love and the teenage years
written by Alex Osborne
EDITED BY MARGARET LICUP
Love can be a strong word, love can be a scary word, but to me love resembles something different. I find myself often expressing love in different ways, sometimes overenthusiastically, sometimes quite subtly but all in all it’s something that has always been present.
When referring to overenthusiastic love I mean the kind that you have for a particular band or singer. The kind that makes you want to jump up, out of your seat and dance and sing your heart out, not caring who is watching. Some may see this as being weird or too positive for the environment they are in but that’s on them. If this feeling of love and joy makes you feel a certain way, who should give a fig about anything or anyone else at that moment.
Subtle love would be the love you have for your friends at school. You might not fully express or acknowledge it this way due to the embarrassment it may cause but it’s there. The people who hold you up and never let you fall—even the smaller moments of love just from someone purely checking in. All of these forms of love are important, even if you don’t notice them.
It remains unsaid that with love, comes pain. Losing love, whether physically or emotionally, can and always will be a downer. It might feel like the world may end. It might feel like after losing this person or thing, nothing in your life will ever be quite the same or ever as joyful as it once was before. But these thoughts, like all things, shall slowly fade as the true beauty of love slowly seeps back in and the difficult, tedious process of moving on begins to bloom.
As teenagers, love can often seem like a game, a competition or a race. I know we’ve seen those high school movies and thought that ‘that will never be me’ but quite often we are proved wrong. I remember last year looking around at my friends who had some form of close relationships with one another and feeling the pressure almost overwhelm me. I wasn’t sure what I was missing, yet I still found myself wondering if I was the problem. In my older years, I see that I was suffering from the urge to be something I wasn’t. This urge to fit in the trope I had seen and been taught to forget growing up had suddenly hit me. A problem that I thought I was above had come and hit me in the face.
Woah, we got a bit negative-nelly up there, but these things are important to consider upon looking at the general aspect of high school. It often feels like a place where we need to get EVERYTHING in our lives DONE. IMMEDIATELY. NOW. In reality, however, heck we’ve got ages.
Remember in primary school when we felt as if that one fight with our friend was the ultimate and imminent end of the world, that we would remember it forever and ever? Maybe? Sort of? No? Exactly! That’s what all the teachers back there meant when they said ‘there’s life after primary school’. We might not have believed it at the time, but now look where we are!
In my experience, whenever you feel on top of the wave of life and your teenage years, you seemingly always fall back under again. And you know what? That’s 100% ok! No one is expecting you to be perfect. No one is expecting an 18-year-old’s mind in a 15-year-old’s body so there is no need to give it to them!
My advice, being a semi-old person, is to take things one step at a time. Now, that sounds like I’m giving you love advice but this goes towards anyone wanting to grow up quickly. Take it at your own pace. You’ll be fine and you, my dear friend, have huge things ahead of you.
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