“At school, you have to be this perfect student. And then at home, your family expects you to be that perfect child again. But with your friends, you do all these bad things, just to get away from everything you have to be.”

There were a lot of students’ quotes in the Everything is Off-Balance reading who stated essentially the same thing but in different words, but I liked this particular quotation because to me it was the simplest and the clearest. I feel it sums up very neatly the feeling that adolescents are being pulled in a million different directions, and it results in confusion and chaos. It’s a period of tremendous, almost stifling self-consciousness. Every situation demands that the adolescent be something different, when they often don’t have a very clear sense of themselves, and to save face among members of all the different groups that matter to them, they need to project all kinds of conflicting identities at once. I like how the quotation explains why adolescents sometimes do bad things – this identity crisis and never-ending demands sometimes leaves this as the only escape.