On Emotions
I was on the train on my way home from a friend's house last night. There was a child who was crying, simply because she wanted to be sitting on the seat that her mother had sat down on.

It took just that one child crying to make me think at adolescence, everything is life and death. We joke about it being the toughest time in our lives as adults, but could that be because we remember our teenage years with more clarity than our childhood ones? Oh, I'm not saying we cry over every seat that we want to sit on that's already taken, like our childhood counterparts were guilty of, but some of the things I look back on just weren't worth the emotional effort I went through back at 16. I remembering crying to my mum, for example, one night when she wouldn't let me go to a friend's house after I'd already been staying with that friend for almost a week and my mum just wanted me home for dinner on that particular night.

As we get older, the emotions fine tune more again. It's very rare to see an older person cry. I remember only once growing up that I ever saw my mum cry. I am a very clumsy person. Myself and most of my friends make jokes about it now, but when I was about nine or ten, I broke a pottery bowl that she had made, or had made for her. I remember seeing her crying about it afterwards, and I remember how strange it was for me, the child, to see my mother crying. I'm sure I cried many times that week, or the next, and never thought anything of it.

In writing, I know I draw on a lot of emotion to channel my writing through. I don't cry because I was tired and wasn't asleep, or because I've just found out that the boy I liked liked someone else, but the frustration or sense of loss can be just as much felt now as I assume it was then.