Defense Mechanisms

Being a teenager is all about protecting yourself. Nobody ever wants to be hurt, to be compromised or devastated. Every single day we have two kinds of interactions, either we feel good afterwards or feel bad afterwards when we come into contact with another person. In in other words, you either metaphorically dap me up or else you throw some hatorade all over me. We've all come up with our own ways of preventing from being thrown under the bus, avoiding awkwardness and doing whatever takes to not be uncomfortable. This is defense mechanisms.

Defense mechanisms are deflection tools we all utilize to avoid uncomfortable situations. As college students it's our go to when it comes to avoiding feeling out place, unwanted or awkward. Everyone had their own way of doing it. The body language acrobatics we pull like awkwardness-ninjas. Popular practices include the pretending not to see people (guilty, as charged - I don't know if I should say hi or not), responding with one word answers (killing a conversation real fast), and of course the smartphone ignore (*vine - must have app, so awesome). The last one is the most common, people (myself majorly included) rely on their phones to fill the time between real life social interactions. I'll text people, snap chat, tweet, Facebook stalk, and write hole blogposts in public in order to good certain people. My phone is my obsessive necessary equipment, when I'm separated from it, I can't even deal. So why do we use defense mechanisms.? Nobody wants to be embarrassed, to feel unwelcome or unwanted. We want to be accepted, celebrated, and adored by all like Superman (aka the "Golden Boy" - way too much Justice League recently). And so when we have to interact with new people or those we aren't very familiar with we use these defense mechanisms to keep everyone out, away, and at arms length. We have our personal space bubble both physically (people who talk super close to me make me super uncomfortable, like back up off me, you don't know me like that) and emotionally. But what are we really meaning to say about why we've got the protection up. We're scared. Fear, trepidation and anxiety from interacting to other people. We want to be liked by everyone but the truth of the matter is that not everyone will like you. The majority of people will not hurt you, betray your trust or blame you for everything. In our minds we have this sensationalized idea that everyone is out to get us, no one wants to be friends, and that we'll never get to where we want. The reality is that people are stronger, more trustworthy, and kinder than we give them credit for. People will always surprise you, that you can count on. You have to let people in, give them a chance, and allow them the opportunity to impress you. Keep the faith and have hope that people are better than we make them out to be. We owe the world that, we owe mankind that as well. Defense mechanisms away.

Being a teenager is all about breaking down our own barriers. We have to demolish our own walls and lower the bridge from our moat surrounded selves to the rest of to world. It's up to us to let people in and know that every once in a while some Benedict Arnold with shove a John Hancock style quill throw our palms but the majority of people can be your King Arthur and wield your Excalibur (pleas excuse me mixing founding fathers and medieval myths; my bad). You get the point. Only you can take down your over shield, you have to take the risk. No more defense mechanisms.

My blog post question for the day is ... who would you be in a different life? Uhm, probably James Wolk - literally the nicest person of all time.