Stephanie Georgopulos

Before Teen Mom, before My Super Sweet 16, there was Engaged and Underage: the perfect program to watch with your parents when you needed to convince them that cutting school and sneaking cigarettes wasn’t the worst thing you could do at 15.

Show it by taking action, by picking up the phone and calling someone when texting or e-mailing or ignoring them altogether is easiest. Call your friend when you hear of a promotion, a breakup, a cross-country move and forgive them when months replace weeks and your phone remains silent.

You will not call him ‘snooks’ or ‘snuggles’ or ‘scruffs’ or ‘stinky,’ you will not call him ‘bear’ or ‘boo’ because these names belonged to his predecessor, these names belonged to someone old, someone borrowed. You will have new names now, because you don’t name something new after something dead.

It could be that our hair never looks just right or that one boob is bigger than the other or that we can’t pronounce certain words the way we know they should be pronounced — whatever it is, no one quite gets why you can’t face your complex like a normal person and not a paranoid, neurotic freak.

1. Live 2. The Who 3. Cake 4. Brand New

The Impressive Mess has a respectable job and a burgeoning addiction to pretty much every substance and vice known to man. They hold it together in the public eye, but since you have a front row seat to their E! True Hollywood Story you’re aware that their private life is essentially a montage of wanton drug use and causal sex with married strangers.

And just when I think we’re reading from two different scripts, our hands meet blindly, neatly. They clasp without hesitation, never questioning for a second that they’re where they belong — these knuckles and joints and nails.

I was jealous every time a classmate broke a limb or changed the color of the bands on their braces. I wanted their apartments, their pets, their magazine subscriptions, their divorced parents, the lunches their divorced parents packed for them.

Hey, you. I hate to disrupt all of the completely worthless thoughts you’re having, but can you start using me again? This is your brain, by the way. Did you really not recognize me just now? No, I haven’t lost weight but now that you mention it, I’m feeling mighty malnourished lately.

Do not think of befores, or afters, or right nows, let your mind go blank, go black, think ‘nothing’ so fervently that nothing becomes something, that nothing becomes everything.

Baking isn’t much fun either, when the person you’re baking for will take this thing you’ve spent countless minutes, hours creating, this thing you wanted to perfect, this thing you loved; they will take it and destroy it in seconds and have no idea how much time, how much of yourself you had to sacrifice just for it to exist.

Life is full of frightening transitions — adolescence, parenthood, those god-awful bifocals that morph into sunglasses when you’re outdoors — but perhaps the most overrated metamorphosis occurs when you ‘enter the real world.’