“I have a hard time talking to new people,” says a seventh grader. “I have social anxiety.”

“I’m such a procrastinator,” says another. “I know what I’m supposed to do, but I will avoid it until the last possible moment. I feel terrible about it.”

It’s not a bad thing that this generation of kids is very self-aware. It beats the cluelessness of my own cohort -- we didn’t have the Internet to help us figure out what was going on or find people who shared and validated our weird traits. But I worry sometimes that all the labels these adolescents give themselves will prevent them from seeing that they always have the possibility of changing their habits and disrupting their patterns, even if their personality remains fixed.

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On one dark morning, forty minutes after sunrise, the streetlights came back on.

The clouds were so heavy that they convinced the light’s sensors that it was night.

We humans can be fooled, too. The contrast between a bright sunny day and a moody, cloudy one — or stormy one — is stark. When you’re in one, it’s hard to imagine, from the evidence, that another is possible.

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People are trying to make sense of the passage of time.

Reflecting not only on the past year, they’re attempting to process the past decade, hoping to glean some lessons and understand the trends that shaped the events they’ve just lived through.

If you’re feeling a sense of loss, a fear of missing out, a worry that there’s a party going on without you, let me reassure you: Nobody knows what the heck they’re doing.

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With wide-eyed innocence, a ten-year-old student shared the words her mother had used to comfort her when she had hurt herself.

“She sad there are always bad things swirling around, and sometimes they land on you.”

I was flabbergasted. I imagined a world in which evil butterflies have the power to curse hapless humans with a touch.

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