Cheers to the teenage years

“I think being a teenager is such a compelling time period in your life--it gives you some of your worst scars…”

-    Stephenie Meyer, The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide

Life.

Life has a funny way of sneaking up on us, it has the ability to let us down and proceed without even the slightest feeling of guilt, it relishes at turning our lives completely upside down and finds enjoyment in giving us a reality check just after we've paid it a compliment stating that maybe we were wrong, maybe it wasn’t that bad after all.

The teenager years can be compared to a sweet before you’ve eaten it. It looks perfect. It's perfectly round, it has a soft sweet center that you can’t wait to devour, and the bright red color entices you and makes you think that once you've tasted it you won’t be able to get enough.

You can compare this to how you felt when you were younger. How you couldn’t wait to grow up and be a teenager because it seemed so much more appealing than being a simple 7 year old. To you, life was way too boring back then, you wanted the rush that came with being in your teens, and you yearned for freedom and responsibility. The teenage years - the "soft sweet center that you couldn’t wait to devour"

Anxiously and slowly you lift the sweet to your mouth, easing it in as you wish to savor the sweet taste and not finish it immediately. When it hits your tongue, you suck on it and immediately you want nothing more than to spit it out.

You realize that the sweet that you expected to be perfect was never really perfect to begin with; the appealing look was a facade, it was glamorized to be something that you wished it to be, just like the teenage years

.

When older people reflect on their teenage years, very often you hear of the good things: how your mom met your dad in high school and how he expected very little from her, how they would play in the road and everyone knew everyone because of the community structure, how they enjoyed school and were anxious and excited to learn. 

They choose to omit the bad times, the times when they sat in their rooms crying because they found out their friends were speaking behind their backs, the heartbreaks, the pressure, the failures, the temptations, the fake friends. What about all of those bad things that make living life for us teenagers unbearable?

I think of most of my friends at school and I realized that the topic of conversation almost every break consists of us complaining. We complain about being tired, we complain about the exams that are creeping, we complain that our parents won’t let us go out; we complain that we don’t have money. We complain…. and complain.

Can you really blame us? Life has become so routine. We go to school, we come home, we do school work, after which we go to bed and wake up the next day only to repeat this tiring cycle.

As it sits I’m really fed up with life, and more importantly I’m fed up with life as a teenager. I know that I have no right to feel this anger towards life because it owes me no favors; I realize that I am more of a liability to it than I am an asset and I give it nothing in return for what it has given me.

I know it may come across as if I’m ungrateful toward life and as if I’m taking it for granted when many people have not had the opportunity to live to my age, but that is not the case. I really am grateful to be alive and I am grateful that I am healthy. I am grateful that life has enjoyed my company enough to allow me to live to experience the teenage years while many have not been awarded this opportunity. 

After experiencing these dreadful years first hand, I feel that I have earned the right to say that being a teenager is fucking hard. People don’t understand what we as a generation have to endure, especially in today’s day and age. You hear of so many young people ending their lives when they are our age because life just becomes too much to bear, even death seems appealing.

If you are reading this, I commend you for sticking around. The teenager years are not for the faint hearted so award yourself a huge-ass-filled-with-love hi-five for being strong enough to endure all the heartbreaks, the pressures, the failures, the temptations and the fake friends.

If you are not proud of yourself for anything, be proud of yourself for dealing with things that could easily have been escaped. You are amazing, and you my friend, are a badass.

Stay put, we're nearly done with this shit and by "this shit" I am referring to the teenage years. Because that's exactly what it is: SHIT.

Cheers to better days in the future x