it gets better

Despite the fact I'm staring 30 in the face, I rarely feel like I'm an actual adult - a productive, contributing member to society who knows how to pay my taxes and unclog a toilet. But one thing I'm certain of having learned in the past 28 years is that "it gets better."

Of course, this is not a universal platitude. I am fully aware that whatever difficulties I've experienced, I never had to wonder where my next meal would come from or whether tomorrow would bring a violent death for me or my loved ones. But as Catriona likes to point out, the Holocaust may be worse than finding a half-eaten worm in your apple, but that doesn't mean you aren't perfectly justified in feeling perturbed about the fact you've just eaten half a worm.

Being a teenager is a difficult time for most right-thinking people, in my opinion. You start contemplating the universe, your mortality, the balance between good and evil, and whether you will ever be able to look at yourself in the mirror and not cringe with horror. And your peers harass you for all sorts of bullshit. You read too much. You dress funny. You get good grades. You have weird hair. You've lived abroad. Etc., etc. I look back on my teenage years and remember the angst I felt almost every day. No one understands me. I feel like a reincarnation of an enlightened monk surrounded by the blind. (What, me? Melodramatic?) What is the point of this existence? Is it really better to be a starving Socrates than to be a satisfied pig?

Now, over 10 years later, I can look back at myself and feel a mix of amusement and pity. But at the time, my angst was real, and my fantasies of killing myself to end my miserable existence were also real. As a Korean American teenager trying to survive in the Korean education system, I was convinced that no one in the world could ever know how shitty my life was, and that letting it all go would be a million times better than having to survive six years of torture. Six years! It's an eternity to a teenager with no perspective of time.

That's why my heart breaks when I read about these gay teenagers who kill themselves because they can no longer stand the torture of their very existence. They see no end to a kind of life where waking up every morning is merely a reminder of how much life sucks. And they have no idea that their life now will not necessarily be their life ten years later. They have never experienced their life getting better, so how can they know that it will? I cannot fathom how deep their pain must be, and that's why it's so important for them to hear from others that YES, IT DOES GET BETTER.

At the same time, I know that sadly, for some of them, it may never get better. The It Gets Better project is full of people who managed to leave their hateful narrowminded communities and do something with their lives. But leaving your community is not always an option. College is not always an option. Where does that leave these teenagers, who may be forced to come of age in a community that treats them with contempt and hatred? Can we sincerely tell these kids that it gets better, any more than we could say the same to a starving child in Somalia with a straight face?

I don't mean to negate the importance of this project. For many teens, it will get better, and making sure they know that could be the difference between life and death for many of them. But we must remember that the message "it gets better when you leave" is only a message of hope for those who CAN leave. Where does that leave the rest of them? I don't know.