There are advantages and disadvantages to being a little on the mature side as a teenager. Being more mature doesn’t mean you carry a brief case around and talk about the weather during a business brunch. You can still walk around wearing baggy pants and laugh at all of that crude, high school humor. However, some teens are cursed with a broad understanding of people and how they work. If you haven’t rolled your eyes or doubted me in some shape or form yet, then bravo to you. Perhaps you’ll find some truth in what I have to say. Now, some have gained this skill from observing their siblings as they go through the personality changes while entering high school. I don’t know everything, but I do know how horrible it is to know too little to find others like you, but just enough that keeps you from getting along with everyone else. You know enough to make yourself feel like an outsider while everyone else is having a fun little adolescent party on the inside. The inside is a place you’ve always wanted to belong to, yet be far away from at the same time. You can’t seem to understand why people feel the need to put on a façade when encountering one another. Only when you take the time to really understand their motives you discover their truth, and it turns out it’s not too far off from your own. The truth of the matter is, everyone in the world pretends to be someone other than who they are every single day of their lives. The people around you effect your personality changes so you can better adapt to theirs. However, If the person you’re talking to is doing exactly what you’re doing (morphing their personality to adapt to yours), then technically the entire relationship would be based upon two different acts that work together, but neither being who the other really is. And after a while, that act gets hard to keep up. Slowly but surely, the walls come down the more time you spend with each other. You start to struggle to recall that person you were when the two of you first started talking, but you can’t find it. And then you realize that’s why things never really work out. You both start to be yourselves, and everything goes down-hill from there. You end up realizing that your real personalities don’t match as well as the masks you wore when you first met. Funny how getting to know each other is usually when everything turns to dust. It’s discovered only too late that you can’t stay disguised forever. Not a force in the world can hide who you were born to be, not even yourself. And yet we do it again and again and again. Observations like these are the thoughts that have created the walls between you and society. You know you don’t always act like yourself. The difference is you’re aware of what you’re doing, and why. You realize, it’s all about survival of the fittest in high school, and to make it out alive, you must adapt. Being “real” doesn’t work anymore, and won’t allow your social life to get from point A to point B. Most friendships that have withstood the test of time have been developed and molded in early childhood, when you didn’t have to pretend and no one cared if you were the weird kid who ate glue in the corner of the class. After all is said and done, Love, relationships, friendships, they’re all still a Foreign concept to the youth of our time. The kids on the inside, the ones without a care in the world, will always think they understand. They know how people work. How life works. But us, we feel like we area constantly playing catch-up. As soon as we think we have a handle on things, we lose our grip twice as fast. We feel like everything has an end and while everyone is enjoying it while it lasts, people like you and I, we’re busy bracing ourselves for the impact. We live, love, we break, we pollute, we die. You didn’t ask to know these things, or understand life the way you do. So call this a blessing, a curse, or even just a nuisance. You’re different, but don’t reject it, respect it.