"When you look at a person,
any person, remember that
everyone has a story, everyone
has gone through something
that changed them forever."

This post is a response to/was inspired by Neda's "My Though Process" post.

My friend Neda, there (may I call you friend, I think I may, we talk often enough via Twitter), brought up something interesting tonight: maturity.

It is my belief that teenagers today are not mature, mentally mature that is, at all. Some people beg to differ, but it seems to me that the only way that we are mature as a group is that we are reverting back one hundred years, becoming baby-making machines by age fifteen. And at that, that is not emotional or mental maturity, it is quite the opposite.

I have a "nephew" (I like to call him my nephew-by-association) who will be ten months old the end of this month, and I love him to death and would never be able to imagine life without him on this planet, but he was born to a teen-aged mother. And he would have had an older brother or sister had she not tragically miscarried her first pregnancy.

Before I left public schooling, anywhere from six to ten other girls had become pregnant and had children. It was rumored that one young lady had become pregnant for the third time, the first was either miscarried or aborted, the second resulted in a full-term baby girl.

This, this is not maturity. This is stupidity. I understand that there are instances such assault (rape) that can result in pregnancy, and that is definitely no fault of the mother, but the teen-aged boys and girls having sex willingly without protection, that is not maturity, that is stupidity.

Okay, I got waaayyyyy off track here. This is not where I was going with this topic when I began writing it.

So, anyways, what I was saying is that most teenagers are by no means "mature". However, there are exceptions. And however selfish, self-centered, snobbish this may seem, I believe myself to be one of the exceptions.

This does not come without reason, however. It is my belief that the conditions I grew up in contributed, if not forced upon me, a more mature state of mind and emotional sense.

I grew up and am growing up poor. Not just poor, but incredibly below the poverty line. If it weren't for the fact that I receive a dividends check off of my college fund every few months, I would not have decent clothing to wear, hygiene products to use, or a computer to sit here and write this on.

To put things in prospective for you, during one year, I make one twelfth of what my mother does by sitting back and waiting for the mail to come every three months, while she works two jobs, six days a week.

Being poor, though, has put into perspective how hard I will need to work over the next few years in order to give myself a leg up in an ailing economy and broken country. I need to be able to make a good living. I do not need to be rich, but I would like to pick up and say, "Let's go out for dinner, somewhere nice," once a month or so. I would like to be able to go see a movie without worrying how I will buy food the next week. I would like to be able to see my family without needing to scrounge for gas money.

I have the mentality to know that I will be working myself to the bone to get a college education, whatever that may be in, so that I will be able to raise a family in which my children can play a sport at school, go on a field trip, or even just have a few friends over to spend the night while having plenty of bad-for-you snacks and melt-your-brain video games to play.

I not only grew up in a poor family, but an abusive one. Without going in to too much detail, my father was/is an alcoholic abuser, emotionally more then physically, but both. I spent ten years of my life in that environment and thank my lucky stars that I no longer am every day that I live.

While living through that did make me an emotionally weak person, I have since recovered from the mental grasp he had on my mind (though, physically, I could stand to lose a pound or two that I gained from emotional eating). In my own healing, I have become someone who is more emotionally aware of my surroundings and am more empathetic towards others' situations.

Everything I have gone through makes me understand even more so how important it is for me to be in a stable home with stable funds and stable love before I can ever bring a new family into this world. I think that understanding things like this is some of what makes a teenager "mature".

What are your thoughts on the subject?