You can't possibly know what you're talking about, you're only 18. You can't know what you want. Just wait until you grow up and have to live in the real world. Then I'll value your opinion.
These are words I've heard countless times, in countless forms. They all boil down to mean the same thing- that just because I'm a college student with no husband or kids, I can't possibly know what I'm talking about. I have to go out into the world and work and live and become an "adult" before other adults will listen to what I have to say. Until then, well, my opinion doesn't seem to matter.
I've heard these words since I was a kid, a little girl. Trying to explain good ideas and being pushed into the corner, trying to say what I wanted when I grew up or how I planned to get there and having adults laugh, telling me I'm crazy. I would explain my dreams and goals and be told they were absurd.
And the funniest part is, almost all of the things I said I would do, I have. And yet, my opinion- my words, my thoughts- still aren't considered valid. I'm a legal adult, living in a big city, studying at college, writing and working for multiple publications, and yet when I share my opinion I still feel like that little girl again, being told to shut her mouth and wait until she was grown up. I certainly feel grown up- so why do I still feel this way?
I witnessed it all over again in the wake of Donald Trump's election, in which many of my friends and peers expressed their feelings of worry and disappointment online, only to be told by their older relatives that they refused to value, or even accept, their opinions because they were young, and therefore they couldn't possibly know what they were talking about. Because we don't have full-time jobs, or kids, or marriages, we can't have any feelings worth listening to.
I find this incredibly sad. I understand that these things are difficult and part of growing up, but what about them makes your opinion any stronger than mine? In terms of politics, I'm legally old enough to vote, and it seems absurd that so many adults would decide my opinion won't matter for another twenty years. It matters right now. It's valid. Me being young only gives me a different perspective; it doesn't make me wrong. Just like you being older doesn't make you better than my generation, or any more worth listening to. All our voices matter. You're missing valuable perspective by automatically discounting my opinion, solely on the basis that I'm 18 and a college student.
I'm not going to keep my feelings to myself, and I'm not going to let myself be told my voice isn't worth listening to because I'm young. But the point is that I shouldn't have to. I shouldn't need kids and twenty years of work experience as a qualification for having something to say.
I know how I feel, and, though I don't think that will change in the next few years, it could. But that won't make my opinion then any more worth listening to than my opinion now.
