My Goals as a Writer: Junior Year, Fourth Quarter

At the beginning of the school year, my main goal was to create a blog with a unique perspective and a common purpose: to express the life of teenagers through the eyes of a teenager. During these past months, I have realized that I was completely right in assuming that a plethora of interesting ideas comes with writing about adolescents. However, while I am more convinced than ever that our age group is among the most interesting, I have realized that a lot of the problems facing today’s youth also blend with the problems of the adults in our culture.

I have covered eating disorders, financial struggles, and social and academic pressures. And through this, I have uncovered the secret to end all teenage myths: we may be less subtle in dealing with it, we may be in the spotlight solely because of our dependency to our parents, but adults and teenagers are not different creatures. This is how I want to improve my writing skills during the fourth quarter of my Junior year: I want to work on my specefics. I want to delve deep, discover the seedy underbelly that truly is today’s teenager’s, and find topics that aren’t only dramatic and shocking, but also truly, one-hundred percent teenager.

I am not going to claim that my blog helps adults understand teenagers (if anything, I’m sure it blurs their understanding a bit) or that teenagers can find help through my words, but the purpose of my writing is to expose different people to all sides of teenagers. I wanted to put it out there that teenagers are not just living simple lives, getting weekly allowances and doing nothing but coasting through their adolescence. Some teenagers actually have legitimate problems, and I hope that even if only one person ever reads my blog, that one person feels validated in some way, like their personal problems are recognized, even through a generalized statement.

I think that by blogging about next year’s choosing of our course schedules and all the anxiety that is associated with those five or six simple decisions, I can actually meet my goal of writing more selectively about teenager’s experiences. Alameda High is seriously absorbed in having to decide class schedules: Juniors are deciding whether to take five or six classes next year; underclassmen are facing the hard fact that they may have to repeat that dreaded math class they slept through all year; people are chewing their nails to the bone over the hard fact that that class they so desperately crave a spot in may be full by the time their names are considered. This last quarter, my classmates and I are coming to terms with the fact that blogging and the freedom that comes with our online posts is coming to an end, and long, monotonous novels written by decrepid authors of the past are in our future. I want to take advantage of this freedom; I want to improve my writing by writing about what us Juniors are truly thinking: what is going to happen once Alameda High leaves us with nothing but a diploma, four years of unflattering yearbook pictures, and memories we will have with us for a lifetime?