A few things you should know when you speak to a young adult, adolescent, or teenager:
1. We are capable of understanding more than we are given credit for.
2.. We are under more stress than is actually given credit for.
3. We work harder than given credit for.
4. We have more of a voice than is ever listened for.
By me stating these, I would like to go ahead and knock out the already well thought out and repeated retorts to these statements. No, I do not want your pity or shoulder to cry on. No, I do not want you to redirect me in a conversation on how easy we have it and how hard your life is as an adult. No, I do not want praise or a pat on the back for every thing I do because that is not the reason I do it. No, I am not whining about my responsibilities because I know that they are mine and I need to be able to eat as much as I put on my plate. Lastly, NO, I am not speaking for every person of youth in these upcoming generations, the same way that you cannot speak for every adult in other generations.
Out of those four statements, there are two things that I would like to make an impact on your minds: the fourth statement and the fact that three out of four of those statements end with "given credit for." Now, lets start with the whole credit thing. Giving someone 'credit' for something versus giving them 'praise' and 'excessive recognition' are different from one another. When you give a person the credit they deserve, it leads to a sense of fulfillment, and that feeling is something we all search for in our lives. When you simply hand someone a cookie and tell them "good job!", you are giving them an ego boost, so if that's what you call credit, thanks, but no thanks.
To address the fourth statement about our voices, we do have some thoughts that may be worth your time, if a little of it was taken to stop and listen.
The thing about chances is, we all take them. The thing about risks? They present themselves to everyone of every age. Failure will occur in anybody's life. What's the one thing we have that allows us to believe that? The voice of people's stories, testimonies, and experiences. Heck, we even sometimes have to listen to voices from our own past stories, testimonies, and experiences for us to know that failure is not unusual.
So, why not listen to our voices?
We try over and over again to be accredited for our talents and attributes that everyone seems to believe we lack, yet we are ignored. We are a generation of thinkers, people who propel things into action, we are ambitious, and unfortunately, ambition is not always put towards running a business and sliding out of high school with a 4.0 GPA. Some ambition is put towards running the streets and being king pin, or being the winner in that Madden game. What gives one fulfillment may seem like failure to another.
Speaking from my generation to another, we must understand that times have changed. The stakes for getting into college are much higher, yet the degree we graduate with means so much less. The entry level jobs meant to support fresh-out-of-college-walking-into-life-young-adults turn into unpaid internships, and then, criticism for not being able to pay our bills leads up to messed up credit leading up to decline loans and no houses or cars and being unproductive members to society. There is a higher rate of depression and anxiety in the generation than any other, and have you every stopped to think why? We are defined by our emotions of fulfillment and only seen through the eyes of our amount of failure. Yet when we try to reach out, our voices are nothing but Charlie Brown teacher babble lost in the universe. Words spoken that never reach ears and float through the air aimlessly. We are lazy, we want things handed to us, and we will ruin the future of the world? Well, (not to burst your bubble but) the world's already ruined, Americans as a whole as lazy, and how can we want something handed to us when no one has ever reached out for us to know what that even means?
