It’s okay not to be okay

Nowadays, teens’ mental health keeps being underestimated by society, without realizing that adolescence isn’t that easy to face.

In our adolescent years we start to experience a brand-new way to live our lives. We start to realize what we like; who we like; our attitude starts to change drastically; our insecurities have a proportional growth to our failures and not knowing what’s coming next leads people to serious life crises.

Why is it underrated? Society thinks that being young means having a ton of chances, being happy and energetic all the time and, most of all, not having problems at all, but is that true? Belittling problems and situations never helped anybody and even schools play a huge role in all this, ignoring the signals that teens are sending unintentionally and maybe even making the situation way worse.

What can we do? Being there for those who actually need us is fair enough. We live in a world with many facets, in the last 20 years we have witnessed a more increasing variety of being “human beings”; society is opening more and more even towards the LGBTQ+ community and foreigners, but this is just the beginning. In a world that revolves around how our Instagram account is in other people’s eyes we often forget about real problems. Suicides, bullying, discrimination, these are real things, things that happen every day, every second of our life, and many people out there start to think that maybe the only way to find peace is to do something which is irreversible.

Crying is for the weak! That’s the funniest lie I was telling myself back then. Crying helps you to release everything you feel inside, it may not have helped people in human history to conquer nations, but we need to focus first on ourselves, because it’s with ourselves that we will spend the rest of our life, it’s ourselves that we need to respect, because we need to remember that we’re worthy of living, we’re worthy of being happy, that not every day might be the best, but surely, we’ll do what’s in our power to be the best we can towards those who need it. Spread love and love will come back, be the change you want to see in the world, look at yourself in the mirror and look at how beautiful you are, because we’re on this earth to do something, and if you still don’t know what to do about your life don’t worry, everything happens for a reason, it might be an unknown reason, but life itself has its strange ways of teaching us something.

Is it okay not to be okay? Allow yourself to be broken, there’s nothing bad about it, because it’s from our failures that we become better persons, it’s from our heartbreaks that we learn how to love, it’s from failing that we become stronger. And if you are out there, reading this article, and you ever felt lonely not knowing what you should do next well, you’re not alone in that. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, self-love is the only way to start to create a better society, a society where we can be free to be ourselves, we can be free to love whoever we want and we don’t have to be afraid of what we are. So, stop doing what others people want you to do, stop letting people decide what your humor will be, stop to crawling in your own cage and start to look out the window, a whole world is waiting for you and don’t be afraid if occasionally you will be hurt, because it has to be stuck in your mind that, sometimes, it’s okay not to be okay.