Your Teenage Self is Not a Bug, It's a Feature

“Sometimes creativity is a compulsion, not an ambition.”

— Edward Norton

There's something comedic about my dog's reaction to Trump's voice on inauguration day. Each time it played, he'd pad into my room and sit at my feet, as if sensing some disturbance in the force fields. When the voice stopped, he'd retreat to his bed. When it resumed, he'd return. I am not trying to make an easy joke, but rather observing this canine EMF detector of political distress.

Many of us know what it is like, to feel caught between gratitude and rebellion, calmness and tension. Ten years ago, you too had a simple prayer: for example, to build something lasting with a partner. Now here you are, homeowner, with pets, and a spouse who makes dinner when you're tired. It's everything you might have asked for, wrapped in a bow of middle-class stability.

And yet.

This teenage part of you wants to slam the door, crank up the music (or the aged version, earplugs), and retreat from it all. Public discourse, domestic duties, the endless scroll of catastrophe. It emerges with force when your writing, your art, your resistance get squeezed out by responsibilities. It's not a precise instrument, this internal warning system. Like a car's check engine light, it could mean catastrophic failure or “something tickled a sensor.”

You might be living exactly the life you once begged for. Some days you'll walk into the living room and see your spouse and dog on the couch, struck dumb by the sheer gift of it all. When your prefrontal cortex is online, you appreciate the beautiful ordinariness you've built.

But beneath that, there's also a more profound question about meaning and impact. Why do you feel compelled to create anything at all? To make new connections, write posts that a handful of people will read, to push against the comfortable entropy of silence?

Perhaps it's because, as Nine Inch Nails suggested in Year Zero, art is peaceful resistance. And the mundane banality of routine, at any level, is our first enemy—both social and personal. It's not about ego or impact, though those elements exist. The need for continued exploration is about maintaining humanity within structures naturally pushing to suppress it. It's about having something that's yours in a world defined by collective resignation.

A healthy response to our times requires both engagement and self-preservation. Your need to create, to express, to resist—it's not in opposition to your stable life, but rather essential to it.

Without a core of resistance, there can be no true participation in the world, only passive acceptance.

So this teenage part that your discomfort originates from isn't just being bratty. It's standing guard over something vital—the part of you that needs to make meaning, to connect, to resist the easy slide into comfortable silence. You know what happened in history out of comfortable silence.

So the trick isn't to silence that internal warning system, but to hear what it's trying to protect. And to take action. To complicate matters, you can explore how sometimes inaction is the best action.

And that's what your journey is about: learning to hold both gratitude and rebellion, the settled adult and the kicking teenager. It's about building a life that's both rooted and free, stable and resistant, safe and brave. In times like these, the most radical act might be maintaining your voice while building something lasting. In that way, you create spaces where others can find their voice too. Including your loved ones.