Being 15

Everyone has that year or time of their lives when they are especially rebellious, usually

in their teens. Mine was when I was 15.

My step-dad always goes on about how teenagers think they know it all, how teenagers think they’re invincible, and how teenagers don’t know anything about the real world. My step-dad says this from experience, but what I have learnt is that people only learn from their own mistakes.

Unfortunately when you’re 15, you don’t listen.  Unfortunately you have to make your own mistakes before you learn and wish you had listened. Unfortunately you do think you know it all and you don’t know anything about the real world. Unfortunately when it does hit you, it hits you hard. Unfortunately my step dad was right and I never listened.

I had always been ‘the good girl’ and ‘the quite one’ but that all changed when I was about 14 ½. I started hanging around with some friends from school, outside of school. I went to an all girls school so when there were boys there I thought it was cool and exciting, because it was new. We would meet daily at a local park and just hang out. All of the girls were 14/15 but the boys were 17/18. I thought nothing of it, but my mum warned “boys that age are only after one thing” – I didn’t believe her. I was young and naïve and inevitably easily led.

I soon became smitten with one of the boys in the group, and that was where my downfall began. We became a couple two months before my birthday. When I was 15, he was 18, technically an adult whilst I was a minor – I thought nothing of it though. I felt so mature, being in a relationship with an older guy, but I wasn’t I was just a kid.

Whenever my mum expressed her concerns I just got annoyed thinking everyone was against me. They just cared, I know that now. I began seeing him every day, I began to barely see my friends and family. My world became him and us and our ‘love’ was all that mattered.

It is true what they say that love is blind because when I was with him, when I was in love with him; I thought he was the image of perfection, how wrong was I!?! When that love had gone and it was over, I saw clearly for the first time in a very long time. I saw how possessive and controlling he had been; I noticed all his snide remarks and saw all his wrongs. I saw for the first time how stupid I was, I saw why my mum was concerned.

I am now 17 and mature enough to realise my mistakes and my stupidity. When I look back at being 15, I look back in regret. I regret not listening to my mums concerns and my step-dads wisdom. I regret neglecting my schoolwork and not achieving my best. I regret the friends I lost and the way I treated them. Most of all I regret the way I let him treat me, and how stupid I was.

The problem that I now face is that my younger sister is now 15. I feel like I am watching a more stubborn and resentful version of myself making the same mistakes that I did. She is completely smitten on a guy that she has been with for about a month. She is seeing him every single day and neglecting her friends, and especially her best friend – Something I did myself and something which I deeply regret. He is now her world and all that matters to her. I don’t want her to get hurt and I hate seeing the way she ignores everything that me and my mum say to her but I know from experience, that it is experience that will teach her the lessons that she will refuse to learn from us, her family.

Life is a lesson, and experience is the teacher.