So teenagers experiment. As they learn new things, meet new people, and form new opinions, they try on different identities. Adolescence is one of the few times this type of experimentation is possible. The new lax bro swagger your young adolescent takes everywhere he goes is an attempt to re-create himself in an image he hopes others will buy in t

I picture ten-year-old me, feeling my anger, fear, jealousy, otherness, unbelonging for the first time and understanding these uncomfortable but normal human feelings to be wrong, shameful. I thought I needed to hide these feelings, escape them, fix them, deliver myself from them. I didn’t know that everyone feels the hot loneliness.