I just imagined a world where for 10 years I told my child I loved them and then for them to within less than a year, stop responding and then actively shame you for doing so.
Fuck, I really wish my parents humanised themselves a bit more when I was younger. It took me far too long to rationalise that adults weren’t different from me.
Reminds me of the quote:
“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”
The older I get, the more I empathise with teenagers. It’s far and away the most difficult era of your life.
You’ll have incredible pressure to not ruin the entire rest of your life, you’ll be constantly told to make decisions that will have a massive impact on your future (with little help or course correcting, I hope your three years of interest in that one subject lasts a lifetime).
your body starts mutating like a slow version of an American Werewolf in London, you’re thrown into a school that often resembles something out of Lord of the Flies, and adults aren’t there to support you, they just want you to be that 8 year old innocent child or a full blown adult with no inbetweens.