Vivat Libertas

This post discusses self-harm. You have been warned. I spend a disturbing amount of time in the company of people slightly younger than me (I'm 18). Not much  younger, of course - 15, 16. Old enough to be articulate and form ideas about the world, but not old enough to see as much of it as I have. I really need to get off Tumblr. Anyway, if you remember being 15 or 16, you probably remember being very confused, insecure and angsty. (If you don't, you're either lying to yourself or you lived in a happier time and now I'm jealous of you because I spent my early- and mid-teens being suicidally depressed.) Some of you probably remember showing your angst to others in some pretty horrible ways. I'll now make an obligatory digression so I can say something very important: if you are considering self-harm, I have been there. I have looked at my body and thought "how utterly disgusting, I'm such a poser, I need more scars". I have looked at my body and...

Well, this is going a bit overboard... And here I go...Me, the failure at romance and life, discussing a subject everyone pretends to know about but I'd wager few have got right! Yes, that's it! You can love it, you can hate it, but you're force-fed it from birth...That old, tired concept we call romance, that goes hand in hand with another old and tired concept we call love. I'd like to start by ranting a little bit about love and by saying this: If we as a society had never heard of love, I think that fewer of us would fall in love and those that did would be even more confused (I can't speak for everyone, but I tend to get confused as shit by things other people seem to do with ease and then not get that confused at all by things that other people shy away from). But I also think we'd have a lot less of people saying "this isn't real  love", and who knows? Maybe if we weren't force-fed love and romance we'd have better relationship...