Youth Instability Quotes

Growing up in Vancouver in the 1950s, I was often capricious and temperamental, quick to laugh, even quicker to feel despair, prone to flailing my arms, pouting and crying when things didn't go my way, or I thought something was unfair, or I was bullied by my sisters.

When you're young, you don't have a lot of control over even basic things in your life - where you live, what you eat, where you go during the day, how you get there. You don't have a lot of control, and that can feel sort of unstable in its own way because you don't get a say in those basic things.

I ended up getting kicked out of my house when I was 16, and I went off to college. When they actually saw that I was getting some kind of stability as far as having a career in this business is when they started coming around.

It's challenging to find an identity as a young person if you don't have the sustenance of love, because you're being shipped around.

I moved to Des Moines when I was 15. I asked my mother to give up costody and sign parental rights over to my grandmother, who I lived with while I went to school. I was clean and finally starting to figure myself out. I can only say that now without laughing. I was still very out of my own place, and I didn't even know what that place was. All I knew was that I could write music, that I had no idea what that could mean and that I was still surrounded by people I couldn't relate to. I hadn't found my tribe yet.

So when I was 13, I basically left home and never returned and lived at home again. I would come home for a week at Christmas and two weeks in the summer only.

The gang culture - tragically - has for some young people become the only source of stability in their lives.

I ended up dropping out of high school at 16 and getting kicked out of my home. My parents told me, sadly, that because I was so disruptive to the rest of the household, that I could no longer live under their roof.