Read This to the Teenagers
Someone Needs to tell them.
When I was in high school, adults would always comment on what it means to be young. They always had some type of input about what life is supposed to be or what it could be. Usually, they’d say it with an attitude like a judgmental assumption about how young people think and reason. They’d say things like, “If I had only known then what I know now…” and, “I was such an idiot back then!”
Then, when I asked questions or tried to understand, they’d say something like, “Oh, you’ve got time.. you’ll figure it out.” As if they had no intention of helping me find the way through the things they so quickly pointed out.
I am on the other side of that now, and I get to be the adult commenting on what I think it means to be young when I see that youth in another person. However, I have something different to say, and I wish I could say it to every high schooler on the face of the earth and say it in a way that they could really understand it as a fact they could trust.
Of all the parts of life there are to understand, I wish I had understood that it wasn’t a lie when they said I could be anything. When someone told me I could do anything and go anywhere, I wished I had realized that it wasn’t just one of those cute things, like what we say to little children at bedtime. I wish I had known it wasn’t just b.s. when someone said, “You determine your capabilities.”
Income — Location — Gender — Age — Race — these things all play a role, but no challenge is insurmountable. As long as you are making the best decisions you can, and bringing all the goodness you have inside, there seriously is not anything that will stop you.
