What happens when literally no one in your life tells you no

By sixteen, Augusten Burroughs had almost everything a teenager might say he wanted. No curfew. No homework checked. No parent asking where he'd been. He could bleach his hair, pierce his own ear with a hypodermic needle, drink two six-packs and throw up in a washing machine, and nobody in the house said a word.

And yet, he writes, he constantly felt trapped, without being able to say what exactly he felt trapped by, since the whole point was that nothing was stopping him from doing anything.

The moment this cracked open for him came after something almost comically small. He'd developed a crush on a boy working the register at a convenience store, worked up the nerve to write him a note, and delivered it, only to watch through the window from across the street as the boy read it out loud to his friends and they all laughed. Burroughs describes the specific horror of realizing he'd now made an entire section of town off-limits to himself, one store, one street, out of sheer embarrassment, and that there was nobody around to help him think it through, warn him it might go badly, or comfort him afterward. Sitting alone afterward, he arrives at the line that names the whole problem: the trouble with having nobody around to tell you what to do is that there's also nobody around to tell you what not to do.

That's the part easy to miss about total freedom. It sounds like the absence of a burden, but it's also the absence of a backstop. Somebody who tells you not to send that message, not to make that purchase, not to say that thing, is also the person who might have caught you before the consequence landed. Without any of that, every decision is entirely yours, including the ones you're not ready to make alone, and the mistakes are entirely yours to sit with too, unsupervised and, often, unexplained to anyone who could help.

The next time you feel proud that nobody is checking up on you, pause and ask honestly whether that's freedom or just an absence of anyone paying attention. Pick one rule you set for yourself on purpose, something you'll keep even though no one would ever know if you didn't, and treat it as the backstop you're not otherwise getting. Find at least one person, a friend, a mentor, anyone, that you tell your plans to before you act on the big ones, so a second voice exists before the consequence does. When a choice feels lonelier than it should, that loneliness is worth noticing rather than mistaking for independence.