Choosing the Best Flower for Your Future

Teenage life becomes colorful when you get to find your flo wer. When you were younger, the only thing that you did was to dream of many dreams. Like a kid playing in a garden, you can see that all the flowers are beautiful - and you can’t choose just one, so you pick as many flowers as you can. Meeting new people, trying new things, and discovering who you really are is what makes your teenage life. Eventually, when you finally get to find the flower that you believe is destined to be yours, that is when you have already discovered yourself. This is when you have already decided what you really want to be and to do in the future. Unfortunately, discovering yourself is not as easy as picking flowers.

A multimedia artist, Patricia Anne Juanillo, explained how it is like to be a teenager. She said that things can be pretty tough and fun for a teenager. It is the period of life wherein a person is just starting to learn things. A period in life where we lose people and meet new ones, and the time when we experience our first kiss and our first loves. Teenage life is the time to develop one’s personality. For her, it is where a person could experience a great indescribable feeling of emptiness and anxieties of being an adult. She admits that she could not balance her life between being just a young person and being a person who needs to prepare for the future. However, as she turned 20, she expected herself to be organized and to learn balancing things as to prevent having a messy life.

“There are days wherein I drink and party with my friends in a week more than I actually do my school tasks, and there are days wherein I am stressed out of doing academics in a week without getting in touch with my friends,” Juanillo stated.

For her, life is not as easy as she plans it would be. Despite this, she makes sure to prioritize the important things when it comes to sacrificing socialization and work. “There are rules in my circle of friends that we are ought to have fun on a weekend or weekdays only if we are done with the major school works because it feels better that way,” she added. Along with her progress and learning, Juanillo makes sure to sacrifice things that are worth the result and have fun later on.

For a teenager, deciding for the future is not as easy as picking a flower in the garden. For instance, you can easily tell yourself that you want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or anything else. However, you can’t easily make a decision because there are so many factors that affect you in terms of determining what you really want to be in the future. These can be in the form of your parents, personal problems, or the society in general. Making wrong decisions, like picking the wrong flowers, might be the cause of not knowing yourself well. This is one of the reasons why our teenage years is a challenging period of life. Sometimes, you are expected to act all mature and to have right decisions, regardless of the idea that you still need to develop your specialties and skills in life.

Another multimedia artist, Aletha Rosel, shared her life experiences as a teenager who prepares for the future. Rosel stated that she always equips herself for the next days and for opportunities to come; she also said that she has set in her mind that the future will not be nice and that challenges will come. As a teenager, she gives importance to education as her way to be successful in the future.

“Education for me is like a sword, as it will be my tool in facing and dealing with the challenges that will occur in the future. One must keep on learning, just as how a sword is being sharpened from time to time,” Rosel stated.

She said that she hasn’t fully discovered the person that she wants to be in the future. Though if she would give one quality that she wants to see in her future version, she wants herself to love more and give more to the people who care about her. She is planning to use two strategies to be successful in the future: empathy and optimism. For her, if we understand the people that we encounter, even our classmates or coworkers, they will do the same to us. With this idea, we will be able to help each other and eventually achieve success in everything that we do. Rosel believes that success is achieved by a group of people; even leaders are not going to be able to be successful if they don’t know how to understand and to unite with their people. Optimism is her second strategy because she believes that whatever profession you have in life, if you always think positive and give trust not only to yourself but also to the people that you encounter, you can be successful.

I can honestly say that this generation gives the most difficult things to teenagers like me. If I would be given a chance to tell the stories of my friends who creatively tell their stories to me, I would highlight the parts wherein their emotions become art. A lot of teenagers today are fighting many different situations because of present-day happenings. Anxiety, depression, stress – these are the words that we usually hear from so many people, most of them young people. They turn their emotions into a song, a drawing, a poem, or anything creative, and for me that is what makes them artistic.

It is hard to pick our flowers in this generation because unlike before, people nowadays are too absorbed by the modern world that a lot of youth choose to just go with the flow of everyday life. Picking everything, finding it hard to choose the right one. However, seeing how these young people turn their emotions into art, I gladly feel that they are trying to be strong to make the best for their future.

In our teenage years, we are supposed to do things that make us happy. It becomes difficult though because we have to be mindful of our future at the same time. A Youtube vlogger, Abigail Atienza, believes that happiness is all about validation. As a youth, she believes that teenagers seek for validation from other people in order for them to be happy—and it is one of the reasons why teenage life is challenging. Atienza is trying her best to make her youth wonderful, so she balances her life by investing on things that she’s visualizing for the future.

Life as a teenager is a combination of fun and difficulties. It is the period of being a child and being an adult at the same time. In the end, choosing the right thing for the future is not as easy as picking the best flower in the garden. One must develop their personality as well as set their goals straight first, in order for them to discover the person they want to be in the future.

Now that we are leaving our teenage years, it is time to pick the best flower out of the hundreds in the garden. Consider and choose wisely, because after all the stress, fun, and adventures of teenage life, discovering yourself would be the next priority. In reality, you are not a kid anymore that could play in the garden and get all the flowers that are beautiful to you. You are a developing person, a person that is about to finish the teenage stage of life, which is why you have to think wisely in choosing the flower that you believe is destined to be your own.