Forgot to Post Updated Personal Piece...here it is.

Outline:
Complication: Chaos numbs youth.
1. Anxiety drives world.
2. Parents disappoint me.
3. Connection restores feeling.
Resolution: Determination overrides numbness

YOUNG HEARTS RUN FREE: SELF PRESERVATION IS WHATS REALLY GOING ON TODAY
Jacqueline Rogers

It was 36 hours in, and I was kissing Ryon from the Puerto Rico delegation. It was exhilarating, hot—I felt his lips on mine and my back pressed up against a wall in a blindingly white bright stairwell, drunk on the feeling of release from the numbing of my nerves by fear, disappointment, and anxiety.

We arrived in Washington D.C. three days earlier, over one hundred high school students from the continental United States and Puerto Rico. It was September of 2002 and I had jumped at the chance to escape home for a few days by accepting a nomination to participate in the Anti-Defamation League’s National Youth Leadership Mission to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The first day I sat down in a row of empty chairs and looked around the room. I was among my peers, bright-eyed youth who were supposed to feel inspired by global violence and carry the weight of potential world peace on their shoulders. In the front of the room, survivors of the Holocaust sat quietly, hands in lap, watching a mix of hope and hormones bustle and shriek in every corner. Stern-looking Secret Service stood behind them, enveloping the room with a tension that cut through the youthful energy and excitement. Workshop leaders, practiced professionals enshrined in suits and self-importance bustled around directing groups of students here and there, their range of emotion limited to two facial expressions. The serious listening face: eyes intent, lips pursed, eyebrows squeezed down and together, and the lecture face: eyebrows up, eyes huge and dilated, forehead wrinkled, mouth open and moving incessantly.

We were to be ambassadors of peace and justice, the suits preached, a serious job description in the relatively recent arrival of the post 9/11 world. Still growing breasts and managing awkwardly long limbs, it wasn’t too soon for our parents, grandfathers, and grandmothers to pass on the burden of their mismanaged history, to capitalize on the anxious energy that the loss of more than 3000 lives on American soil had bolstered to a new height, terror level red: time to panic.

We were told how vital it is that human beings exist in an orderly world where injustice is addressed, and a sense of security radiates. Life is now less secure, less certain, they said, and we had to understand.
I was recently sixteen. I understood.

The tumultuous summer preceding dulled my expectations of the adult world and activated a mode of self-preservation that I existed in for several months. My mother and father had located each other as the fourth point on the axis of evil and decided to share their hatred and disappointment in one another with me and the rest of the world. The sight of both of them grasping for their share or more of a previously combined pool of money, resources, and dignity had made me exhausted, unreceptive, and unwilling to take the chance of relying on anyone. I’d also lost my virginity that July, just a week after my sobbing mother had parked me outside the ice cream store to tell me about my dad filing for divorce. Her head slumped forward. Big tears plopped onto the steering wheel. She was so ashamed, she said, so ashamed and so sorry. I didn’t cry when she told me and I didn’t feel anything at all towards Rob the next week, even as he hovered over me and told me he loved me. A serious emotion, a serious relationship didn’t make sense. I wondered about compassion and if I could feel it.
Two months later, there I was, the florescent lights on the white paint blinding me and warm cheeks, nose, and lips pressed on mine. I shut my eyes, parted my lips, and tried not to smile so hard I would have to stop.

It wasn’t about him, although he was certainly a tan and beautiful young man. I was bouncing back, destroying my disappointment, my bitterness, my vulnerability with a sense of purpose and some human connection; it was a direct challenge to my parents and the other adults who made a conference on humanity necessary in a world of six billion humans.

Emotionally, intellectually, and physically my 16-year-old nerves, mind, and lips were jolted to a point of bursting. I want to feel this awake my entire life, I thought, I’m going to fight for this feeling.

Eight years later and eight years deeper in the politics of fear, I find myself having to fight harder than ever not to slip back into numbness.

I am not too much older now than I was then but already I feel that ability to live in the moment, to bounce back from fear with hope and energy, dripping from my trembling fully-grown fingers and swirling down into the numbingly anxious busyness of adult life. We graduate from college, or we get jobs, or we graduate and go back to school, leave the country or move back home, and never escape a world where self-preservation and the regulation of passion, of emotion, is required.

My generation, the generation who remembers vividly snipers and 9/11, Columbine and Katrina, the generation that can look around their classrooms and see so many of their peers on depression, anxiety, focus, or hyperactivity medications, is a generation that understands what it is to be both emotionally full and empty.

We were watching. We watched the destruction as we learned to assimilate, as wide-eyed kids, pre-teens, adolescents, and young adults, staring at the television, learning to distrust the world, to withdraw and self-preserve as keepers of our own fragile hearts, minds, souls.

We are overloading our brain and from an early age—the zombification of our youth. And we will only heal the world as we heal ourselves, by waking up and reaching out to connect and find the substance amidst the chaos.

I am counting on my peers, as we transition into adulthood, to remember their moments, their passion, and their reasons to fight.

I’ll be fighting. But I already know I’ll be alright. Bright white stairwells still turn me on.