One of the hardest things a person will have to endure is adolescence. Your mood swings from high to low; one minute you love your family, yourself and life is beautiful, next minute you have a (normally irrational) hatred of everyone around you and feel like there’s no meaning to life. Most of all you’re scared because suddenly you have all these choices to make and it’s terrifying not knowing if you’ve made the correct ones. You so desperately want someone to help you map out your future, day for day, all the while knowing that this is impossible. You slowly learn that luck has a huge part to play in your success i.e. the connections you may be lucky enough to make, if you are in the right place at the right time. It’s a shocking awakening being whipped out of the warm blanket of childhood and plunged in the ice-bath of adulthood.

  I (being a teenager) constantly compare myself to my friends and my somewhat successful siblings. It isn’t easy when I have one brother earning thousands at the age of seventeen, and the other, an all-rounder who is head boy of my school. What strikes me about both of them is their innate sense of self-awareness- they are extremely confident in their own fields. I have always lacked self-confidence, or should I say, lacked the ability to put on a confident exterior. I say this because no one is completely secure in his or her abilities; everyone has individual insecurities. I have a solid foundation for success, yet I’m being held back by my inability to trust myself. If you aren’t sure of your own talents, how can you convince anyone else that they exist? I have become much more aware of how important it is to be able to convey yourself well with a lasting positive impression. 

  With television shows such as ‘Britain’s/America’s got talent’ or ‘American Idol’ becoming increasingly prominent in our society, young people are given the idea that success can happen overnight, and they find it astonishing when they realize that this is not the case and you have to work hard to do well. Especially at this time of economic struggle, young people are finding it increasingly difficult to become employed part-time and therefore they are not getting the work experience they need. This also means that they have no money to travel, or in a lot of cases, this means they cannot afford to buy new clothes to stay ‘in fashion’.

  Body image is a huge issue, not just in girls. Many teenagers carry ‘puppy fat’ up until the ages of 17-18. They are bombarded with pictures of beautiful, slim people and don’t understand why they don’t look like them. They don’t realize that it all comes with time and patience. 

  While all this is going on, there is also the pressure of ‘fitting in’. Most of the time, this means getting wasted every night and smoking behind the bike shed. This is something that lots of teenagers don’t actually enjoy but do it for the ‘cool’ persona. Some get involved in soft drugs, which leads them down the slippery slope of addiction. 

  A large amount of teenagers aren’t getting support, and they are drowning in the feeling of isolation and the idea that they are all alone in this huge world. Some may say that this is the case- that you enter and leave this world alone. However, at this age, a person has so many hormones flying about in their bodies that completely mix them up and it can be very confusing. What is concerning is that a huge amount of teenagers believe that they are the only ones who feel this way and think there must be something wrong with them as there is no-one there to tell them otherwise. 

Adolescence causes people to do things that are unfitting to their character. So many of us are scared and all we need is someone to take the time to listen. It’s a big world, and we’re being thrown in at the deep end.