In The Eyes Of Our Elders

I was lying down just last night and I was thinking about how other people might see me. Often, when I look in the mirror, I find it hard to comprehend that the face staring back at me, is me and I am looking at what other people see.

It’s a bit of a weird thought and might be slightly confusing but I just thought it was strange. When we are interacting with people, we can’t see ourselves. We just hope that we look good and we try our best to do so. Someone told me the other day, that when you see someone for the first time and if you get that feeling that you don’t like them, but you can’t place why, it’s because in the split second that you looked at them, they have blinked which has caused a reaction in their face and from that reaction you have seen something negative which makes you automatically dislike them. It’s all a bit psychological, but apparently it’s true. I did happen to find that quite interesting though.

So then I started thinking about how older people see me. I am 18 years old, still quite young and I still look like I’m about 15. I wonder, do older people see me as a young immature girl? Do they think that I’m innocent and have still got to experience a whole load of shit that life is going to hand me? Or do they see my experiences in my eyes, or on my face? Can they tell what I’ve been through? Or by wearing make-up and smiling at them, am I giving the impression that I’ve had this great life and I’m still young and have my whole life ahead of me? What do they see? And what do they take from what they see?

I mean, I know I am still young. But I am quite mature for my age; I’ve had to grow up a little before my time. And I know that seems to be the norm these days in society and when I’m saying all this, I feel like you are all going to be thinking ‘Oh, another teenage sob story, here we go’. When really, it’s not like that at all! The truth of the matter is, I have been hurt, I have had to grow up, I have experienced sadness and regret and I have even gone as far as to hurt myself. And admittedly, a lot of us have. But every person’s story is different; everybody does things for different reasons. Everybody is different. So why are we so quick to judge?

Do we really go on the belief system about stereotypes? Does every older person think that teenagers are just angsty and haven’t had any experience of the real world? In the eyes of our elders, what are we? When we see people for the first time and in the split second that we look at them, do we deduct something negative? And do we ignore them cause of our negative instinct? Are we really that shallow?

I know I’ve posed a lot of unanswerable questions, questions I myself ponder on time and time again. But I just wonder sometimes, is this really what the human condition is being reduced to? Are we really becoming shallow stereotypical judgmental arseholes? Or are we just going with ‘society’ and becoming social numb nuts?

Whatever the answer, I do think it’s time we take a real good look at what we’re tuning into; because I don’t think it’s anything to be proud of. The least we could do, is respect our elders and show them that we’re not young immature idiots and that we do have some kind of good moral upbringing. At the end of the day, they are the ones who have paved the way for us to have the lives that we do and are we really going to pay them back by being idiots? No, I didn’t think so.