Stefanie, I think you have skipped over, or missed - an important, maybe even salient - point.
Then, I disagree with, but like what you’ve written, probably for reasons you don’t expect.
Maybe other commenters have said the same as I’m about to, but I’m not bothering to trawl through Medium’s byzantine & deficient comments scheme to find out.
You & Talia are peas in a pod.
I like what you’ve written because like talia, you’re having a rant. I like rants, and rants on Medium are about the only thing that keeps me from throwing up in disgust at the onslaught of life lesson platitudes here. You’ve done good, rant-wise. I read the whole burrito. And I’m replying. Hopefully in a way you’ll respect.
You and Talia are clever. You’re each doing writing things, each in her own way. Each utterly annoying to the other. Does this mean you’d make a great writing team?
I happen to like the way talia ballsed it out, and ballsed it up. She’s not one for playing it safe. She’s completely open about having fucked up every step of the way. She can’t even get her cri-de-couer right. How utterly incompetent!
That also happens to be the story of my life. No way did anything important go to plan until I was about 30. Too late to recover from so many early mistakes. I had to run with what I got. Family disasters too numerous and too all-encompassing to detail. The wrong schools, the wrong neighbourhoods, the wrong set of social skills. The wrong attitude, the wrong solutions or the wrong understanding of the problems.
I can identify with someone like talia, the eternal fuck-up. I also know that her fucking-up means someone else gets to win, gets a life that goes to plan. Paul Krugman said yesterday that being rich is more often a matter of luck than a lot of rich people let on. Being in the right place at the right time, instead of having fucked up on the way there.
My life could not be your life. What you got sounds like a life that can and does go to plan. Maybe you know how special that is. Maybe you don’t. I suspect you wouldn’t be thinking or saying these things if you have a sense of just how precious a stable life that goes to plan is. Maybe you do know, and maybe your life was as off the rails as talia’s, mine, and the people Justin Keller has been hating on. After all, we’ve all got some sort of shit in our backstories.
But please don’t think that because your life goes to plan that anyone else’s can too. All of Medium’s pimp-my-life-skillsters get up my nose that way. I hope they get a taste of (and for) reality sooner rather than later. I wish those skivers would stop lording it over those of us who haven’t got picture-postcard, camera-ready lives.
Out of all that, please consider, for a moment, maybe more, that your sense of entitlement comes across loud and clear too. Because what smells like teen spirit to me is not what it smells like to you. What happens to talia speaks more of humaneness, of soulfulness, compassion, to me. She’s bound to play by the rules she can manage; by what she can run with. Not what you can manage.
Your solutions are not talia’s, and the world is big enough for all of us. Dig?
