Justice for the inner teenager

The idea of the ‘inner child’ is quite a well known term and it stems from the notion of nurturing that younger version of yourself. It’s about meeting the needs that were left unmet for you growing up, it’s about harnessing that mindset as an adult and letting yourself be free and playful, it’s about caring for yourself the same way you would care for that younger version of yourself if they stood in front of you. There’s a lot to it, but the bottom line of it is -✨healing✨. Now, one thing about me… I lurvvv the idea of my inner child. I wanna see the world the way 5 year old hope did, I want to care for her and teach her things and I want to do the things that make me feel connected to her. However, it occurred to me the other day - you never hear about the inner teenager. Now, I think this is quite a universal experience but I’ll speak for myself when I say that being a teenager SUCKED. It was a time of many changes, a whole heap of self - hate, and an abundance of questions about the world and how to do the whole ‘life’ thing. It’s like you’ve spent your whole life swimming in the shallow end, then suddenly you’re thrown into a completely different swimming pool with water 5 metres deep, and you’re left to it. I look back at my teenage years and I see a compilation of me flailing about constantly having no clue how to get out of the pool. The best I could do was stay afloat. Even at the ripe old age of 20, I look back and still meet 15 year old me with judgement and resentment. I scorn her for not doing better, for making certain decisions, for looking the way she did. Everything I felt then, I still make her feel now. I had a notification pop up the other day with a video from 5 years ago. It’s rare that I ever watch them and when I do, the duration of it is spent judging the way I was. Nevertheless, I watched this video of me as a teenager doing a dance I had made up and as the song ’Stand by me’ by Ben E. King played, it hit me. Why on earth was I so mean to myself? And even more so, ‘Why am I still so mean to that version of myself?’ Because in that moment, all I felt was sorrow for that girl. I mourned her, I mourned the life she dreamed of, I mourned the radiance that shone through her and through doing so, I saw the beauty she possessed. Suddenly, this evil villain wasn’t such a terrible person. She was someone doing the best she could at her first time on this scary earth. So when I say ‘justice for the inner teenager’, what I mean is, nurture that version of yourself too. Invest the same care you put into your inner child, into the inner teenager too. Because she was just as scared of the world around her, and she deserves to be met with just as much love and empathy as that 5 year old does.