You are Ninteen going on Eternity.

***Disclaimer: I wrote this when I felt in a bad way about my life and my place in the world, I may not feel as self-depreciating now, but I still think that there is a lot of truth here, not just for me but for anyone in a similar situation.***

You know after a while even the most heart-felt, earnest advice becomes a lecture. After about five times of hearing how bad you've messed up, how you're throwing your life away, how your family only wants you to have a better life, you stop listening. Past a certain point you just give up on trying to explain or stand up for yourself and you put up a shield to keep the waves of negativity off your increasingly fragile psyche. Not all the feedback is negative, no, but every single bit of it tinged with the bitter taste of disappointment. No matter how hard you try to find the silver linings or how grown up you try to rally yourself into being everyone keeps giving you the "I wish you'd done it better" look.

Now is a sensitive time in your life. You're trying to find yourself, trying to make your way, trying to become a full-fledged adult. But at 19 you're in the teen-adult limbo where you're only considered an adult when it's convenient or you've done something childish. If you don't have a job everything you're told ends in "get a job;" if you're not in school everything is"go back to school." God forbid you're neither in school nor have a job, at that point everyone sees you as a waste of flesh and form. Everything you're met with has the crush of finality to it and you can't see through the haze of disappointment to find the silver linings. Sometimes it all seems too much and you need the absolute finality of death staring you in the face before you can really get yourself back together and try to press on. You're only a loser when you let yourself be; cowardice is never the answer. They say it's always darkest before the dawn and you're standing in the twilight.

Regression from Progress.

Sometimes I like to write out letters long-handed just to remember the feel of it. So much has changed even in my short lifetime that as a society we've forgotten what it feels like to open a letter and read the words of another person painstakingly written out in ink. In a time where the most trivial matters can be made known to the world in an instant it can be hard to see why anyone would go to the trouble of writing out a letter and sending it via snail-mail to someone in the hope that by the time they receive it the information will still be relevant or they will have not known it already. Technology has made us lazy and narcissistic, giving us the power to put whatever we like into the world's view in a matter of seconds just at the click of a button or flick of the wrist. We think we are so important now. The internet can make anyone a celebrity. It can  ruin lives, friendships, businesses, dreams, bring down whole nations or build them up. With so much power in our hands shouldn't we be more responsible with it? Has that power corrupted us? Are we any less human because of our reliance on machines? Wold we be able to cope without them ever again? Have convience and speed whittled away at our resolve? If I sent you a book would you read it or wait for the movie? If I sent you flowers would you smell and admire them or put pictures of them on instagram? 

Open your eyes, throw off the rose-colored glasses and take a stand.Regain that lost part of yourself. Write a letter.Draw a picture. Read a book. Go outside. Live a life. Live in the moment. In reality, not virtual reality. Remember yourself. Be unique and individual. Then when all is said and done go back and bring others out into the sunlight.

An Essay on Perception.

Every time I look in the mirror my mind argues with what it sees. Not because I don’t like what I see or I think myself fat or anything. Between each time I see my reflection my mind constructs a mental image of my appearance, and by the time I see my reflection again I began to believe my mental picture of myself and when I see my face in the mirror I don’t really recognize it. My perception of myself doesn’t agree with my actual physical features and so what I see in my mind’s eye differs from what the onlooker sees. Each human being has a mental picture, their view of the world; shaped by imagination, beliefs, dogma, experience, dreams, instincts, whatever. People see the world in their own special ways, but is this inner world so very different from the real one?

In the mind’s eye we take the information our senses give us and create a mental map of our surroundings, our memories, our ideas; we base these mental maps and pictures on what we do remember and fill in the information we don’t remember by imagining things that could possibly belong. For example if you asked any student at West Georgia Tech Carroll Campus what is the third machine on the left side walking into the student center they would probably wrack their brains to try to remember whether a snack machine or a drink machine sits there, and get frustrated when they can’t remember. So they probably would answer that there’s a snack machine, not because they remember, but because they know there are snack machines in the Student Center and that side of the Student center mainly focuses on the food whereas the other focuses on drink. The mind captures information relevant to a place, or a person, or a thing and stores it away for later use, it doesn’t remember everything, and it can infer the information based on what would make sense in the situation or place.

Colors always seem so much more vivid in memory. The mind views color as a very important aspect of whatever it saw and so remembers color and exaggerates it. The sky always seems bluer, the grass greener, the sunlight brighter in retrospect when really it was just another day, the same sky, the same grass, the same sunshine that your best friend felt and saw that day that you got a raise and she got a cold, but she remembers it quite differently. So who was right? In truth the sun wasn’t very bright that day because it was overcast, the grass had lost the green due to a month’s long drought and the sky was obscured by clouds. However the mind gave brilliancy to that memory due to the strong positive connotation associated with it.

One psychological theory about human behavior discusses the “imaginary audience,” which is the mental belief that at all times a person is scrutinized by others. Like believing that you’re fat and everyone around you is thinking about how fat you look and why did you even decide to wear that shirt because it doesn’t help you look any skinnier. No one is looking and judging you but your mind tells you that everyone must be, because you don’t feel sure of yourself and so you are self-conscious. That was your perception but really everyone else was so caught up with themselves and their own issues to even barely register that you were wearing a shirt far less how it looked on you.

In the real world noting happens in slow-motion. Time cannot be distorted. So remembering something as happening in slow-motion is a concept of perception. Life isn’t the Matrix; bullets cannot slow down when it suits them. So when you remember that every single second of the car accident in striking detail and swear that it happened in slow-mo that is just another example of your brain seeing things in way that it can better understand.

Real life rarely ever makes sense. The brain’s primary function is to try and make as much sense out of sensory information as it can and translate it to the consciousness in a way that the mind can understand. Taking the cold hard truth and presenting it in an easier to comprehend way means a skew in perception, a leap between truth and fantasy, and an entirely human view. In the words of a great man, Gustave Flaubert  “there is no truth only perception.”