I’m really glad to be a part of the “Teens Tell Their Story” project, initiated by the lovely Caitlin and Sherina. I think it’s a really great idea to inspire teen writers to blog. 🙂 I’m new at this blogging thing too, but I think it’s really just a fun way to get my thoughts out of my head and out… somewhere.
Click here to view the first TTTS post.
Week #1: The Struggles of Being A Teen
Being a teenager is fun, but it isn’t easy.
It’s a season of life that involves exploration in life, love and relationships.
It’s a time when we wisely stumble and make clumsy, silly mistakes that we’ll laugh about in the future.
It’s a phase of innocence in our relationships, and bitter despair when fragments appear in them.
It’s a period of learning from both good and bad, and grappling with ‘grey’ choices.
There are just too many struggles that I’d love to discuss in this post, but I decided to choose the biggest struggle that I face as a teenager even now at times.
It’s the struggle of security.
Physical security aside, I think our emotional security is one that is at great risk today. The media propagates the “ideal” body shape and effectively narrows our definition of beauty. In our adolescence, we are constantly trying to fit in with the crowd, to find friends whom we can click with and people who don’t mind our eccentricity at times. Sappy romance novels romanticise relationships to the point of being unrealistic at times, and they leave us hungry for a love and happy ending that is as complete as those in fictional stories. We try to look for things that we’re good at, to excel in a certain skill or area so we can earn approval from our parents.
We’re always looking for love, and for acceptance from others. Without it, it’s almost as if there’s a gaping hole in our chests which then drives us to do more things out of a need to be recognised and well-liked. This is why so many people resort to rejecting themselves and going to extremes just so they can conform to the popularity equation created by others who are nothing like them.
But I want to speak out against that, because we’re all different individuals in our own ways; we have strengths and weakness unique to us. I know it’s so much easier to say than to embrace it wholeheartedly, but there’s so much truth in it. I used to struggle with accepting myself for who I was before. It hurt whenever I got rejected by my friends, when I was told that I was “annoying” straight in the face, when my parents constantly compared me to my cousins who were acing all their tests and being amazing elder sisters. It was the worst feeling when I looked at other girls and wished that I could be them, to have their faces or their slim figures. I had a floppy belly, I wasn’t exceptionally smart, I had pimples sprouting on my face, I wasn’t “cool” or funny enough to be friends with many people, or to get the guy I had a crush on to notice me.
I thought I could never be good enough.
But this has changed over the years. My hurts and insecurities faded away and the scars on my heart were healed, all thanks to Daddy God. Call me a preachy Christian, but this post is really about sharing my experiences in the hopes that it blesses someone who felt the same way or worse than I did when I was younger. God made me see that I was worthy of love and that He had already accepted me for who I was.
I learned to be content being myself, to be okay with being alone and to be okay with the fact that there will always be someone better than me be it in music skills, studies, art, sport and physical beauty. I embraced strengths that were unique to me and told myself every day that my worth isn’t just defined by my looks or my skills and smarts. Whenever feelings of rejection nagged at me, I shrugged them off and told myself the opposite, that I was fine the way I was.
You see, the ironic thing is that in the process of thinking that the world is hurting us with its rejection, most of our scars are self-inflicted by thoughts of worthlessness and thoughts of despair. Sometimes, we forget that we’re the ones who can do the most damage to ourselves.
Stepping out of a life fraught with insecurity isn’t easy at all; for me, it’s still a journey that I’m on. There’re many bumps along the way, times when I feel disgusted with myself for being so impatient with my siblings or judgmental towards people I barely know, or for not performing as well as my peers in school. Even so, I refuse to be trapped by what others think about me anymore; my focus now is on living a life that’s pleasing to God and a life that can bless others too.
I’m not perfect in any way, but that’s what makes me unique, that’s what makes me one of a kind.
star in a galaxy 