Girl, you are singing my song.
I’m going to pretend here that I haven’t been a good little deconstructionist in my life and I’m going to marginalize Goldstein’s referencing of the tribes as “African.”
I’m going to let that particular racial, and arguably racist, modifier go.
Instead, I want to focus on these ideas: feeling power, transcending limits, and swallowing my wishes. And being better for it.
If there’s no challenge, in short, why bother?
It was funny and it was sly. It was self-aware and it had a fully formed sense of irony. All good things.
But what was really great was it was metaphoric.
I love metaphor. I live my life seeing things in the shapes of other things. I think that because my adulthood is so painful and so lonely that I couldn’t cope with things as there were—combined with the fact that I read like it was going out of style, and it was—I see the world as symbols.
All those hormones? All that pressure? All those new hairs? All that desire to leave the nest paradoxically combined with a fear of the world? Hell, my friends.
It rocks.
Because I can solve my crises, I can find my own solutions. Because a slayed Jade returns to life repeatedly, rising from my own ashes, I can remember that I too can recover the self lost to pain, to depression, to whatever.
Jade 
