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Self-Improvement

Would Teenage You Be Proud of Adult You

If not, how do you fix it

Ryan M. Danks

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Photo by whoislimos on Unsplash

As teenagers, life ahead of us seems fantastic. We have so many dreams.

  • Become a basketball all-star
  • Raise a family
  • Master the martial arts
  • Travel

As we age, we lose sight of some of those dreams. Sometimes, what we lose is for a good reason. When we grow up, we leave childish things behind.

I think we all understand, as teenagers, that our dreams will evolve. But what about those big dreams, the ones that we define ourselves by?

What happens when identity-establishing dreams change?

The teenage version of you knows you best

Our identities are formed during childhood and adolescence. During childhood, we absorb the values of our parents and society; during adolescence, we experiment with these values.

Remember the first time you had sex? You had certain ideas of how it was supposed to go, and not go — values you absorbed through learning what sex was.

Then you got the opportunity to have sex, to experiment with it, and find the values that held true, the ones that didn’t, and…

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