To be a teenager can be very difficult, but to be a teenage girl is a whole other challenge on its own. We are trying to find ourselves but we are impacted by just about everything we see.

A big thing I think that impacts every teenage girl is body image. For me, I know I am not overweight by any means, but whenever I see friends or other women in magazines that have flat stomachs and toned legs, it makes me feel upset because I wonder why that is not me. Then people will talk about how I just have to go to the gym and eat healthy but the reality is I do not have time make sure I do every little thing perfectly to get the toned stomach I want. Of course I feel some jealousy towards these people too do not get me wrong, but it is more sadness because I feel that in order to impress someone I have to have the body of a model. For other girls maybe they want to impress some guy but they feel their body image will dictate how this guy perceives them. Then there are those guys who say it does not matter but in reality it does, whether or not they want to admit it.

In movies they say high school is supposed to be the best four years of your life, when for some it is the worst four years we will ever experience. Everyone says to be yourself but how are we supposed to be ourselves when we worry about how others will view us. Words like weird, ugly, and boring are just words until those are the words people use to describe you. We worry about who we will have as friends and if it will be just one person or if we will have a group, and if we have a group of friends we wonder how we actually fit. We wonder if the group would be just fine without us.

We also worry about relationships more than we should. We will see happy couples at school and granted we know that they may not last, but we know some will. Whether or not we want to admit it, we envy the love these couples have. One of my best friends sister has a boyfriend in the military and they have been together since high school and I just hope I am as happy as they both are in the future. We also tend to think more in the future than we do in the present so no matter how many times we try not to we end up getting our hopes up to be let down.

We live in a world full of so much hatred that it is disgusting. Why do people feel the need to call girls "sluts" or "bitches". Name calling should not give someone entitlement over another yet somehow it does. Every time we put someone down they are going to question everything about themselves. We need to learn how to save the drama and let people be who they want to be. Let them dress how they want to dress, and if you do not like it oh well, because it is their life not yours.

The silent nights girls spend questioning everything and crying themselves to sleep can be tiring, and sometimes all we hope for is someone to help us. Because the reality is, being a teenage girl is not that easy.