After hearing a number of stories this week about teenagers and young adults who are struggling with what it means to live in a world that isn’t always kind to them, I’m posting again a blog from the winter of 2013. Please share it with a young person who feels out of place in the world, and please comment to add your own stories.
“How are you doing?” I asked a teenager this week.
In a moment of unhesitating honesty, she responded, “Well, everyone at school thinks I’m a freak.” And then she paused. “But I guess I’m okay.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about that comment—thinking about how many times a day we casually ask about each other’s well-being. When we ask that question, “How are you doing?” we expect to be answered in a sound bite response: “Fine. How are you?” The niceties are out of the way, and we can get on with our busy days. Sometimes we get the opposite extreme of the sound bite—the lengthy complaint—the one that stops us in our busy tracks and requires us to listen and pretend empathy for a litany of maladies that makes us wish we hadn’t asked.
