In some ways being a teenager is the hardest chapter in your life. This is the part of your life where you’re trying to define who you are not only to everyone around you, but also to yourself. We teenagers struggle with image, gender identity, self confidence, and tons of emotional issues.

I bet if you were to take my entire class of 2018 to a psychiatrist, each one of us would have some sort of mental issue. Most of us look and act completely fine but everyone is going through something. Everyone has heard a story of a really smart kid who was seemingly happy, but “all of a sudden” decided to take their own life. Suicidal decisions are not made “all of a sudden” these feelings take time to work up to. Anyone who believes the person who killed themselves is just running away from consequences is humongous mistaken. This person had to go through weeks, months, or even years of internal pain, to finally make a decision to simply quit living.

Sometimes I can’t sleep at night, because I feel empty. The best way to explain this feeling is like you haven’t eaten in two days, but instead of that pain being in your stomach that pain is in your heart and you can’t just eat to feel full. There are things, huge things, which I just don’t care about. I don’t know what it is about being a teenager, maybe it’s all the raging hormones or perhaps  the preprogrammed desire to displease our parents that seems to be in all of us that makes us want to do outrageous unnecessary things just for the fun of it.

In the year 2015 it seems like everyone is having sex which has become a huge issue for teens to pressure themselves about. If you haven’t had sex yet you a loser but if you’ve had sex, everyone looks at you differently and silently judges you. High school is all about silent judging. No one is ever going to tell you exactly how they feel because they want to have and keep as many friends as possible.  My best friend says she loves me to my face but for all I know she could feel completely different and not like me at all. Those are the thoughts that most teenagers have and those are the thoughts that damage us. We all believe that everyone hates us and that we are completely alone. These things could most definitely be true but its better to not think about them and focus on loving yourself.

I had a friend who found it so completely hard to love herself that she starved herself until she was so malnourished that she looked like a walking skeleton. I knew what she was doing; I saw her pushing food around her plate at lunch. I also saw the pain in her eyes when some brought up how skinny and pretty she was. She had pain in her eyes when people said these things because she didn’t believe them she felt like these compliments being thrown at her were complete lies. She wanted to have a thigh gap, and cheek bones that weren’t hidden by baby fat on her face. Therefore she didn’t eat, she hid it well from everyone else but I could see how tiny she was becoming. I tried to ask her about it but she would just dismiss me like it was crazy I would even accuse her of being anorexic. This drove a wedge between us, I kept trying to talk to her but she just didn’t want to listen to me, so I gave up. I see her around sometimes, and every time I see her I feel this immense pang of guilt. I gave up on her when I was the only one who knew to help her, I stopped trying and in my eyes that made me a monster.
Most of us teenagers don’t even know what gender we prefer to be with, although none of us will admit it. It still amazes me that in 2015 people can still be scared to admit that we have 100%  no idea what our sexual orientation is. There are also the homophobic people in schools that make it hard to be open about who you are.
Being a teenager is hard.

Being a teenager is so difficult that many of us wish we could just skip this chapter, and have everything figured out. The truth is however, you can’t skip around. You have to go through this part and hopefully come out alive and happy. In an ideal high school world everyone would be happy with the way they look and wouldn’t force themselves to become something else. All of us would also have a voice, a strong voice to say exactly what we’re thinking. We wouldn’t do things that didn’t matter to us, we would wait until they mattered then we would do those things with so much passion and devotion that there would be no question of right or wrong. None of us would resort to suicide because we would all have unconventional support for one another. Unfortunately not all of this can happen because our world is not perfect or ideal. We, teenagers have to bind together and strive for these things to happen and we all just have to push through our issues. If we just keep pushing and hoping we will come out on the other side victorious.

I’ve never been bullied or an outsider, quite the opposite actually. I like to think I have never bullied anyone and that I have many friends whom I fit in with. However the fact is no matter how many friends I do have I am still an outsider to myself. I have no idea who I want to grow up to be, or what I want to do, more importantly I have no idea who I am in this moment of time.

We are never going to have everything figured out, not even when we are adults, so we just have to except that and remember this chapter will end. We will move on. High school is not the end of us, it’s the introduction to real life, and real life is what matters.