The phenomenon of adolescence

Young Adult novels get me.
Not get me as in, they grab me emotionally (although, they do that quite well), but they get me. We connect, me and the novels.
High school. High school was a living hell I am only willing to live once. Remembering it feels like reading a young adult novel. It was not my life. It belonged to someone else someone might someday write a novel about. And I read these YA novels and pieces of it are from me. They say the meaning of a text is only created once a reader brings meaning into it. I never want to be a young adult novel again, but I have an important role: bringing meaning to all of these over dramatic teenagers that seem to get me, scribbled onto blank pages. They get who I was, and the pieces that are still somewhere in my fingertips.

An excerpt from Paper Towns by John Green:
"Maybe it's more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like, each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen -- these people leave us, or don't love us, or don't get us, or we don't get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time in between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it's only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out."

Reading is important.
I am important.
"...Imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in." - John Green