What is being young like? Sometimes, I get the feeling that everyone wants to be a teenager (again), only teenagers hate being teenagers. It’s confusing. It’s suffocating. Being a teenager means figuring out how to grow up, dealing with being powerless and trying to understand who you are.
We shouldn’t be this kind of tired at our age.
School is teaching you to memorize pages of a book, spill out the information on a piece of paper, and starting the same task anew with a different topic. How exactly are we supposed to become smarter if we’re simply littering our brain with information, just to throw it all out after the class test? The only thing I remember from biology class is that the mitochondria is the power house of the cell.
And while the academic pressure grows, I’m glad to acknowledge that Gen Z, our generation, doesn’t try to put people under one stereotype. Instead, we’re seeing beyond a person’s outer looks. After all, we all had a hard time realizing that people can’t be confined in just one aspect.
Young people these days are not given a voice, so they are making space to be heard. They don’t let themselves give in, they stand up for each other. Yet, we are considered as disrespectful and rude, labelled as unable to understand a joke. It’s actually kind of ridiculous since Gen Z spends most of their time making internet memes to express themselves, doing finger guns and verbally fighting sexists and racists.
If anyone wants to know what being young is like, just check out the memes we comment with “Same” or “Big Mood”. We aren’t irrational and immature as most adults seem to think – We literally had to educate ourselves about gender identity, sexuality or feminism since nothing of that is being properly taught in school.
Sometimes I even feel like adults teach you to stand up for yourself as long as your opinion doesn’t differ from their own. The only thing most of us want is a life without stressing about school and without being judged by other people.
Take Snaps of your coffee and put them in your story. Make TikToks in the subway and watch vines with friends. This is our generation and its uniqueness. We all have a little bit of “I want to save the world” in us, and it’s okay if you only save one person, especially if that person is yourself. That's what I want to change about the world.
Until we are given a voice, even if your hands are shaking, even if you’re scared and frightened, remember what Kim Namjoon said: Just speak yourself.
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