Life is hard, especially for you. Being a teenager is hard because people think you're naive, weak, and oblivious. That's the truth. But here's what I want you to know, teenager to teenager. You can make it. You don't have to be a feminist to fight for equality. You don't have to have a strong platform to stand for what you believe in. You don't have to listen to what your parents believe to make up your mind on where you stand in society. Change starts with you and I refuse to believe and accept that young people can't be apart of the change in the world.
I've always felt that since I had to work so hard for things, others didn't get a pass just because they didn't know how to do it. That wasn't fair of me to treat others like that and I grew out of it, eventually. I blame my actions on tough love; I saw the world from a spectrum that wasn't truthful and it made me resent a lot of people because I saw them as lazy. Tough love made me feel that I couldn't be weak in any aspect of my life and if I showed an ounce of weakness, then I would fail, so failure became my biggest fear; it was my only fear for a while.
I was scared to fail because I didn't want to upset my family, but at the end of the day, my mom would come into my room and tell me that I was beautiful in the recital, I played a good game, or she was happy that I made it as far as I did in the spelling bee. My mom is the strongest person that I know and now that I'm older, I see what she means when she tells me things, whether I listen to her or not. I understand my mom and I'm blessed that I have her to tell me things that nobody else will.
Ask yourself, do you have someone who will be brutally honest with you no matter what? That person can be your best friend, your cousins, your aunts and uncles, your brothers and sisters, mom and dad, grandparents; it can even be your teachers and faculty at school.
Germany Kent offered this advice to her younger self, "Start where you are with what you have. Try not to hurt other people. Take more chances. If you fail, keep trying."
Take that and run with it. People may be living longer, so making change happen is getting harder, but we can do it. I know we can.
