The Hamlet Project

This must be why there is such a vast amount of material created about American teenagers. The heady mix of freedom and age creates stories full of wildness and mistakes. Young peoples’ stories are powerful for everyone, in part because everyone was, once, young and can recall the extremities of feeling and events of those days. The stakes are always high for teens and these mistakes can be fascinatingly enormous. I’ve been watching a TV show that revolves around a high school and it reminds me of the fragility of that time, with painful accuracy.
I was not so wild or wanton. I stayed within the lines for the most part but my friends fell down constantly. Many were wanton. Many were wild. There were those that slipped with drugs, those that slipped with drink, those that slipped with displaced sexuality, those that slipped into self harm. My companions were those that slipped so perhaps I can say that I slipped in trying to rescue those that were slipping. I fell down once or twice, with my hand extended to a friend.