19...A Very Difficult Age To Be

    

 What was it like the day you turned 19? I feel as people get older they forget the emotions that came with each milestone year of their lives and for that reason, I choose to document those milestone years. I want to be a parent, an adult who will understand the youth and provide them comfort and solace that everything they are going through is normal, and provide them with support through that process instead of being dismissive. 

     I am currently 19 and it's the weirdest age by far I have ever experienced. I'm talking weirder than even the awkward puberty phase of 13, and weirder than the "I want to fit in" phase of 16. 19 is like when people go between the borders of two countries or towns and put their feet on either side so that they can be in two places at once. That's 19..except one country is adolescence and the other is adulthood. 

    

That weird transition phase is really annoying. You are given a lot of responsibility that you have to face on your own, adults expect you to be adults but your peers still expect you to operate like a teenager. In my experience, even up till I was 18 my family would encourage me to stay indoors, " don't go out too much, don't go places, or make big decisions by yourself" are things they would recite. You know as a teen you naturally have a sense of adventure. They killed that sense of adventure telling me don't leave the nest..don't even look outside of it because the world is dangerous but as soon as the clock struck 12 and my 19th birthday began the narrative changed to "when are you going to leave the nest, when are you going to take flight, you have to be independent and do these things by yourself". It's like how am I suppose to swim all of a sudden in the deep end when you only taught me to float at the shore? How are you going to hold my hand while crossing a calm street then push me randomly into incoming traffic? This is so infuriatingly frustrating because I don't know what I am. Am I an adult or a teenager? I feel like I'm being forced to grow at the pace set by a societal standard and not by my own pace. I like to take things step by step gradually till I am comfortable. I don't like being hurled into the great deep when that's not what I am used to. 

    The worst part is when you are responsible and you carry yourself like an adult you are not treated as such. Everyone views you as a kid and treats you as such. Then when you act your age, when you act young and more like a teen you get compared to others your age our to your family when they were your age. "When I was your age I was getting married and I owned a business", "When I was your age I moved out and was living on my own", "When I was your age I was much more responsible". You oftentimes feel you are in this weird limbo of being both too mature and too immature. Too young for some things and then too old for other things. It feels like an age of identity crisis. Your peers can be the same way they can expect you to act young and goof around one day then the next some of them are planning their next big life step and you're watching cartoons confused about your own life step. You're almost done with college and that's when you start second-guessing your career choice. You're trying to find a job and get hit with the hard-cold reality that it is very difficult to obtain a job especially if you didn't work a lot of jobs previously in high school. Good luck finding a job with little to no experience even though you need a job to get experience. 

    It's easy to compare yourself to your peers because other people already compare you. You don't know your pace in life. Am I walking or running? Because it all feels like a race and you don't even know why you're even in it, you just know you don't want to lose. Because failure...failure is the worst thing to a young adulteen. It feels like your world will come crumbling down. You feel like you're not good enough or that you bring shame to your family if you made mistakes or you didn't get a job or changed your major for the fifth time because you don't know what to do in life. You feel stupid and worthless and when all people do is compare you it feels like they think you're stupid and worthless too.

     

It's like a weird tango of you not knowing anything about yourself or your life. 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19 ?? are 7 years where you have to decide what you do for the other 70 plus years of your life. I don't know about you but at 13 I was super innocent and I didn't know a lot about the world and I still watched Nick and Disney junior I will admit (The songs were catchy... fight me) and that was only what? 6 years ago. That's not a lot of time but the difference between those ages is crazy it is like you're been catapulted from one extreme to the next. I am writing this blog because I know I am not the only one who feels this way and I want to use my posts to write about things that affect young people that aren't talked about often because most older people seem to up and forget their youth and don't seem to understand us. I want to create a space where people can feel understood. I have felt misunderstood my whole life by family, my peers, and my friends and I want to create a community where misunderstood people can rally and feel heard and seen and less lonely about the things they go through. So that's it for this episode of Girl Rants Online. I'll see you in the next one because I do have a lot of things to rant about! See ya!