Super Sonic   +  tactless idiots

16

I hated being a sixteen year old girl.

I don't know what it's like for guys– just as bad, maybe, but men just don't talk about this stuff much as women do. But being female and being a teenager– anywhere between the ages of about thirteen and seventeen, really– it's horrible and difficult and painful.

Or at least, it was for me. And for a lot of other chicks I know as well.. Those who are teenagers now, and those who have been teenagers in the past. It's a time of being awkward, of not quite fitting in anywhere, of being insecure and sometimes pretentious and all the while a little out of touch with reality, because that's just how your brain is wired at that age. (Really.)

Being a teenager in the modern, material world is difficult at the best of times. Add anything that makes you different or even slightly undesirable, and ’difficult’ becomes ’virtual social torture.’

You can be too thin, too fat, too smart, too dumb, too poor,too rich, too boring, talk too much. You have to watch what you say and who you say it to. It a hormonal scramble combined with social chest beating sessions and it's enough to test anyone's sanity.

Friends are so important when you're that age. Your family literally becomes something you take or granted for a small percentage of the time and actively resent the rest of the time. Your friends are your family... The love and understand you more than blood relations do anyway.

I hated myself as a kid. I thought I was excessively ugly, boring and plain. I was bullied and I was unpopular and I remember a stretch of months where I cried every night, begging my mum not to send me to school the next day, please don't make me go... It's difficult to see a life beyond high school when you're in the thick of it. Life after school– as a grown up– it's all one big confusing daydream where you may fail, or may succeed... And somehow that is directly tied in with your high school career. Although no one can explain that to you as an exact science.

Added to all the usual crap that teens have to deal with, now there's the internet to really screw things over. The FaceBook feeds of young people are terrifying. At least when I was a kid, I could go home and shut it out and escape it- kids today don't even really get that option because it follows them home. On their phones, their computers, their online social networks. If you are not on FaceBook you my as well not exist, and I understand that. But it also leaves you with few options as far as taking a break from the constant social parade that is being a teenager. And that sucks.

I'm not even sure why I'm writing this post. But it's for someone I consider a mate of mine, someone I love very much. It's hard now, I know that, and it probably sucks way more than I actually remember... But it passes. It feels like forever, like the most important chapter in your life... But it's not. A few years from now you'll look back had realize that what I'm saying is truth– being a teenage girl totally sucks arse, but it doesn't last forever.

It passes. The best I can do is promise you that if nothing else... In time, this will all be insignificant. Everything– everything– passes eventually. And being is a teenager, feeling this way... that passes too.

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