Keep calm and carry on

Let’s get this straight!!! Teenagers are the most misunderstood people on earth. For as long as I can remember adolescents have always been considered to be dramatic, rude and unpredictable, but has anyone really wondered why we act in such a way? The answer to this question is very simple: Teenagers are treated like children but expected to act like adults. Coming-of-age is definitely a process in which we not only have to deal with the pressure of discovering who we are and who we want to become but also we are dealing with the criticism and disapproval of adults and other teenagers. Trying understand our own thoughts and feelings is probably one of the hardest things when being an adolescent and as if this wasn’t complicated enough for us to process, society expect us to be mature and independent enough to make intelligent and wise decisions yet obedient and submissive enough to do what they think it’s ‘better for us’. Is it as if one day you are playing outside with your friends having the time of your life and the very next day you need to go to work in order to pay and afford all the things you need.  With this in mind it is not hard to understand why the coming-of-age process if full with negative feelings such as fear, anger, confusion, hopelessness, between many others.

On the other hand, one cannot ignore the fact that many of these changes are caused by biological reasons.  As Kartip Kalyamram explains in his article adolescent angst, In the course of early adolescence, the grey matter thickens, peaking at 11 years for girls and 12.5 years for boys. Many new neuronal pathways open up, in a sense reflecting the influence of multiple environmental cues and also the choices that adolescents face. However, more pathways need not necessarily be more efficient, in fact they actually slow brain functioning. As the adolescent grows, these pathways prune down and the grey matter approaches adult size by about age 20 years

But hey… not everything its lost!!! At the end of the day angst play an important and indispensable role on the process of getting to know ourselves and those around us. Truth is every single person has gone through this process .Nobody said this it was going to be easy in fact we live in a pretty strange, fake and unpredictable world  but as everything else in life you need to have ups and downs in order to feel alive.