Letters to Juliet

I always thought that the agony aunt/problem pages of teen magazines were so complicated - but in a real way. I always felt that the young girls who wrote in had problems which were so complex, even a grown up wouldn't be able to solve them. But now I look back on them and they are such desperately insignificant situations that it angers me to read them. Its got to the point where I have to hastily skip the couple of pages in which the problems are located and just look at everything else. But the fact I study Media means I am always having to read up on whatever it is young teenagers do today. And the thing that gets to me most of all is the fact that there are some urgently real issues that such a huge scale of young teenagers suffer from which are never mentioned or acknowledged by these problem pages or agony aunts. The magazines seem to continuously select (and write) such pathetic questions about puppy love and periods. I know 'pathetic' is probably the wrong word to use when describing such situations but have these magazines simply forgotten about the teenagers who feel so badly pressured under the media's constant injection of 'bones are beautiful' and 'fat is freakish' that they feel the need to starve themselves of absolutely anything with the idea that saying "no thanks to food is saying yes please to beauty"? Have they also abandoned the teenagers who feel such a tremendous surge of guilt whenever a single crumb slips into their bodies, they recklessly charge their fingers down their throats to vomit it all back up? And what about the ones who have absolutely no idea how to express their inner loneliness and tangled up feelings; the ones who are daily ripped apart and beaten by their parents who are in an uncontrolable fit of rage; the ones who go through an exprerience they should either never go through or have gone through far, far too early and then just to cope with it all, smash razors up with their bare hands in order to retrieve the blade and cut real scars over their innocently screaming skins? We, as a living broken society, are always, always, always going to be served everything with a pink, fluffy, sugared coating around the edge because we are too afraid to admit that anything is wrong. And maybe this is a good thing. Maybe its better to have everything served this way because at least then we won't always be living in the dark. It's good to have light in our lives. But we are still swerving round every single bump in the road. We are still hiding the truth about the way in which some people out there live. We are still avoiding and running from the past, and the mistakes within that past, that so many have made. The only way to get through a problem is exactly that - get through it.

This is why I think that the problems which are addressed in teen magazines are something we really don't need to focus on as much as we do. As we get older, the problems continue to be fluffed up, however they are focussing on more mature and adult situations like sex, debt and marriage. Whilst these help a great deal, I have come to the decision that it is far more worhtwhile (and if not a cheeky little bit more romantic) to write a letter to the one woman who knew women inside out, more so than women perhaps know themselves. Whilst the above situtations conform to the typical problems in which we always seem to be faced with, they all have one thing in common; Love.

There must be something absolutely wonderful in writing a letter to someone who will reply with the utmost honesty and simultaneously achieve a sense of pleasure whilst writing it. Whatever your 'love problem' is, whether it is big or whether it is small, Juliet will answer without the slightest hint of judgement or critique. And this is what must be so satisfactory. Just imagine writing something to someone who won't think you are overeacting or dramatising a situation that can be helped with the click of a finger. Bliss. So therefore, I am going to write what will be an epically long letter to Juliet about my misfortunes (and delights) with the emotion that affects absolutely everybody on the whole entire planet.

I'll write back soon.