By Caroline Keller, Year 11
A cool still sea. A windy ocean. That is the difference between childhood and adolescence.
Childhood is happy, innocent and peaceful, yet naive in so many ways. Imagine if we could package our childhood in one big memory that we could always go back to. What would that include? Happy days with a happy family, picnics, running around in the sun, or a lot of fun friends?
No. That is only one part of it.
What we never knew back then was that we would grow up to learn lies, that not everything was happy. Taxes got involved. For some of us, families were destroyed and torn apart. We learned things that sometimes we’d rather wished we hadn’t.
Childhood is happy for everyone, is until we start looking into it. For some of us, it was the start of most of our problems and insecurities. For others, it’s plainly what we wish to forget. In a way, we could call it the calm before the storm.
Adolescence is a time where we truly lose and find ourselves so many times, that by the end of it, we forget what it’s about. It’s a confusing time, where we lose ourselves in insecurities and doubts. Most of the time, if we’re lucky, we find ourselves by the end of it. It’s a time when we learn the deeper meaning of things in life such as schooling, family, and life in general. It’s a time when we have to fight the waves of life, the ups and downs, the cool and the warm, the sicknesses and the adventures. Sometimes we fall and get back up, and some days we’re just too tired and we stay down for a while. That is when mistakes happen. It’s in these moments that people become messes, when people die and become addicts. That’s when people’s lives end.
I feel like most people just look over these two important times of our lives. They dismiss it by saying, “Oh, they’re too young to be really affected or to understand,” or “Oh, it’s just hormones and emotions.” But those people don’t get how much it really does affect us. Because it does. It’s the start of our lives. It’s the start of our happiness and our sadness. It’s the start of everything that’s good and bad in our lives. Most of the things we enjoy later on come from what we liked when we were younger. The same is true for what we don’t like.
People overlook us and what we think, but they shouldn’t because they don’t know how much it affects us, and they don’t think about how we’re the future.
