Living in today's society as a teenager

„It can’t be that hard to be a teenager these days, can it?“

Many adults think so, but let me tell you something – it isn’t true. We may haven’t fought in wars, but we are overly sexualized, just like words have been sexualized. The average teenager’s anxiety level is as high as the level of an adult in 1950, which shouldn’t be like that. The anxiety level back then was set during way different times and as said before, these people were adults, but we are teenagers, it shouldn’t be like that. We deal with depression, anxiety and overthinking (the list is way longer) from a young age on. Our families may not notice, but they are often hurting us with comments about our bodies or how much we eat (just to name two things, there is more).

We try to define ourselves, but we often can’t because of family, friends and even strangers. We seem to be judged constantly because of our actions that other people think are not good, they think that the decisions we make are bad. Imagine you’re standing on a road, there are two ways to go and going back isn’t one of them. You can either go right or left. You want to go right but your family and friends just like strangers try and convince you to go left because they think it’s the right way since no one ever has gone the other way. But how are you ever supposed to know what you’d find on the right way, if you follow everybody through a path that has been known for long, and you know it’s safe? Think about this.

We’re trying to make our own decisions, but we don’t seem to be allowed to do so. We try to learn how to earn money, have a social life, keep friendships and balance school. Due to Covid-19, some of these points got lost, for example, having a social life. We’ve been in and out of quarantine and haven’t attended school for months, it was all virtual. We don’t even get the chance to truly think about how to earn money since we’re so focused on school because it isn’t easy to sit in front of a monitor for hours straight and not be able to really see someone, because it wasn’t and isn’t easy. We couldn’t concentrate on our school work and that shows. We try our best to regain everything that we lost during those months, and it seems like it’s never going to be ending.

The once deepest friendships are breaking apart because we’re growing up way to fast. The people we had the most connection with seem to be mostly strangers, just like most of us see ourselves. Just like slightly mentioned before already, school has been stressful and keeps us up until the middle of the night.

Even now, after Covid-19 seems to have ended.