Teenage Years

TEENAGE YEARS

“Mommy can I –”

“No, you can do it when you are older.”

“But… okay.”

How many times have we had this conversation with our parents only to be turned down at the pretext of age? And how many times have we wanted to grow up and ‘experience’ life?

It’s ironic, isn’t it? How when we were younger we couldn’t wait to grow up and now that we are finally growing up we yearn for the good old days.

Your teenage years are like a trial version of how your life is going to be but on a smaller scale yet these prove to be some of the toughest albeit memorable years.

‘Growing up’, you get a taste of reality, you start forming your own individual identity, different from your parents or siblings or friends. The thoughts in your head are really yours and not formed by bias or impressions. Throughout our life we are constantly evolving as individuals, teenage years just speed up the process.

You learn how to handle everything, be it happiness, stress, betrayal, heartbreak or just life in general. You learn how to grow up and behave like a respectable and sane member of the society.

Yet somewhere along the line, you fit into the mould that society has designed for you. Your goals and aspirations and dreams become ‘realistic’ and you learn to give compromise the name satisfaction.

The possible reason for this is that we don’t let our children learn how to grow up, we just expect them to do so without giving them considerable control over their own lives. One moment 16 year olds need permission to even go to the washroom, and next they are expected to make career decisions that will affect their entire life.

Being a teenager is like hanging in the middle, you are neither a kid nor an adult. You are just somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

And in today’s world, a teenager has to be excellent in every aspect of their life or else there is the burning fear of being mediocre for the rest of your life.

But on the bright side, if you have survived your teenage years with all the mood swings and the pressure of fitting in, you can probably survive hell too.

Cheers to being almost adults!

Drasti Jain

XII Lily.