Youths, Do You Isolate Yourselves?

The opening guitar part soars high and wild. Steady bass notes ripple across the floor to me. The singer wants to live a free life, unhassled. I know his feelings. They are my feelings, too. Everything is right when I'm listening to my records. It's as if the musicians understand me, and I understand them.

Not like Mom and Dad--they don't know what my ideas are. Or at school-the teachers do all the talking. They never listen to us. They would all be surprised to know how I really feel.

So every day it's the same. I come straight home from school.

"Hello, dear!"

"Hi, Mom."

"What did you learn today?"

"Nothin'."

There, that's out of the way. Now up the stairs, two steps at a time, to my room. My music. I shut the door. My world. I spend most of my time here, listening to my records, sharing thoughts and feelings with the singers and musicians. Sometimes we get all charged up about changing the world; sometimes we're depressed at how hopeless it all seems.

We look out at the world as it really is, but the world doesn't look in at how we really are. They call us kids, but inside we feel old beyond our years. Injustice, freedom, love, pressure, getting together about the environment-these are what we care about. But adults don't take us seriously, so we communicate our own way in our own world.

Are you a young person who feels something like this? Do your emotions and strong feelings churn inside you? Are you frustrated because you think adults show little interest in your real feelings? How have you dealt with this frustration? Maybe you have felt confused, and so you've withdrawn from the adults in your life, spending many hours isolated with your music and maybe a close friend. Why do you think it's so hard for many adults and young people to talk together about their real feelings?

Growing Up: Physically and Another Way

You are changing. You aren't a child anymore. Your body is well on the way to its final form as a mature man or woman. It may seem that almost overnight you added several inches to your height. Extra body hair sprouted like crabgrass, and you suddenly developed sexually. Tremendous physical changes have overtaken you.

During this spurt of physical development one of your parents or some other adult whom you are close to may have shared the facts of life with you. It was helpful to find this out. You needed to know this was all normal, that you are not the only one it happens to.

But as outstanding as these external changes are, other changes as great or greater have been happening to you that affect your personality. About this same time you also began maturing emotionally. This kind of growing is just as real and often just as fast, but it takes place below the surface where others cannot see.

While people may notice your outward growth and mention it freely, what is happening to you on the inside is really making you a different person. For others to continue to know you well as you grow up, they will have to spend time talking with you, and you will have to be open with them. People often neglect to pay a proportionate amount of attention to a young person's inward development.