Soon to be Eighteen

"You wonder about your eighteen years, ricocheting between a stubborn determination that you've done well for your own capabilities and opportunities... that you're competeing now with girls from all over America, and not just from the hometown, and a fear that you haven'tdone well enough. You wonder if you've got what it takes to keep building up obstacle courses for yourself, and to keep leaping through them, sprained ankle or not. Again, the refrain, what have you for your eighteen years? And you know that whatever tangible things you do have, they cannot be held, but, too, will decompose and slip away through your coarse-skinned and death-rigid fingers. So you will rot in the ground, and so you say, What the hell? Who cares? But you care, and somehow you don't want to live just one life, which could be typed, which could be tossed off in a thumbnail sketch: 'She was the sort of girl...' and end in 25 words or less. You want to live as many lives as you can... you're a capatalist from way back... and because you're eighteen, beacuse you're still vulnerable, because you still don't have faith in yourself, you talk a little fliply, a little too wisely, just to cover up so you won't be accused of sentimentality or emotionalism or feminine tactics. You cover up so you can still laugh at yourself while there's time."

- Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Syliva Plath