3 Things That Can Make or Break a Young Person...

Early in my freshman year of high school I started experiencing 3 new things at a whole new level…freedom, loneliness, and stress.

In my mind, all my classmates seemed to have pretty good ideas about who they were, where they were headed, and what their story was. For me I had no clue. And like my brother Shaun Derik says, “When you don’t know who you are, you start taking suggestions from other people.”

I remember one Friday night in October, I was hanging out with a couple friends, Kyle and Clark. We’d been watching movies, eating pizza, and cracking on each other. Clark started roasting my hair, making fun of the fact that I rarely got it cut. He started calling me “Mr. Kotter” from the old sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. I didn’t love that. Then Kyle suggested I let Clark cut my hair. Up to that point, I’d never let clippers touch my head. Scissors had barely touched my head since elementary school. But Clark claimed he cut his own hair and could hook me up, so I gave in. We went upstairs to his bathroom, and he started cutting.

After about the fourth or fifth, “Oops. My bad. I’ll fix that!” I figured I should probably quit while I was behind. He had tried to give me a fade, but let’s just say when he was done, I had to ask him if his eyes had been open at any time while he was cutting my hair. Still, the bushy afro was gone.

It was late. I threw on a hat and went home. I avoided my parents and went straight to the bathroom to assess the damage. I jumped in the shower to wash off all the hair, then hid in my room.

The next morning, I knew I had to face the music. I went downstairs and told my mom I had something to show her. She looked up from folding laundry and asked, “What’s going on?”

I took my hat off and her eyes nearly popped out of her head. She didn’t say anything for a second. She just stared. Her expression was a weird combination of confusion, anger, and amusement. Then she laughed and ordered me to head down to the rec center, where Frank, the director, gave free haircuts to kids on Saturday mornings.

So I walked down there, hat on, and waited my turn on the bleachers. When I took off my hat, Frank reacted exactly like my mom had. “Who did this to you?” he said. “Why would you let someone that clearly hates you cut your hair?” The whole gym cracked up. Then Frank went to work. And just like that, I got my first real fade.

I definitely don’t regret getting my haircut and I’d love to be able to say that was the last time I cared more about what other people thought of me than what I thought of myself, but unfortunately it became somewhat of an obsession for me. I spent most of my time in high school exhausting myself trying to be noticed by other people. Mostly because of having new freedoms, a fear of loneliness, and the stress to impress others. Thank God I didn’t have to deal with social media on top of that!

One of my dear friends and mentors says, “We can spend our time creating the life we do want for ourselves or reacting to the life we don’t want for ourselves”. A lot of the time we spend being reactive instead of proactive stems from mismanagement of freedom, loneliness, and stress.

As caring adults, we have an opportunity to help the teens we care about create a life management plan. I’m sharing a resource with you that you can use to start the conversation about freedom, loneliness, and stress as well as create an intentional action plan to deal with them.

Also please check out this really short video that you can use as a discussion starter for this topic. As always, please share this story, this Life Management Plan resource, and this video with anyone you know that you think would appreciate it.

Thank you always for the work you do, but mostly for the person you are.

Also don't forget to share it to your socials!