‘Taxidermy for Beginners’ by Jodi Palgrave-Handscombe, age 13, Year 9, Cornelius Vermuyden School

They promised that maturity would bring a perspicacious vista, an elegant blueprint where every fractured, juvenile thought would coalesce. They said the chaos of youth would acquiesce, leaving a steady, authentic adult in its place. They gave us the myth of the arrival- the lie that one day, we would simply wake up whole. But they elided the mechanics of the performance. Now, I look at the contour of my face in the speculum and wonder which version of my voice belongs to me. We are taught to curate a pristine, sterile grace, to camouflage the jagged, turbulent truths just to make the thronged concourses comfortable. We stitch together acceptable responses from online algorithms, wearing a manufactured guise so utterly flawless that the real self suffocates beneath the heavy fabric. I watch my peers move through the academic thresholds, all of us operating like highly optimised ghosts, trading our actual, amorphous humanity for the safety of a curated, bloodless profile. We smile on command. We nod at the correct intervals. We compress our rage into neat, digestible captions. The question catches like a glass in my throat: Are you for real? Or is it moral peril to let the hidden things breathe? Should we have been told that a mask was mandatory? It breeds a silent, crushing despair to realise they didn’t raise us to be people, they trained us to be a beautiful exhibit, polishing a hollow surface, long after the living thing inside has perished.