PEOPLE ROMANTICISE THEIR teenage years.
Everyone always pines for their younger lives, indulging in nostalgia, reliving the good old days. Oh, those halcyon days, when the music was better, and we didn’t even know how good we had it with our waistlines.
Well, newsflash, chumps. They WEREN’T the best years of your life. Here’s why.
1. Everything is embarrassing
Your Dad embarrasses you in front of your friends. You Mam embarrasses you in front of your extended family. Your siblings embarrass you in front of anyone they can get their hands on.
2. No, really… EVERYTHING is embarrassing
Remember putting your hand up in school and your voice breaking? Or calling your teacher “Mam”? Or going into the wrong classroom by accident? Or getting hit in the noggin with the ball during PE? School as a teenager was a minefield of potential embarrassment, just waiting to explode in your acne-troubled face.
3. The anxiety of the shift
Courtship rituals as a teenager were fraught with nothing short of electrifying panic. Were you doing this right? Did they really like you? OH GOD, ARE YOU SWEATING TOO MUCH?
4. Your changing body meets changing rooms
It’s a cruel irony in life that at the time when your body is undergoing the most changes is also the time during which you’re forced most to change clothes in communal surroundings.
5. Parental controls
Sure, you were finding your feet in many respects in life, but your parents still paid the bills and called the shots. That meant arguments a-plenty, and a decent helping of shouting “It’s not fair!” before running upstairs, slamming your bedroom door and crying to the Smiths.
6. School woes
So, society decided that a time in which you can’t do anything without blushing, your hormones are raging, your life is run by your parents – that THIS is the time in which it is appropriate to sit an exam that is sold to you like the be-all and end-all of the whole world. Yep.
Hello, Leaving Cert. Glad we never have to think about YOU again.
7. The all-consuming desire to be cool
One the most pressing concerns that utterly consumes most teenagers is the omnipresent necessity of appearing cool to peers. Of course, you regularly failed at this task, which led to…
8. ANGST
Ah yes. Who can forget the tumultuous emotions we’re catapulted through as teenagers?
9. Turning the intensity up to 11
Everything is intensified through the magnifying glass of one’s teenage years. For example, you don’t just LIKE a band as a teenager. You forge an undying bond of allegiance for their every movement. You don’t just have a crush on that guy from down the road, you’re already planning the wedding.
10. Young folks these days
Imagine you were a teenager in these highly troubling times. You’d probably have a vlog. IMAGINE HOW EMBARRASSING A TEENAGE VLOG OF YOURS WOULD BE.
11. Hormones.
Coupled with the acute boredom often experienced during your teenage years? Nightmare waiting to happen.
Would you be a teenager again? And if not, why not? Let us know in the comments. We can get through this – together.
