So there are countless ways that I think adults are wrongfully condescending to children, teenagers, and young adults. For example, that one thing you're really passionate and excited about in life right now could just be a phase and you'll move on from it eventually. However, there's this one thing that has been said to me by adults in my past that I find especially unwarranted and misguided, and that was... "What do you have to be so stressed about? You're just a little kid. What in your life can possible feel so real and so important at this young age of yours that you feel stressed, trapped, and worried? Yet, you still have genuine feelings." I just find this notion completely void of empathy or compassion of any kind, and I find it absurd to think that an older person who say that to a younger person. Why? Because of what separates those two people, and I'm going to try to break it down.

Think about your life and your age as a video game. You start pretty much almost every video game with no knowledge about it. You have no skills nor objectives, but as you progress through the video game you begin to learn and understand new things. As you learn new things, the game becomes harder and the objectives become more difficult, but all the same, the easier levels remain as easy as they were when you first played them. Also, to revisit these older levels nowadays would be extremely easy because you have a much more vast library of knowledge to approach problems with and you have something to compare them to. The levels you once found so difficult now look and seem so much easier in comparison to your difficult and demanding ones.

Overall, you have harder things to compare easier problems to, and that's where I feel a lot of adults lose sight of their empathy and understanding for young people. It's wrong to put somebody down for something they find difficult or stressful just because it isn't to you. It doesn't make it any less real, difficult, or terrifying to that person, and I always just find it so hurtful and patronizing to be treated so dismissively by someone I looked up to.

Of course, in some way, they were right. The stress I felt studying towards Reading and Language Arts in elementary school and middle school came no where near the amount of stress that I still feel every now and then, trying to complete college work while preparing for auditions outside of college all at the same time. However, the stress and anxiety at them time felt equally real in both cases.

I may be wrong, but I think when an adult says, "What do you have to be stressed about", they're looking at your life, in that moment, with a sense of envy wishing that they have those problems to worry about instead of the ones they have to worry about. Ones that feel very real, yet they just forget that yours feel very real to you too.