19 Oct 2019

Your teen years are for learning about the world, the people around you and yourself. It’s a time to make memories, mistakes, turn everything upside down and then watch everything make sense again…

You’ll fight with your parents. Fall for the wrong person or maybe even the right one. You’ll mess things up, but you’ll also work things out and get good at something. You’ll make lifelong friends, go on adventures and experience a lot of things for the first time. Mostly, you’ll feel alive.

With the release of Looking for Alaska on Stan this weekend, we’re all in our feels reminiscing on our own teen years and the defining moments from them. In case you haven’t read the wildly popular book that the new show is based on, Looking for Alaska is all about a teenage boy who enrols into boarding school to “seek a great perhaps”, where he experiences falling in love, heartbreak, new friends and tragedy – and has to try and make sense of it all. Whether or not you're familiar with the novel of the same name by John Green, this one deserves a binge - head here to check it out. 

It’s so bloody relatable that it’s got us reliving some of the crazy, beautiful, terrifying, amazing experiences we had in our teen years and inspired us to chuck together a list of those moments:

1. Falling utterly in love with someone

Whether you admit it to anyone or not, you’re definitely going to fall in love with someone before your teen years are out. You’re going to find someone you can’t stop thinking about. They’ll fill your daydreams and every free moment you have will see your mind drifting straight back to them.

2. Feeling guilt and regret

We all make mistakes. It’s part of being young. In fact, if you go through all your teen years without any regrets, then you’ve made the biggest mistake of all. As teens, we need to experience new things, mess up a little or even completely screw up – from this we grow and learn how to better ourselves.

3. The feeling of having never been happier

Who said your teen years are all about angst and annoyance?

Being a teenager is full of moments of feeling immortal, being on top of the world and not having a care in the world. You’ll be free to do whatever you want on the weekend with your friends – you’ll jump in your car and drive with the windows down blasting your fav tunes, you’ll run wild on the beach when its honestly far too cold to swim, you’ll ask out the person you have had a crush on forever. You’ll feel pure, unadulterated euphoria.

4. Feeling lost

If your twenties are for finding yourself, then your teens are for realising you’re lost in the first place. From dealing with the impossible social politics of high school, to trying to decide what subjects to do in Year 12, to choosing what to do with your life after school finishes – it’s easy to feel like your life is just a giant labyrinth.

5. Having your heart broken

One of the worst moments you might endure is heartbreak – there’s nothing worse than getting hurt by someone you really care about, especially when you have to see them five days a week… torture.

But eventually, you will get over it and you’ll begin to understand why it didn’t work.

In saying that, heartbreak is you experiencing completely raw and true emotions that prove what you felt was real – and as much as it hurts, there’s something kind of special about that.

6. Having your first taste of independence

Whether it’s in the form of getting your driver’s licence or even just packing your own lunch for school – you’ll definitely start feeling way more independent. This is both a blessing and a curse. Having your parents stop doing certain things for you can be the pits, but it also feels pretty empowering to take control of your own life.

7. Realising just how big the world is

At some point, you’ll stop dead in your tracks and get a taste for just how ridiculously huge the world is. Whether it’s a stat about the world’s population, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, or just your friend moving out of town – something will make you appreciate that we’re all just tiny little fish in an impossibly large ocean.

On top of that, you’ll come to realise how chaotic the world is. Things happen – good and bad – for no reason at all and there’s nothing you can do to stop them from happening. It will, however, make you appreciate what’s important and the little moments that will mean the world to you.

If you wanna check out Looking for Alaska and get in your teen feels with us, you can nab yourself a 30 day free trial of Stan here – that’s easily enough time to binge-watch the whole series (and probably start a new one while you’re at it – suss out some of the perfect shows to binge-watch in your study breaks over here).