About the Young Writers Project
YWP, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, Vermont, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power and to gain confidence and skills for the workplace and life. YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: Be respectful. For more information, please contact YWP executive director Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org.
Ava Kendrick, a junior at Harwood Union High School in Duxbury, writes about what it’s like to be a teenager – “trapped in the in-between,” between childhood and adulthood.
The Teen
By Ava Kendrick
[P]eople write novels on the enigma that is the teen.
They cannot figure out how these people trapped in the in-between
can exist and function.
Hey, neither can we.
These people analyze teens for all the wrong reasons:
they look at how video games affect our brains
but forget to calculate the amount of hours spent on homework.
I have not played a video game in years
and yet there is still something caught in my brain that I can’t shake loose.
Can you diagnose that?
They say we’re moody because we don’t get enough exercise,
and while it might factor in,
they really should focus on how we’re in the midst of a sort of identity crisis,
just learning of the lies we were told when we were young:
our ancestors slaughtered the Native Americans by the millions;
the Holocaust is not the only genocide that happened in the last 80 years;
abolishing slavery was not the real reason the Civil War started;
our country is founded not on the greatness of explorers,
but on the bones of those they deemed unworthy.
They say we need eight hours sleep every night
yet start school early enough so that we get up at six,
give us enough homework so that we’re awake until twelve
give us enough stress so it takes another two hours to fall asleep
and then they wonder why we’re always so tired.
Usually, they just blame it on technology,
forgetting how their parents hated them watching so much TV,
forgetting how the previous generation has a hard time understanding
the innovations of the current.
People poke and prod and analyze,
forgetting that we are not simple lab rats,
but are still as smart and self-aware as they,
just too drugged-up under the lies they feed us to fight back.
