An Honest Thought on Growing Up

By: Grace S., Grade 11

Do you ever have times where you don’t feel your age? I don’t know about you, but the last time I truly felt my age was when I was 14. After that, it felt like time just kind of stopped, and I’ve been living in an extended moment where I make new memories, but I’m still the same person.

When I turned 15, I didn’t feel 15. Recently, I turned 16, and I can hardly believe it. I’m getting older. I see more and more people who are younger than me on my school campus, the fall class of 2029 freshmen who have been flowing in (if you’re one of them, hey!). I’m a junior now, so I’ve officially joined the upperclassmen.

When I was a freshman, my older brother was in the same place I’m in right now. Now he’s graduated high school, and is off to college in Illinois. We really are growing up. I’m sure each and every one of you can feel it, no matter what age you are. 

Here’s a little story about age. I used to have online friends and be particularly active on Discord. If you know, you’ll know, but there were age roles in every server, and I would select the 13-15 year old age group each time, as an underage user (I was 11!). I always lied to people online about my age so I wouldn’t get reported, and I would hate being so young, because everyone was older than me. 

The perfect age to me was 14. Because that’s a year older than the Discord minimum age requirement, so no one can report you. And it’s right smack in the middle of the teen years, so you can relate to anyone from ages 13-18 while not being too young or too old for anyone. But 14 passed by me. Now I would fit in the 16-18 year old age group, and would be considered an older teen. In two years, I won’t even be a minor anymore. My peers are driving now. That’s when I know I’ve really grown up. 

But finally being 16 hits hard for another reason too. A deeper one. A tragic one, in fact, but I want to tell the truth as it is. 16 was the age a fellow student at my high school was, almost two years ago, when they died by suicide. I was 14 then, only a freshman in high school, and maybe that’s why I feel like I’m still mentally stuck in that age, because it affected me deeply.

If you were there to witness it in high school, or you heard about it back then, you know the loss profoundly affected the whole Palo Alto community. Though I wasn’t directly affected, I can say that it was traumatic to witness as a fellow student, at such a young age. It left a lasting impact on me, one that translated to falling grades and deteriorating mental health in my sophomore year.

I’m slowly getting back up. But I’ll never forget the loss, and I’ll always acknowledge it as a part of my teen years. Now that I’ve reached 16, it feels as if I’m experiencing the world through that lens; the lens through which my older brother lived, and the lens through which that past student unfortunately struggled. I now know what it’s like to be at this age, to go to this school, and to fight difficult, often invisible battles of my own.

I know as teens, our collective mental health isn’t great; the Palo Alto teen suicides in the recent years prove this. It's not just one or two people who are struggling, but many of us, every day. We’re all fighting internal, invisible battles of our own that nobody knows anything about, not even the adults around us, not even our peers. We suffer in silence until the day we finally break, and that’s when we didn’t get the help we needed; it was too late.

I won’t exaggerate. It kills a part of me to see my peers dying around me, when I still have a life I have to live, and a future I’m expected to work toward. It’s near impossible to have any motivation or hope for the future, when you’re constantly reminded of how bleak the living circumstances are for some of us. Some of us are battling things nobody our age should have to, or at any age for that matter.

It’s hard to be a youth in this time and age, especially with how uncertain the future is. It’s hard to be Gen Z, hard to be Gen Alpha, hard to be any generation of youth. We’re the ones who have to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders. 

These things are going to keep happening for as long as we're growing up in Palo Alto. And not just Palo Alto, but anywhere, really. This is the reality of our world, and it’s concerning. But we can’t keep it hidden forever. We have to acknowledge it at some point. Let’s acknowledge that this too, is a part of growing up. 

And most importantly, know you’re not alone, but for real this time. The stories around you, though tragic, show you that you’re not the only one who’s been struggling all this time. And there is so much to be learned from them.