By Anantinee ‘JHUMPA’ Mishra

Speaking from a personal and ongoing experience, being a teenager is hard. It’s not like that manual-labor-and-muscle-pain-and-spasm kind of hard, but that I-am-going-through-heavy-turmoil-on-the-inside kind of hard. Everybody talks about the hormonal urges and the physical changes in our body, whether in those special social awareness programmes or in a chapter in our Biology book. But, I think that the best person to describe that is you, yourself. Only you hold that ability to say what is going on inside you, because it is different for everybody. There those lucky ones, who feel as though nothing has changed, and everything is just the way it should be or just the way it was, but there those people also, who feel as though yesterday they were something else, today they are something else and tomorrow they would be something else. There are these mood swings, like one moment you are insanely happy and on top of the world, and the next moment you are so-so angry and furious and livid that you just want to throw and break something and just the next second you want to cry so hard that there are no tears left to shed.

We want to have tons of me-time, we want to just be left alone, we hate it when somebody tells us what to do and what not to do, we hate those sickly sweet smiles directed at us on times, because they seemed to be dripping of sympathy.

We like a thing today and want to throw up at the sight of it tomorrow; we hate something today and want to try it out tomorrow to prove that we don’t hate it.

We want to do things opposite of what we should do, opposite of what we are told to do, just to show that we don’t care what anybody thinks of us and that we are the masters of the goddamn universe.

We are rude, and selfish, and indifferent, and bold, any angry all the time because it seems like the world is fraud and unfair and that life is just one big ploy against us.

But is gets tiring, you know?

After a time, being angry all the time and keeping that grimace on your face for so long that it feels as though it has been pasted there with permanent glue, gets exhausting, and suddenly you can’t do it anymore. You try to revert back to normal, the way you were before this ‘mess’, or try out for a whole new personality, a whole new persona and even though it could have had happened on a regular Tuesday or Friday, if feels like an eternity has passed and it is a whole new beginning for you.

And just like that, it passes. After a whole lot of complexities, it just goes away, as simple as that. Like you wake up one morning, and you fell different.

Pretty anticlimactic, huh?

Often, there are times where we want to say something, anything, but we don’t. Maybe, it is a pride or vanity or ego thing, but the point of the matter is we don’t. And boy, do we end up regretting it.

There are times we say something we don’t want to, and take it back the second we said, and didn’t mean it at hall, but we don’t say any of these things.

The damage is done, right? You can’t reverse it.

We are prideful, too prideful to admit that we are wrong, and just shrug it off and saunter into are room, as if we don’t care, because pretending is so much easier.

But in reality, it is so much harder.

It is like an identity crisis, at times. We don’t know where we belong, we are neither adults nor children and we sort of stuck in the middle. And we try to try out every single emotion existing out there, to see which one is ours.

It is like a whirlwind of feelings and colors, and you don’t know what to feel at all, but, all you know that is adolescence.

Your coming-of-age.

My finishing will be the same as my starting.

Yes, being a teenager is hard.

About the Author:

Anantinee ‘JHUMPA’ Mishra is a prodigy author, poet and TED speaker. She is twelve years old studying in std.8th at Apeejay School, Saket, New Delhi.  She has published two books and many stories and articles in magazines and journals. At the age of ten, she published a 21,000 worded anthology of stories called ‘Treasure of Short Stories’. Last year her debut Novel ‘Manhattan to Munnar’ got released. Recently she has been conferred with a title ‘PRODIGY AUTHOR’ and an ‘HONORARY DIPLOMA’ by the Hon’ble Vice President of  India Sh. M Venkaiah Naidu.