when adults tell teenagers that the dull ache of high school is just a survivable mess that they’re making up to be worse than it is, i think of this:

when i was in sophomore year, i was in an accident and the left side of my face was hit. i sat in the emergency room with a clearly broken nose and blood coming out of a laceration on my cheek. and i did my homework. i did my homework with a black eye swelling up, with little red fingerprints on it. 

and he told me to redo it. that it wasn’t good enough. the assignment itself was worth maybe five points out of a hundred. he wouldn’t forgive me for it. when i explained about my concussion, he told me to do it somewhere dark.

we don’t make it up. the value of our lives becomes almost nothing at all. the quality of living that is allowed is so low that students learn to apply it to themselves. they are useless, unimportant, a machine to figure out problems without any food, sleep, family time. nothing. we call teenagers moody because something in them breaks a little. we don’t say: they are stressed beyond measure and they believe their own physical health is less important than the quality of the product they’re forced to produce. we don’t say: wouldn’t you be moody too?