Were you ever a silly girl with your head full only of laughter and serious boys who visited your attention with their stern adolescent dumbness? Try to remember. It would have been before you decided to choose between various styles and ideologies, and well before you chose to stop choosing. You see, if you are now the finely honed product of all those years of choosing, what were you before this, before choice? Can you remember how old you were when you ceased to be a tabula rasa? Maybe not precisely, but there had to have been a time before the choice, the choice to speak in a certain tone, to mix a kind of polite forthrightness with a certain reticence. It would have been some time in early adolescence. Something, some event you may not even remember at first, would have launched you into the orbit of choice that led you to be the person you are now. Perhaps you were greatly impressed by something you saw or someone you knew, something you felt? Was there a vaccine, some ampule of humiliation, that immunized you against whatever it was that the girl no on chose to sit next to was riddled with?
— Elliot Perlman; Seven Types of Ambiguity (via thebadasses)
