful - the type of thing that you can only feel when your heart is as open as a child’s - and it is all that I can think of when I hear the words “true love.”

Living In Your Own World

Understanding how to live in your own world is essential, or else you may find yourself living in someone else’s.

As babies, we all dwelled in vast, endlessly entertaining bubbles of selfness. We found amusement in sparkly stickers, calming colors, funny faces, and even the sound of our own cries. Everything around us was fascinatingly new; the world seemed to exist for us alone, and things we had never seen, places we had never visited, had no substance whatsoever in our minds. It was as if the world had no past, and everything simply came into being right before our eyes at the very moment we experienced it.

Since then, a lot has changed. The world has gotten narrower as morals, societal customs, and outside expectations delineate the lives we lead. Adults have sat down seriously to explain to us the way life works, and most of us have taken the path of least resistance and followed their rules. It is easy to be convinced by them; after all, they are the ones that created children, and it is hard to imagine how out-of-touch they could be with their own childhoods. Yet even still, in the back of every person’s mind there is a place far, far away - a safe place without any pressures, where all that is left are fantasies and positive feelings. Few people still remember the promise they made to themselves when they were younger, that they’d never grow up and act like “them.” Those that have lost touch with their childhood miss out on the serenity of dwelling in their own imaginations, and the security that comes with being intimately in touch with oneself. In some way, their joy is limited by what society will allow them to feel.

In the last few years, I’ve watched myself waver between timorous child and responsible adult – and thankfully I have been able to save myself from falling into the chasm of adulthood. The struggle to remain a child and avoid the prefabricated behaviors of grown-ups has been one of the most difficult of my life, as it meets with opposition at almost every turn.

In the course of my mission to stay childlike, I’ve developed several survival skills. These techniques have effectively shielded me from the outside world:

Sinking Into Your Subconscious. Knowing how to drift off into a peaceful place where you can be alone with your imagination is fundamental to remaining a child. In order to keep your head in the clouds, practice unfocusing your eyes so that the world is a blur around you and your head feels light and fuzzy. It is easier to see inside of you if you can’t see what’s outside of you. (Make exceptions for frolics through nature or interactions with pleasant people.) If you regularly commute to adult places like schools or workplaces, buy a portable music player so you can block out their world and fill yours with sounds that put you in an uplifting or exploratory mood.

Surrounding Yourself With Other Dreamers. If you become friends with someone who gossips a lot, guess what? You’re going to hear a lot of gossip. By the same token, if you fill your social circle with positive people who share your dreamerlike qualities, your state of mind will not be interfered with as frequently and you may be able to partake in their reveries as well.

Deflecting Negativity. Negativity is unavoidable, but it can be substantially reduced if you know how to shield yourself from it. Although it is difficult to deflect negativity the way a stone wall deflects a pebble, the skill does exist and can be honed. The easiest way to do this is to follow the first two guidelines and simply steer clear of places and situations that breed negativity. However, when negative people or institutions are a part of your everyday life, one useful strategy for blocking them out is reducing them to concepts. Annoying people can be viewed as big, dumb dogs who simply don’t know better. Authority figures can be pictured naked or in highly embarrassing situations. Rude or overly-competitive people can be sorry sacks who never received enough love as children. If you can manage to keep your concepts present even when directly dealing with these individuals, you will be able to successfully deflect their negativity. For more on this subject, see Ridding Your Life Of Negative People.

Knowing How To Act Like Them. Unless you are a hermit or so powerful that nobody would ever dare try to impose their point of view on you, you will have to take on the real world sometimes. In these cases, rather than bringing further scrutiny to yourself by professing your abandonment of adulthood, simply put on an act. One important caveat: It is very important to realize you are acting while it is happening. Many teenagers act like adults with the best intentions and then quietly succumb to the pressure of following social conventions without realizing that this action is precisely what they were trying to avoid. Make sure to snap yourself out of acting mode as soon as the adults or adult-wannabes have dispersed.

Those who learn how to inhabit their own minds have the incredible ability to restore the magic of childhood. The drawback is that they will constantly be confronted by naysayers, proclaiming: “You’re not living in the real world.” But if you hear that line often enough, you know you’re doing a good job. 

How Can I Improve My Relationships?

People who know themselves intimately well can meet and embrace potential partners much more easily than those with an unclear vision of themselves.

If you conceal your feelings from the people you speak to everyday, it is likely that you are out of touch with yourself. Hiding your insecurities from others is almost always a sign that you are hiding those same issues from yourself.

Naturally, it cannot be expected that you walk around like an open book; and the ultimate goal isn’t to do so. Rather, it is to be able to acknowledge your weaknesses so that one day you can select the person who best complements you and have a more stable relationship.

Think of something you hide from others - something that, if it were to ever become known to people outside your family, you would be mortified. That is the issue you need to concentrate on. If you subconsciously deal with this issue on a regular basis, but have never said it out loud, you are not much further along than someone who cannot identify the issue at all. In order to relieve yourself of this weighty burden, you need to outwardly admit what you are feeling: either write it down, or say it out loud. Nobody needs to be around when you are coming to terms with your private feelings. But putting them into words will cause you to see them in a realistic, purifying light.

Do this whenever you catch yourself feeling down but can’t quite explain why. Search first for the immediate stimulus of your bad mood. Perhaps you are worried that you gained weight, or didn’t get a phone call you were expecting, or took offense to a comment someone made to you. Question why that incident might have triggered your mood. A larger insecurity usually lurks behind.

After you have been recognizing the causes of your moods for a while, little things will begin to affect you less. Routinely investigating your feelings in this manner allows you to form a closer relationship with yourself.

Eventually, this awareness will allow you to understand your connection with others better. When a fight arises with a significant other, you will be able to communicate exactly why you feel hurt. As an introspective person , you will have the intuition to understand your partner’s emotions as well. It will be far easier to interpret and resolve the conflict, as well as to assess your ultimate compatibility with that person. All of this comes from making a conscious effort to understand yourself.

What Should I Be When I Grow Up?

When you grow up, you should be the person you’ve always admired or the person you would admire if he or she existed. Some kids admire their doctors because they made them feel better when they were sick. These kids have a special, parental trust with their doctor and are calmed and relieved the moment they enter the waiting room. It is this type of person that, if they have any aptitude towards medicine, goes on to become a successful doctor and inspires others to go into the field.

If there is no profession you particularly respect, then think of a pastime you love and do something that allows you to share it with the world. I know it is hard to think of things you love because lots of cliches come to mind - but concentrate hard. Try thinking of things that are so basic that you take them for granted - like eating, going on vacation, and pursuing the opposite sex. If those are the things you truly enjoy in life, make a career out of them. Not to worry: you can make a career out of anything. Your job does not have to be in finance, medicine, law, or teaching, even though these are the most popular areas. If you like eating, you can become a restauranteur, a chef, or you can write your own dining guide. If you like going on vacation, you can become a star travel agent, a pilot, or you can found your own tour company. If you like chasing after members of the opposite sex, you can become a matchmater, a marriage counselor, or start a dating website.

The reason I repeat the idea of starting your own business is because that is often the best way to translate the thing you love into a career. As intimidating as it sounds to create your own company, it is not really so hard: all you need is a telephone, a computer, a good work ethic, and a bit of direction.

The one thing not to do when deciding what you want to be when you grow up is choose a profession based on other people’s opinion of it. Certain careers, like medicine and law, are well regarded by society; others, like pornography and professional gambling, are looked upon poorly. But a career’s reputation should have nothing to do with your decision to pursue it - soon enough, its reputation will seem unimportant compared to the quality of life it brings you.

A career has a lot to do with a person’s happiness, so it is imperative that you enjoy going to work. If you choose a job because it pays a lot of money, remember that money is enjoyed after work. If you spend most of your time and energy earning a lot of money at a job you don’t like, you are eliminating 8 hours from your total daily happiness; not to mention, you probably won’t come home in a good mood anyway. Another reason to choose a stimulating job over a high-paying job is because if you work diligently and passionately at any one thing, you will somehow make a good living from it. There is a demand for specialists in any field, be it open-heart surgery, interpreting scholarly books, hitting a baseball, having sex, baking cookies, or talking about politics.

And if all else fails and you truly cannot figure out what you want to do, there’s always grad school.

Ridding Your Life Of Negative People

Negativity is a cancer that appears in many forms. Ridicule, guilt, prejudice, condescension, intimidation, and self-doubt are only a few of the ways negativity manifests itself. While some kinds of negativity come from within and cannot be easily controlled, most are caused by other people. I believe that everyone is entitled to rid themselves of these negative people in order to enjoy happier lives.

As teenagers, we often accept negative people into our lives because we are insecure and afraid of becoming the object of their wrath. We feel safer if we have them on our team. Also, we are intimidated because negative people seem to wield power. Indeed, the ability to disturb another person’s day, week, or life is a form of power.

Nowadays, we feel that we are mature enough to avoid such malignant influences in our lives. However, not all negative people are as overtly mean as they were in middle school. More common are people that merely reflect negativity, like the girl who insists on informing you anytime someone speaks badly about you, or the guy who only acts nice to you when you’re alone with him. These people, while not affirmatively attacking you, are quietly chipping away at your mood and self-esteem; thus, they should be removed from your life.

How do you decide who to expel? What if a long-term friend, or even a parent, is the source of negativity that is causing you to be anxious or unhappy? How can we really avoid those who have permanent places in our lives?

To help answer this question, try to detach yourself from the world of the everyday and look at things in a larger sense. As human beings, we are given the freedom to hand-pick people that contribute to our well being and enrich our lives. We are not physically bound to anyone, and many of the people we interact with every day were not even our choices, but rather the product of our environments. We have no obligation to remain loyal to those who affect us adversely unless we place little value on our happiness.

Certainly, there are situations where it is difficult to implement this philosophy of purifying your social circle. Obligations must be filled. But I urge you to examine those obligations very carefully; compare the benefit you receive from them to the amount of negativity they bring into your life each day. Remember that you deserve to be happy, and you only get one chance to do so. The older you get, the harder it is to recognize and rid yourself of the sentiments that have set into your mind. Don’t let negative people interfere with your most precious natural gift: the capacity to love life.

Dreams And Your Inner Child

Although your inner child may seem like a very distant concept, it is really just you with all of your layers of adult consciousness stripped away. Every night when you go to sleep, your mind gives you another opportunity to visit that inner child as it sinks deep down into your most natural state of being, exposing all of your fears, worries, and most basic needs. When you wake up, it is like emerging from an underwater solitude and climbing up onto a higher, dryer ground. The height that you scale before finally coasting on with your day depends upon how removed you are from your inner child. Some people, the most proper and adult among us, quietly ascend mountains before proceeding with their controlled existences, no longer able to detect the roaring waters of childhood they have subconsciously swum through just moments ago in their sleep.

Your dreams and immediate waking thoughts are the channels through which you communicate with your inner child. Trust them; and though the safety of the “real world” with its simpler, clearer set of rules might beckon you, resist it for a few moments every day and think about what you have learned from your sleep. Do not retreat right away into the security you have made for yourself over the years in relationships, positions of status, and other notions of identity. Allow the lull of your barest impressions to wash over you in its uncomfortable, convoluted collage of honesty. There is much to love about life and the day ahead, but facing your true self every morning will help you to unburden yourself of the mental weight you carry every day, and make you feel like a freer person.

It is amazing that the human mind refreshes, or “reboots” itself in this way every night, bringing us down from the mountain of illusions we create for our everyday lives. Although we cannot help but shake off the waters of our subconscious and go on like regular members of society, we should take advantage of the opportunity we get once a day to revisit our inner child, as it were - and, if possible, leave a trickle between our toes, just to keep a part of us dreaming.

How Important Is Physical Beauty?

Even though most of us recognize the fallacy of placing too great a value on appearance, our desire for physical beauty is so ingrained in us that we cannot disassociate ourselves from it. Why is physical beauty so important?

I discard the easy answer that the media has branded the idea on our minds. While magazines and television certainly heighten our consciousness of looks, they are merely harping on insecurities that already exist. Our desire for physical beauty, while shaped and polished by the superficial media culture, actually has deeper roots in who we are.

Our desire for physical beauty is an original human feeling, like the desire for food, nurturing, or happiness. Just as those other things drive us toward survival, physical beauty is programmed into our brains as a means of staying alive and furthering our family line. After all, if males and females weren’t attracted to each other, none of us would even be here: humankind would be a fatally flawed experiment. Instead, nature has given us impulses that drive us towards procreation. Every creature, from the lowest organism to the most complex, desires sex. A natural precursor to that desire, which also exists in every society, is indicators of attraction. Dogs are attracted to each other’s smells. Peacocks are attracted to each others’ plumages. Human beings are attracted to many things about each other – one of which is physical beauty.

Because of the natural role of appearance in human courtship, I can say with certainty that physical beauty does have some objective importance. However, this conclusion does not justify our society’s obsession with looks, for appearance is only the first layer of attractiveness.

Once a superficial connection is made between two people, they then have the opportunity to display other characteristics that could positively or negatively affect the possibility of their union. After they have had enough experiences together, that first layer of beauty becomes far less important than the other, less visible layers of attraction. In fact, it seems as if our original set of human impulses guides us not just towards procreation, but also towards compatibility.

Compatibility is essential to human survival in an absolute sense, for a positively-working team is better equipped to live than a negatively-working team. If physical beauty were the only important factor in bringing people together, the divorce rate would be much higher than it is today and people would be far less happy. Instead, physical beauty is actually only a small component of attractiveness, and in fact, those people who are good at being compatible have a distinct advantage against those people who possess beauty alone.

Physical beauty, in sum, maintains a marginal significance in our lives. Like all superficial things, it is a basis for immediate appraisal; but like a diamond out of its setting, it requires context and compatibility in order to truly instill it with value.

The Feeling Of Specialness

Growing up, my parents always paid an extraordinary amount of attention to me. They vigorously encouraged my interests, causing me to believe that I could be anything I wanted to in life. The affirmation I received from getting good grades in school and being accepted socially further confirmed my feeling that I was, in a way, blessed. Not even the low points in my adolescence aroused any real self-doubt in me, for I felt that despite whatever was happening, I was still very fortunate.

Although I haven’t always received everything I wanted in life, I have gotten most of what I wanted most of the time. It was only in college, when I was forced to leave the sphere of security created by my parents, that I finally came to some jarring realizations. First, I learned that there were many people who were not concerned with me or my life in the least, and second, I found that some of my peers were widely considered better than me in areas I had classically considered myself the best in. The sensation was akin to what a celebrity must feel upon entering a remote region of the world where nobody has heard of him.

This apparent fall from grace has turned into an internal struggle that I currently deal with, epitomizing the reason I long for the sanctity of childhood. “Real world logic,” or the reasoning of white-haired psychologists and sober disciplinarians, dictates that I should come to terms with the fact that I am no better than everyone else. Yet this notion seems intuitively wrong - I know that I am special. I know this not because I score in the top percentile of an IQ test or win prestigious awards, but because a feeling deep inside of me, a spirit that fuels my being, tells me so.

Naturally, I feel self-doubt when I am outcompeted or unacknowledged, but my mind is very good at rationalizing it. I often have the distinct feeling that my positive will is being intentionally blocked by others - that, had it not been for their collective negative energy, my will would have prevailed. The idea that I may simply not be special in any particular regard does not enter my mind.

Most would call my line of thinking deluded, egocentric, or paranoid. But I like it. While other people are doubting themselves in order to accord with “reality,” I’ll be over here with the fantasists rooting myself on.

The Value Of Active Thinking

The most interesting people I know all have one thing in common - they think about things. While thinking may not sound like a special activity, very few people use their minds actively; instead, they go through life making passive associations, allowing whatever words or images float to the forefront of their minds to convey their thoughts. This tendency to live blurrily, rather than with acuity and awareness, inhibits communication on a large scale in our society. The result is that everyday interaction has become much less meaningful than it could be.

I attribute much of this passivity to the mass consumption of popular culture. While teens are reading magazines and watching celebrity-centered television shows, their imaginations are becoming insular. The reason why popular culture has such a druglike effect on people is because it baits viewers with flashiness, action, and excitement on a level that could never exist in real life; then, when the viewer has become transfixed, it transmits opinions that slowly and over time substitute for the viewers’ actual thoughts. People regularly quote television programs and news sources as if they had personally observed the events they watched. The truth, of course, is that a relatively small group of people create the media and decide what to feature, and even outside of that core group, the majority of smaller media outlets are so heavily influenced by what they see in mass media that they end up recycling the same thoughts.

We are taught to feel embarrassed about having out-of-the-mainstream ideas as soon as we are old enough to cognize our surroundings. Certain things are right. Certain things are wrong. Certain things are normal. Certain things are peculiar. Certain things are the way they should be. Certain things are unjust. Our parents purvey most of this information to us, and television, along with the outside world, fills in the rest. Our tastes and preferences are handed to us rather than decided by us. Yet the mainstream isn’t the one that wakes up every day in your body, whose pulse travels in just the way yours does, whose singular store of memories shapes your perceptions. Therefore, it has no right to control your thoughts.

Naturally, there are original thinkers among us, but they are overwhelmed by the masses of programmed people. To make matters more complicated, even those with good intentions - people who try to think on their own - end up adopting thought processes that, despite purporting to oppose the majority view, actually are just different types of passive thinking. The alternative crowd, the revolutionary crowd, and even the anarchist crowd have not differentiated themselves, but rather, they have classified themselves. Trying to distinguish yourself by belonging to a group is a fruitless activity. Our deepest beliefs come from an internal truth that is as unique as our personal experiences and the makeup of our brains.

I used to “know” that Mozart’s music was better than Tupac’s, that an opera was more meaningful than a Disney Movie, and that Shakespeare was a better writer than the girl I used to like in my English class. Now that I’ve gotten to thinking actively, I know exactly the opposite. Those beliefs may challenge the notions of all of the passive thinkers out there, but in my little world - the one that no one but me can control - that’s the way things are.

As challenging as it can be to unravel everything you believe and look at each event in a fresh light, doing so will spare you anguish on a mental, emotional, and spiritual level. Do not try to be unique for the sake of other people; be unique because you can’t help it.

Coping With A Fear Of Death

One major trait of Peter Pan Syndromers is a desire to remain eternally youthful. A natural corollary to that characteristic, which I embody perfectly, is a strong fear of death. I am inconsolably afraid of death - so afraid that I cannot even allow it to float around in my mind as I can with other fears. When its dreary countenance comes to the surface of my mind, an instinct kicks in that automatically expels it before it has time to infect my other thoughts.

The reason I am so afraid of death is because I cannot find any logical way to deal with it. The thought of my selfness being snuffed, of my special existence disappearing into the infinite universe, is simply too awful to bear.

Occasionally, when the notion of dying overtakes me, I try to take comfort in the idea that nobody has ever experienced death, and that no definite evidence exists that it is, in fact, as numb as it looks; but knowing that the organ which makes us think and feel - the brain - distintegrates after a short while does not bode well for any sort of afterlife that I can imagine. If death holds in store for us anything but nothingness, that state is beyond human comprehension; for everything I know to exist, I know because of my brain.

There are two other ways in which I attempt to cope with death. One is by contemplating how little I understand about the nature of being, and how incapable I am of cognizing the original cause that created the universe. Life and death are surely related to that original cause, and the fact that I lack the ability to understand it gives me confidence that death, too, may be beyond my dimension of understanding.

The other method I use to dull the idea of death is the theory of Eternal Return. Here is a brief definition from an excellent page:

By this theory, sometime in the impossibly far future I will once again sit at this computer and type this article. Somewhere in the infinite space-time continuum, Evan Bailyn and his entire network of family and friends will once again exist exactly as they do now. Difficult as this theory is to digest, it makes logical sense, and so I retain it.

In a way, this exceptional fear of death is the tragedy of Peter Pans: it signifies a complete loss of the rosy childhood we fantasize about - and worse, the life that encapsulates that childhood and enables us to nostalgize about it. When the hope of an eternal childhood is sapped, so too is the spirit of the Peter Pan.

Yet even in the depths of my struggle with death, I know that life is not pointless. I believe in the magic of existence despite my lack of religious or spiritual feeling because I know intuitively that my elan vital , the spirit of my life, will outlast me. I will pass this animating force on to my children, and they will pass it to theirs; and even if the family line should somehow end, I believe that my presence will reverberate in other lives just as many people’s energies have influenced and guided my own life.

There’s no way any of us can know what happens beyond our own lives - but that mystery, that conflict, is also the reason why our childhoods are so magical to us: we only have one.

Returning To Who We Are

Every time we go out in public, we engage in a series of elaborate social scripts so that we can get along with other people. Pleasantries, formalities, and personal space conventions are all examples of automated behaviors that we exhibit because we seek approval from those around us. They are a common ground for us to stand on, a compromise of our natural inclinations for the sake of civility.

These learned behaviors are useful, of course; the world would be chaotic if everyone did whatever they wanted. Yet it seems to me that we have become oversocialized and lost touch with the fact that most of the time we are, in fact, acting. The proper place for etiquette is not our private lives. If we infuse our own minds with falseness, we lose the ability to understand ourselves.

As kids, we were all conditioned to act the way our parents thought was appropriate. We were given boundaries that we otherwise never would have observed. And along with the positive acquisitions such as saying “please” and “thank you,” were the negative acquisitions, traits that just didn’t fit us. Parents who meant to mold their children into something meaningful shaped them into people they are not. Gentle souls were made aggressive, creative minds were forced to think formulaically, and passionate spirits were dulled to docility.

Imposing learned traits on natural ones endangers our well-being. We tend to favor learned traits, since they often seem logically superior to our natural ones; yet our original impulses can never be thwarted, and the effort to go against the grain of our beings is always in vain. Often, we become confused and restless trying to reconcile what we’ve been taught with what we naturally know.

It would be nearly impossible to deprogram ourselves so that we could once again act the way we did as children. Sometimes I wish for a kind of mental decompression chamber – an inflatable yellow capsule like the moonwalkers they have at amusement parks, where people could jump up and down and scream and curse, mentally unburdening themselves of all of the energy they regularly repress. Something is needed to release people from the thousands of social conventions that bear down on them every day, to connect them - if even for a moment - with their original selves.

I believe that behavioral scripts were meant to function within a social context, not become absolute standards of conduct. No matter how hard we try, we are not the people we were taught to be. We are the way we were born and the way we have become through our own personal exploration – no more and no less.