This quote kind of summarizes my thoughts over the past few months. Being a bibliophile in the biggest way, I’ve gone through basically every literary phase a person my age could possibly go through. Including the teen cult fiction phase.
Don’t get me wrong. There are zero things wrong with books like The Perks of Being a Wallflower or The Fault in Our Stars. They are thoughtful books. They make people thoughtful. This is a good thing.
Not the mention the fandoms.
But there are some things I’ve noticed in my own responses to these books that made me think that it’s possible to go overboard with the quotation filled, deeper than the ocean, angsty literature.
After reading Perks, I kind of became a recluse. I WANTED to have some sort of disorder, I wanted people to think I was quiet and weird. (which I am, but mostly just weird.) I avoided socializing. I tried NOT to make a ton of friends.
And yet, I was not happy. HOW COULD THIS BE. I was mimicking Charlie perfectly, sans the traumatizing childhood experiences.
Basically, I think it’s very possible to become TOO obsessed with knowing your feelings. You become obsessed with the state of your own emotional wellbeing. You overanalyze everything that happens to you, searching it for some deeper meaning or significance, when, in reality, you’re just living your life like everyone else is. You spend all of your time crying because nobody gets you or because for some reason you're not having amazing Life Experiences.
This is kind of a selfish mindset, too. I, for one, kind of felt that my feelings were so much deeper and important than everyone else's. The things they said were sooooo vapid and soooo void of the big generalized Thoughts About Life that I wanted to hear all the time. It was dreadful.
Sometimes you need to just feel what you feel. Just feel the feels and stop making them out to be bigger than they are. You feel so much in your life, if you stop to think over every individual emotion, you end up missing some of the best ones.
(this is more of an open letter to myself from last year than anything else. please don't take this uber seriously, I'll probably see this in a year and want to punch myself in the face.)
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