Four Clover Life- By Namrata Shailendra Singh

You don't have a mental disorder; you are not on Prozac or Alprazolam, and you definitely don't hallucinate except when you notice your body suddenly start to extend, much to your trepidation. Your arms, your hair, your legs, and your face, as you see in VFX movies, turn and twist, curl, and coil agonizingly into a faint chestnut brown creature, not just a creature, a fully formed Scorpion. You look at yourself in the mirror aghast as tears make an all too familiar entry into your eyes accompanied by a deep pinching pain, the same kind when your parents refused to buy you a pack of crayons, a pair of new school shoes, the gungroo for your dance class, the five-star chocolate. Mind you, they were not desires you could blow away like the fluffy head of the dandelion. They were necessities; in the absence of which the teachers unleashed a volley of words so acidic, it forced you to steal- you see, you can either beg, borrow, or steal. The first two alternatives being non-existe

Have we romanticized teenage angst? Have we sentimentalized teenage loss of identity? Have we glamorized teenage confusion? I ask because angst, confusion, and identity are part of my journey, maybe yours too, and maybe the seventy-five-year-old living in a technologically dominated and emotionally desiccated world. Many of us find stable ground as we move into adulthood; however, for some of us, the cocktail of anger, confusion, and loneliness revisits us in waves and recedes and comes again and recedes again. It's just not you, dear teenagers. While listening to Billie Eilish's 'Lovely' and Olivia Rodrigo's 'Brutal,' I am compelled to pay attention to the word choices of the song that hegemonizes and controls my teenager's mind and soul. The conundrum- my experience with Psychology and Vedanta informs me- you are your mind- if my privileged teenager feels anything close to broken, hopeless, and disconsolate about her existence, then I, as her mother,