An angsty teen, which is to say I don't really have an identity.

I find myself at the fringe of the fringe, an outsider among outsiders, basically I am submerged in nuance. I like to think of identity as a river with the self as some sort of ethereal container moving through the river as time progress. Identity is kind of like a liquid to me. Every time you experience something you're filled with it a little, and if the experience involves people you share that liquid with them. An identity is simply an aggregate of experience, relationships, influences, etc.; and at the core of that is your values, but even they change and even you contradict them, and you. But what the fuck even is "you"? I am my favorite books: Kurt Vonnegut, The Thin Red Line, The Fountainhead; I am my favorite movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Synechdoche New York, Annie Hall; I am my philosophy; I am my relationships with my dad, my mom, the failed relationship with my ex, and my (sometimes rebellious) response to them. This is kind of a bullshit psuedo-philosophical answer.

I guess you could say that I'm in an early life crisis, my adolescence is closing up and I find myself filled with regret and confusion. I got out of my first "relationship," if you could even call it that, it was short and messy and now I'm confused. This is where the pain that comes from searching for belonging comes in. She was an artsy intellectual, and really quite beautiful and neurotic, like myself. I let her become my only source of validation, I let her "complete me". It ended with her telling me she isn't ready for relationships, that me having feelings for her made her overwhelmed. I guess I wasn't ready either. Being in love can be really fucking painful.

This is a long way of saying that I'm one of those artsy white boys you see in those fictional self serving autobiographical coming of age movies that are from MTV films are something.