The question for this week's general paper blogging is

'The teenage years are the best years of one's life.' Would you agree with this view?

After being a teen for close to seven years, I would agree that the teenage years are the best years of my life so far. It is during your teenage years whereby you have really first grasped the concept of life outside your comfort zone. In the earlier years of one's life, we have been mostly dependent on our parents for their support. Even when it comes to primary school, most of us do not have a clue as to what on earth was happening; so much as to often people do not remember much about their primary school lives. Our lives were pretty much filled with innocence and there were not many things that could have affected us. Everyday passed relatively simply. I still can remember the highlight of each day of my primary school days was to just have an ice-cream after school with my friends. That was how simple primary school lives were.

However, as we began to reach the teenage years, we started to notice our surroundings, notice the people around us and notice that life is not as simple as it was before. Here comes the emotions and feelings that have never ever overcame us before and we are at a lost of what to do with it. This feeling of loss might lead to the increased number of teenagers being 'emo' nowadays. Many teenagers pass through a stage of life whereby they are feeling angsty, rebellious and cynical in life. Parents also do not help in this case whereby they do not understand their child, implementing more and more rules to take their child in hand, what they might not actually know is that, by doing so, the child might not actually take to that method and rebel instead. Personally, I think most teenagers would have experienced it and I am not an exception. There are many ways of working it out. Some teenagers, they go into self-mutilation as a form of release. Some simply penned their thoughts down into a diary. Most of us do not require professional help; it is merely a phrase that we are going through. However, the more serious cases like self-mutilation would need help.

Nonetheless, it is during our teenage years whereby we form unbreakable friendships with your really close friends, it is during our teenage years whereby we suffer our first heartbreak, and it is during our teenage years whereby we start experiencing most things for the first time for example being in other countries with our friends without your parents around to be nagging constantly or the first time we actually started to be concerned about our future and start mugging for the O Levels Examination . Our teenage years might not be all happy-go-lucky, there are bound to be ups and downs but it is these roadblocks that we face in our teenage years that will help us in our future endeavors in life.

TESTING!