My youth is gone like a dream...

I finally turned 18 last week! I'm an adult! That must mean that I won't be posting any more blog posts moaning about life...oh wait, I'm still technically a 'teen' and everyone moans about life, not just teenagers, right? Other than turning 18, I've also gone past my 1 year anniversary of having this blog and, oh god, do I moan a lot. But, everyone knows, and seems to forget, it's hard growing up. I had the nicest email from Rosalindis last week and it made me realise that I'm not alone in my struggles and that's comforting for me. If anyone else would like to send me an email about anything (nothing rude though) then my email is at the bottom of my blog.

I do know how lucky I am. I have great friends and through that I have been able to do amazing things with them. One of my friends, for my birthday, got me loads of photographs of our fun times together. While my family were looking through them, each one said how lucky I was and they never had a teenage life like it. I know. I'm super lucky. That doesn't mean that things still don't get me down. Everyone feels down at some point. College gets too stressful or your friends are having an argument. Either way, we all want somewhere to vent...weirdly enough, I choose to do that online where anyone and everyone can read it.

Rosie also said something that made me scream in my head "YES, YES, YES! You get it!" "I guess going over the top is the whole point of being a teenager. If we cant be radical now, then when can we?!" We're all a bunch of mopey teenagers that feel like they have something to say and want to say it. What's the harm in that? And that idea has been going on for centuries. I'm currently doing coursework comparing Charlotte Bronte's 'Jane Eyre' with Jean Rhys' 'Wide Sargasso Sea' and both of those authors were incredibly grumpy. They lived with their heart of their sleeve. My favourite quote by Charlotte Bronte was when it was her birthday she wrote, "My youth is gone like a dream; and very little use have I ever made of it." I like to think that we're all wearing our hearts on our sleeves like Charlotte.

Jean Rhys also said one of my favourite quotes,

 “When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all. I've never written when I was happy. I didn't want to. But I've never had a long period of being happy, Do you think anyone has? I think you can be peaceful for a long time, When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write. You see, there's very little invention in my books. What came first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down . I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go. It leaves a sort of melancholy behind and then it goes.” 

Whenever I write, it's usually because I'm unhappy about something and want to be rid of it. Jean has literally managed to get my whole concept of writing this blog in a paragraph, and I love her for it. I like to think that each generation of teenage girls are filled with hopeless romantics like Jean, Charlotte, me, the people who read my blog and the people I follow. It's not that we're not 'lucky' it's just sometimes life gets us down and we like to write about it. We might over-emphasise a factor of something, but isn't that just to engage the reader more? Isn't that what you do when you're a hopeless romantic? So many people have made a living out of it so we must be doing something right.