The darker side of being a teen

Now I'm going to walk you through the darker side of being a teen.

Being a teen like me has enormous pressure on it. I'll refer back to my ice-breaking line of, "I'm only 14, but I feel like I'm older, it seems I've developed a hunch-back from carrying the world on my shoulders", teens and teens like me have so many and so high expectations of them. I get expectations thrown at me everyday, expectations to get the highest level on my next exam, or the expectation to become rich and successful when I'm older. And those are expectations of just adults; teens launch expectations at each other, whether it is from friend to friend, from enemy to enemy, to boyfriend to girlfriend. The amount of expectations is decadent.

Lets roll in with some examples, Harry throws a poker party every Friday after-school, and so it has become regular and routine and has become expected of him, and that's fine because Harry doesn't mind, but what if one day, Harry doesn't want to throw a poker party? That is when problems occur. Or an example about me, I kiss my girlfriend everyday, so it has become regular and routine and is expected of me, and I expect her to return the kiss and that's fine because currently we don't mind, but what happens when one day she expects something of me or I expect something of her and she doesn't want to do it? If you're an adult, you're probably thinking, so? Life's difficult, get over it. What I'm trying to say is that exactly, life is difficult, and teenage life is even harder with all the added stress. Adults severely take teens for granted. If your teen comes home everyday fine and happy, congratulate them, because they made it, they made it through another day in the hellish conditions that is teenage life.

Along with the expectations, there are further stresses such as enemies, I'm lucky, I'm liked by everyone really, I'm known for being happy-go-lucky, athletic, knowledgeable and funny. So most people can relate to something. But then there are the people who get bullied and tormented. I'll admit it now, the nastiest people in the world amoung the slave masters, amoung the corporate suits raping third world countries for their resources and amoung the politicians who lie to us on a daily basis. Are teenagers. If they want to crush someones personality, strip them of their inhibitions and aspirations they will do so. They band together and they march through anyone who stands in their way. An example, a girl in my school, for her sake, I'll call her by a different name, lets say... Jane, now Jane is overweight, not chubby, but not obese. Now girls, and boys but mainly girls torment her about this, openly, that's why I class teenagers as some of the most ruthless and devilishly evil people in the world, because they're not discreet about bullying. Now this poor girl hasn't eaten for 2 weeks in a vain attempt to lose weight. Probably the darkest aspect of teenage life...

There are only two more darker aspects of teenage life I have to reveal, the one I’m going to explain now is about abuse, drug abuse and alcohol abuse, unfortunately these two are ubiquitous in todays’ generation of teens. Expectations also come into play here, it seems the type of people you hang around with effects what type of expectations you receive, if you hang out with some teens, you’ll be expected to smoke, or fight, or drink etc. and those teens that can’t think for themselves go ahead with these, because to be blunt, most teenagers are indeed sheep. They follow the ringleader, who is often just as much as an idiot as they are. Drugs are easier to come by these days, from the light drugs to heavy drugs, light drugs I consider as weed, ketamine and poppers etc. heavy drugs are cocaine, heroine, speed, and ecstasy. Although heavy drugs aren’t commonly used be the teenagers that just use drugs to be cool and be in a little group of teens. Drug abuse isn’t as common as alcohol abuse, which at least 100 times more common. Alcohol is incredibly easy to come across and isn’t illegal in London, as drugs are. So many pick alcohol of drugs.

Alcohol is alright and harmless in small dosages, but these teens don’t know their limits, they sling back bottles of vodka, and mix drinks to get them more heavily drunk. I’ll bring up an example again, I was once standing outside on the high street with my mates, and on the girls had gotten incredibly drunk because one of her mates had mixed her drinks, (vodka and cider don’t go down well), this girl was vomiting her organs up, for about 2 hours straight she was vomiting, it’s a sight that would put even the most experienced drinkers off drinking. But this happens, and it happens regularly, too regularly for my liking but that’s the way it is, and when those teens wake up in the morning, covered in their own bodily fluids, half-naked in the middle of no-where with no one there to help them, then they’ll realize the cold and cruel truth. Their friends didn’t care enough to even help them in their hour of need and they learn the hard way that those friends weren’t really friends at all.

Finally we come to the last dark aspect of teenage life. Sex. Now I’m going to express my personal views about this, sex is the most natural thing to us humans, we’re programmed to do it, but thanks to our modern upbringing, the subject of sex is somewhat taboo and “dangerous”, which is down right ridiculous. Many teens, mostly girls fear sex, they think it will hurt, it won’t be good etc. many girls are also afraid of losing their virginity. But not for the right reasons, they don’t want to wait till marriage or whatever, they’re afraid of doing anything because if they do, they will be labeled whores by other girls. They’re so afraid by what other people will say that they don’t do what they most want to do. Because every single teen does want to have sex, those have already had it and those who haven’t. You would think that in such an supposedly sexual world that this wouldn’t be an issue but I have to say, I think for such an advanced race of people, we still think of sex of something that can’t be discussed, and has to stay under the covers, (very sorry for the pun). Which is wrong in my opinion, the attitude I see from some girls that are afraid of their own bodies or that think that sex is “icky” and “wrong” makes me blood boil, in fact if they were talking to me and I slit my own throat to die so I didn’t have to listen to the verbal diarrhea exiting their mouths, I would shoot blood onto them from the immense high blood pressure, it frustrates me so much.

So why is a dark aspect? Because teens are so unaware of it, they don’t know how to explore it, for some it’s just in, out, bang bang and the job is done. The words foreplay and intimacy mean absolutely nothing to them, making sex one of the most worst things some teens experience.

So in conclusion I’m going to bring up my initial line, of "I'm only 14, but I feel like I'm older, it seems I've developed a hunch-back from carrying the world on my shoulders" again, and now I hope the reasons for me saying this are clearer. With having just read to some extent the problems and stresses in teenage life, you’ll understand why I feel older and tired. This is only a tiny margin of the stresses of teenage life, there is so much more, but that can be saved for another time. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it and took away something from this.

- Ali Jami

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