BABYGIRL!

We’ve all heard it before: “Enjoy it while it lasts. These are the best years of your life.”

If that’s true, why do so many teenage girls feel overwhelmed and constantly like they’re falling behind? For some reason, we’ve romanticized adolescence into this picture-perfect era of football games, late-night drives, and carefree summers. Movies have done a good enough job trying to tell us that high school is where life’s biggest moments happen. Adults reminisce about “the good old days” as if everything afterward is a decline into an exhausting worklife. But that’s not reality for a lot of girls.

Being a teenager forces you to live through one of the most emotionally unstable periods of your life. Teenagers experience an expectation to decide what career you want before you’ve even discovered who you are, plus balancing college applications, friendship dynamics, extracurriculars, and a social life all while your identity is changing.

Somehow, you’re also supposed to enjoy every second because everyone keeps telling you these years won’t come back. On social media, you see that one day someone’s on a boat, the next day at the beach with twenty friends, and someone else’s boyfriend just surprised her with flowers. It’s easy to look at your own life and wonder whether you’re missing something.

The truth is, you’re not missing anything. Your teenage years aren’t meant to be perfect because this is the decade where you make mistakes and become the person you’ll grow through the rest of your life with.

Some girls genuinely love high school, and that’s wonderful. Others count down the days until graduation and neither experience is more valid than the other. The best parts of life often happen when you finally have the freedom to build it yourself instead of living according to someone else’s schedule. Maybe your teenage years will be unforgettable, and maybe they’ll simply be the chapter that prepared you for everything that comes next. Either way, stop worrying that you’re wasting “the best years of your life” – they probably haven’t happened yet.