Rant

Grr.

Deep breath.

I have this friend who has 2 beautiful daughters - one 17, one 14. They are gorgeous. They are smart. They are these incredible, intuitive, articulate...lovely little creatures who are making their way through this world with a support network that anyone would envy. I also have a younger cousin with an eating disorder and a dependency on her mother's CONSTANT presence that I can't understand or explain, and another that recently tried to kill himself because he was having major anxiety.

The reason I tell you this, you ask?

It just seems that any cosmically timed hiccup in the social surroundings of kids today hits them with more force than is fair. You know what I mean? Like the stuff that merely put me on my ass back when I was a kid might very well put one living today in his grave. Of course - when we were kids, we had our share of social pressures. "Seventeen" magazine was enough to make any teenager my age feel inept, undesirable, and less-than. Add to that the actual face-to-face encounters one had to deal with everyday, and frankly - it's amazing that more of us didn't fling ourselves off the junior high gym when we were 14. For real.

I can't explain the rant that is running through my head here. I mean - kids today are dealing with the most of the same time-honored shit that we did:

"O.M.G. - Look.at.those.jeans.she's.wearing! Can you believe it? I wouldn't be caught dead wearing anything other than blah blah blah..."

"Seriously. If I have to starve myself to fit into those size 0 jeans..."

"Look at so-and-so. She is getting SO fat! She'll never get a date to the blah blah blah..."

"Have you seen her HAIR?"

Same time-honored shit, different decade.

But the kids I know today seem to have even more piled on their plates. There's sexual abuse, and learning how to live in "non-traditional" families; there's this expectation that kids grow up faster than we had to, that they carry more around on their shoulders than we did, and that they "just get over it and move on, for chrissake."

I suppose it's possible that I have always lived in a bubble and I didn't know anyone who had dealt with such things - the abuse, the eating disorders, or the life altering stresses that seem so foreign to me, but so real to kids today. Maybe I just lucked out and have had an enchanted life thus far. Or maybe my perception is failing me, and it was just as hard for us to make it through the obstacle course that was high school in one piece. Maybe there really isn't more drama - maybe I just feel it deeper when I see someone I really love going through it now.

So what is it? Am I smoking crack? Or do you see it too - and does it bother you as much as it bothers me? And what - pray tell - do we do about it? Can we fix it? Should we even try?

Sigh.

**End Rant**