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One of the most essential prerequisites for personal happiness is being loved. So, an average person's life is envisaged to be filled with love during each period. As a child you get love from your parents, then friends and sexual partners, then your own kids and grandkids. You are lucky if your chain of love never breaks, but runs a straight line from birth to death. But it doesn’t always work that way. Not that often, to put it mildly. And, unfortunately, not to everyone.

Where do the terms of “teenage crisis”, “mid-life crisis”, “late-life crisis” come from? All those crises are no more than the broken links of the chain of love for the person. During those periods nobody loves you - that’s where the crisis comes from. In old age it is explicable: your significant other has long been in the grave, your children and grandchildren have grown up and separated from you, and the feeble, unkempt old man or woman with a number of illnesses feels like a mere millstone around their neck. Everybody secretly wishes you dead. You can feel it and it consequently makes you cranky and irritable.

What about the mid-life crisis? Same: the kids have grown up and gone, your spouse has no feelings for you anymore, and grandchildren supposed to come and take the baton of love are not there yet. And so the person gets devoured by depression and the feeling of devastation and loss of meaning in life.

But, perhaps, the most painful, heartbreaking, crushing period of a human’s life, the period leaving untreatable scars in your heart and soul forever is the crisis of adolescence that starts at the age of eleven and ends after seventeen or eighteen - or never in the worst-case scenario. It is the age when your parents and family no longer like you (at least not the way they used to when you were a sweet little baby, not yet a gangly, pimply teen), and people of the opposite gender don’t like you yet either. That is why it is so important to have friends when you are a teenager, and it also explains your longing for gathering in groups in order to just fill that gap. And if, for all that, you get rejected by your peers as well, all that remains for you is to soap a rope and hang yourself on it. That’s what some people do. But, as for doing it you need courage which not everybody has, most people just break, bottle it up inside, become something like “the man in a case” - or, put simply, computer wonks, and sometimes they stay hiding in their shell until they die. Modern virtual reality contributes to it perfectly well. The Internet and its social networks, forums, dating sites and so on give us an illusion of life. Even if in real life you are a musty sad sack, on FB you can always have a big list of virtual friends, liking the fake photoshopped pictures of the virtual you, and on Tinder you can always find him or her pissing in your ear about their virtual feelings for you but they will sure make a wry face on seeing you in person and, citing exhaustion, beat a hasty retreat after a forty minutes' interaction.

Take, for instance, one average apartment building and view it in cross-section, and in three of each five flats you will definitely find a sad wanker, male or female, sitting at a computer with a hunched back inside of a messy, untidy, stuffy room.

Now let me introduce myself. I am one of them, female, even though I am over thirty. Yeah, I am one of those lonely sad losers slouching in front of a computer I described above. Nobody remembers my real name, but it doesn’t matter for I’ve been living under an assumed one for over a third of my life.

What made me take a different name once I reached my adulthood? The answer is simple: my teenage insecurities flourished in the most fertile ground. Back then I believed that having changed my name and my surroundings I’d immediately become a new person and solve all my problems with that. And I did, partly. But in the end I got back to square one. So the registry office lady had been trying to talk me out of it quite fruitlessly; there was no use in her repeating that changing your name you take another person’s destiny. I was ready to take any other destiny but my own, totally unaware that a man’s destiny is his personality and his habits, not his name, surname or location. My personality and my habits were way harder to change.

Ok, let’s not put the cart before the horse.

Reviews

[emmajoygreen]

A downright post, full of tragic, adamant statements, which in a way, shows how society treats the shy, tentative youngster you appear to have been. What had happened to caring parents, kinfolk, school friends , school staff, doctors - professionals all? Hopefully for the enquirer there will be answers ahead.. must carry on reading this fine tho' disturbing writing.. ..