Episodes of Escapism: the Lonely Reflections of an Adolescent in Contemporary US Society

From quite possibly the earliest moments of my generally depressing upbringing, which was fortunately balanced with the tender love and care only my mother could provide me (when she herself wasn’t burdened by all her expectations as a modern woman, mother, and wife), I was never taught the one key element to this entirely strange phenomena we call existence: self-actualization. This realization didn’t occur to me until about what is now one year ago or so, some time immediately prior to the current state of covid adapted society, as I found myself in a daily self-induced isolation at my university apartment while a freshman. It seems that, at that time, I was in a state of complete introspection, essentially cut off from every influence or variable that had molded me into the being I had become prior from that period. Since then it seems I’ve never granted myself the kindness to return to that place in my conscious, that I’ve merely returned to a perpetuity of nihilism, anxiety, and insecurity since the inception of what is now an even more anxious, vulnerable, and uncertain world burdened by reality. I essentially abandoned any sense of an identity, an identity I yearned to capture upon these past two decades of my brief and relatively dismal life. So here I am once more, to reflect, to bring awareness to the decay of…