Remembering Adolescence...

“Write about what it was like for you in adolescence”… this is what was said to me, and I have been thinking about it for the past week and am still coming up blank. I thought and thought about what it was like to be an adolescent and was beginning to get frustrated with myself when I couldn’t come up with a descent response, then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I wasn’t speechless because there was nothing to my teen years, I was left speechless because of how overwhelmingly much there was to being an adolescent. Still, after a good four years of pondering and reminiscing about my adolescence, I can’t even begin to describe what the experience was like. It’s like a giant mass of swirling sparking glowing colors all moving at different speeds and in different directions simultaneously. Adolescence is like jumping off of a cliff because you want the rush of excitement the new freedom brings you, but then screaming for your mom to come save you because you don’t know how to handle your own problems yet.

            I remember when I was a teen, people always telling me that my problems were minimal, that there wasn’t anything for me to worry about, and that I should “just wait until I get into the real world if I thought my life was hard now”. Hearing these things infuriated me to no end, and still does when I think about it today. I always wanted to just scream back at people when they said things like that, that they had no idea what my life was like and that being a teenager was a million times harder than being a middle aged family man. To this day, I still feel like the high school years are so looked down upon by adults. Sure adults acknowledge that there can be “rough patches” but they just sum it all up to one big learning experience for the youth. I disagree entirely.  I think that due to where teenagers are developmentally, they are feeling the most intense emotion they ever will, and that because they are still incapable in many ways to handle this emotion, their problems are increased ten fold. Whether adults understand it or not, teenagers are living a difficult life. It may be somewhat sheltered, but that shelter doesn’t comfort the teen in any way. They feel just as venerable as a single mother of three living on government funds. Their problems feel just as warranted, and the intensity with which they feel is overwhelming for most.

            For me, the teenage years were spent living what I consider now to have been a double identity life. I had the great façade of being the epitome of high school happiness. I was a cheerleader, had many “friends”, was a track prodigy, got all A’s, had happily married parents… everything everyone said “should” make me happy, and to most people on the outside, that’s just what I was; a happy, energetic, enthusiastic teenager living the high school dream. I however, like so many other teenagers was struggling greatly with many things beyond the surface.

            This is where I feel many teenagers get lost in the mix. There are adolescents that stick out like a sore thumb who struggle with the notorious teenage angst and such, but what I feel is often ignored, are the do-it-all types (such as myself) who are literally working themselves to death while trying to figure out their place in the world. I was one of those; a do it all attitude with an iron wall built up that only I could look past.

            There was a lot going on in my life that those outside my family would have never assumed until later. I had experienced many things and been forced to face realities that teens of my age would never have even thought about at that point. Because of medical issues, I was jetting from one doctor to the next in-between my cheerleading practices and cross-country meets. My life was a constant balancing act of hospital visits, school functions and work, all the while holding up the pressure to achieve academically, socially, and physically. Teachers would come to me with “worry” when I was falling over asleep in class, and I’d blame it on getting to bed late or working too much. This seemed to be enough for them, I mean I was maintaining perfect grades and had a smile on my face, so why should they cater to me when there was a guy in a black cloak with green hair sitting in the back refusing to do his work or talk to anyone. I was determined that nobody see the other side of my life because I feared they wouldn’t accept me if they saw anything but the happy energetic Nikita they had grown accustomed to.

            As I continued on through my adolescent years, the schedule only got harder and harder to maintain, and teachers, older students, and adults kept telling me the usual “These are the best years of your life”, “ Think this is hard? Just wait for college!”, “You want freedom? The real world is hard honey, soak up the good life while you’re still living at home…”. I, like so many of my peers heard this and just laughed… if they only knew. I seriously felt like such an old soul trapped in a teenager’s body. I couldn’t wait to be independent and move on from high school.

            Going into my last year of high school, I took a trip to Europe with a history teacher of mine. Little did I know, that this trip would forever impact my life. Over the course of three weeks, I had for the first time, a teacher, an adult other than my parents, try to get to know me beyond the façade. For the first time in my adolescent years, I felt like I could open up to someone. This was seriously a first for me, and as uncomfortable as it was, at the same time, it was the most comforting feeling in the world. This teacher learned all about my background, my family, my real interests, the pressures I felt every day… We talked daily on that trip for hours and by the end of it I realized that I didn’t have to be the teenager who held it all in. This was the biggest relief of my life at that point. This teacher was able to show me the biggest life lesson in the matter of a few weeks. This would eventually become one of the things that drove me into education and her to now have changed from a history teacher to a counselor.

            I feel like although my teenage experience was vastly different from most of my peers, I still felt the same pressures, influences, and demands that they all did, just in a bit more unique way. As I’ve spent more and more time away from high school and reminisced with friends now about the past, I realize that adolescence isn’t an easy time for anyone. It’s a time of turmoil, self-discovery, intense emotion, problem solving, and conquering for every single person. Although the journeys are different for each of us, and people obviously choose to take various paths to get through it, some more detrimental or successful than others, it is still real life. That’s probably the one thing that bothers me the most to this day, is when people say that high school isn’t “real life”. I feel like high school is as “real” as you can get. It is the time when there is the highest amount of intense energy and emotion running through you and you don’t yet have the tools to know how to handle it all at once. It’s overwhelming and exciting simultaneously. Adolescence is like the ultimate “real life”. It’s the sum of every intense experience you can have combined.