By Ginny Dinh
Round Table reporter

No one can really understand the complexity of the teenage mind.  Some think that we don’t care about anything, or that we care about the useless things in life. Teenagers face more then anyone gives us credit for.

Parents try to keep us locked up so that we can’t see what this world actually holds in store for us. They think that they are stopping us from making the same mistakes they have made. They want us to learn the way of the world without experiencing it for ourselves.

But do they truly see the things that we have to overcome? Yes, adults may have “done it all,” but children can’t learn from their parents’ mistakes. They have to learn through their own faults and failures in life, and even from their own success.

We may not have had to go through the things that our loved ones have gone through, but they still hurt us.

We watch our best friend have to choose between their mother and their father. We watch our friends suffer through the mourning of losing a loved one. We hear our friends share their stories of being raped or abused by someone they believed they could trust.

Terrible things are happening around us and, even though we aren’t physically going through it ourselves, we still have to sit on the sidelines while we watch our friends go through these trials in life.

The things in this world are inevitable. Our parents may try to keep us locked up in a bubble that they believe is protecting us, but we find our ways to escape and experience the world through our own eyes. And we put ourselves through our own pain, not through the exact things that our parents have been through.

Everyone’s experiences are different, they may be the same situation but the same things won’t affect us.

We can’t learn from the pain and the experiences of our mothers or fathers, because all those experiences, all those friends, all that pain, they all take a piece of us that we can never get back, and only the ones who are at loss can feel the empty void of that missing piece.

The truth is a lot of us teenagers strive to experience these things the way that we want; it’s in our blood to be rebellious and do the things in which we are told not to do.

Some of us would prefer to stay home and read a book while others would rather go out and party with our friends, all the while knowing that something terrible is going to happen. Some of us put our whole life and existence in the hands of God, while others believe He is the fault of our transgressions.

In the end, we all become who we set ourselves up to be. All of our actions and our choices decide who we will become.

We write our own future, the beginning and the end, and we choose all the pain that we have to go through. We set the course to our lives and we choose who we become.

So, no matter how our parents want to raise us, or how we want to grow, we choose where we end up in life. Our choices, our experiences, our pain: it defines us as to whom we are to become.