What it is like being a teen in 2017 …
I always had this idea in my head, since the beginning; that I would be an adult, I would feel it once I wasn’t a teenager anymore. Iimagined myself being confident, wearing makeup, high heels, holding a handbag, having no more acne.
However coming near the end of my teenage years, I realise that it isn’t the case, I now have small scars of acne, I might be a bit more confident than I was a few years ago but I still wear no make up and still carry around a backpack. This shows that teenage years don’t necessarily change who you are but is there to make you understand who you truly are.
Being a teenager is a huge phase in our life, it’s like this obstacle everybody has to go through to get to the next step in life, which is adulthood.
Of course, just like everything else in life, it has its’ ups and downs. However for me, being a bit unsociable and having no self esteem made it very hard.
My teenage years were spent in a french school, surrounded by mainly french people, so I don’t know if it would have been different if I had been in another country but during my entire life; especially during my teen years, I’ve always felt that I was different from others. It was only recently, I figured out that many people felt the same as I did. I thought I was different because I didn’t have the same nationality as everybody else, the same skin tone, the same style, humour. These are the main reasons why I was always so afraid to talk. I thought that if I opened my mouth, people would judge me and I was afraid they would find out I was different from everybody else. But the thing is, not talking made things worse.
And as it is 2017, there are now so many social medias and you can’t ‘not have either Facebook or Instagram’. I mean, I might be exaggerating a little; of course you can, but if you’re often hanging out with a group, there’s a high chance they might have a group chat and you’d always be lost when they talk about something they mentioned in the chat the day before, or there might be a conversation in the group about a trendy video on Facebook or something but you would have absolute no idea of what they are talking about and might feel a bit left out of the group. And of course you can’t just create an account; people will judge you if you don’t have enough friends saying you’re unsociable or the opposite if you have too many, then you’re desperate. On Instagram, you can’t just HAVE an account, you actually have to maintain it, you have to post photos. And those photos aren’t simply photos, they are what represent who you are to others who don’t know you.
In 2017, but I suppose it was the same for other generations, living a teen life is living a life of appearance and judgement.
It is only after you pass that phase that you realize you were the one putting all the pressure on yourself. There was a solution all along but you ignored it, which was to ‘not care of what others think’. Because people will always judge you, even in the next phase, it even started in kindergarten but you were too young to realize it.
Making Time For Me 