Ramblings on coming of age

 Everybody loves a coming of age story. I bet you've seen the trope everywhere, especially in its most cliché form in Hollywood. Whether it is a struggling artist with a fierce belief in his/ her passions, an awkward teenager learning to navigate the adult experience in a changed world, I bet you can name three or more movies with a plot similar to those, more or less. We love to see character development, or at least depictions of it in this case. We want to see the little boy who survived a village massacre run off into the hills, train, become a kung fu master and avenge his people. We're drawn to these stories because at their very core, they are (sometimes) vivid depictions of vulnerability superseded by courage and conscious effort directed to redemption. Often we see characters get stripped of everything be it pride or dignity and later gather themselves and flesh out new foundations and eventually personas.

There's a quote I've seen around about how even when you intellectualize things and sentiments and reactions, you are not immune to them. You may be able to dissect the reason as to why you reacted in a certain manner scientifically through chemistry and biology, but you will still feel a flash of sadness when you hear bad news say, an old classmate dying. You may not have inherently been intimate on any level but you will still recognize the tragedy of an ember of life being extinguished. Our sentiments and reactions are lessons imprinted on us by the environment inhabit. To me they are natural, like flinching when the door pinches your finger. They are natural mental responses to mental stimulation. In these coming of age stories there has to be an overlying sentiment the character clings to either they learn to cultivate or ignore it. 

Everybody loves a coming of age story until it is their own. We like to see butterflies breaking out of cocoons but I'm sure its uncomfortable to fathom the pain you would go through if a bigger you exploded out of your current body. The tangent of the journey has been made known to us so many times we feel like we have mastered it even before we embark on the quest. We anticipate that we are owed by destiny redemption. That there's always a sunny tropical Island after stormy seas and while it's good for morale it may not be true. I think the lesson shouldn't be 'you will be ok' . It should be " you won't  be okay but you will find a way to deal with it".