Teenagehood

Today i was just thinking that my teenage years were some of the hardest to date. For starters i thought i knew everything and hence any instruction from my parents was of course up for debate. As you can imagine this did not sit well with my parents who knew better than me and also knew that i really did not know anything and was just a normal teenager, going through a normal and very uncomfortable phase for everyone. Unfortunately for them I was their first teenager and sometimes they were just as enraged as I was and frankly sometimes we all did not know how to cope with it all.  All my crushes at the time were on guys who would never look twice at me or give me the time of day if only to say hi and most of my time, when not writing in a diary (which was usually torn in a few months for security reasons) was spent looking at the world map in an attempt to pick a suitable destination that I would go to as soon as I won the lotto or got enough money to run away in a similar miraculous fashion. My teachers were yet another drag story and not being able to fit into any of the fashionable cliques and not interested I was pretty much a loner. I was convinced no one understood me and in my mind it was indeed me against the whole world.  

Looking back, I realise I had no idea of who I was and everyday was a journey to discovering myself and who I wanted to be in life. It was also a stage where I became very self-conscious and every outburst of acne seemed worse than a tsunami in any part of the world. It didn’t help me much that I had a very small body and as a result my peers felt they had to do a whole lot of censoring when around me when discussing the trending topics which were boys and dating. My oversized pair of spectacles were not of much help either and quite often you would find me buried in a book, reading was one of my favourite hobbies and it still is. It gave me a chance to live in another world, to be someone else and picture a lot of places that I had never been to. What I wanted to do when I grew up changed almost every year ranging from being a lawyer, psychologist, tour guide, farmer amongst other things. To be fair, it was not all bad experiences, it was also a time that I made some of the friendships that I have up to this day, read most of my bible, got my first valentine’s card and eventually my first boyfriend, discovered video games and what a great and bad thing the internet was and though I might not have known for sure what I wanted to be, what I did not want to be was very clear to me even at that time. 

I have been privileged enough to live through teenage hood all over again, mostly through my younger sisters and seeing them struggle and somewhat striving in it all has made me understand that some things can only be understood in reverse. I see the look of confusion in my youngest sister’s eyes when I try to explain how a few years from now most of the stuff she worries about is not going to matter and she will not be seen dead with any of the guys she envies now lol. I however realise that like me, she will have to live it all and probably only understand it later and all I can do is to give this advice that sometimes, oh wait, usually falls on deaf ears and hope that she doesn’t burn herself and leave scars in the process for some often do at this stage. I definitely would not want to go back and do it all over again but I know for sure that I would not want to take anything away from it all for it was part of a long journey to self-discovery.