And on and on it goes

Throughout your teenage years you're told by the anti bullying mandatory rhetoric that life gets better. The bully falls on their face and the abused rises like a phoenix from the ashes. Emerging into a life of success and happiness, because they are good, and good prevails.

The movies and shows we watch reinforce this, and there's even redemption for the bullies. We all live happy lives with pain spread throughout. But it's nothing we can't overcome. We're all the main character after all, and something always comes along! It's just the human experience!

We meet that special somebody naturally, fall in love, fall out of love, do the whole song and dance! We have that wacky friend,a group, a tribe and we help each other through it all!

Justice prevails, and evil only rises occasionally for us to squash it.

Then you're an adult, but not really. You're still young and nothing has really changed since you graduated high school. You notice that you're expected to do more with less help and it starts to take a toll. You start to experiment with ideas, the ideal life we were taught existed in our childhood is supposedly being destroyed by this side or that side. It could be how we were taught but the enemy has risen and we're the ones who have the right of it.

Years pass and you realize that each side is fighting for a utopia that doesn't exist. It never has. This is as good as humanity has ever had it, but it will always be imperfect. You ruminate over all the time you wasted, now noticing the effects of an aging body and mind. You see the youth of today acting foolish, the fool you used to be, wasting it all like you wasted it. You remember all the times those adults scattered throughout your life told you of the injustice and cruelness of the world. Begging you not to waste it. They were the losers you would never become.

Then one day you find yourself at a job you hate reading a post by some 18 year old who's on the path to destruction that you were once on. You try to warn them but they never listen, the cycle continues and you realize that you've stepped into the shadow of a memory of that adult long ago who tried to warn you.