Hi, This is Lisa from Washington, DC. Welcome to AbovetheInfluence.com and thanks to listening to our very first podcast. First up, Jen comes to us from Wisconsin. She's got a lot to say on this topic and an interesting story, so listen up.
Hi, my name is Jen and I’m 20 years old and I’m going to the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater and I am studying journalism and women’s studies. In high school I moved around a lot. I lived with my grandmother, my uncle, my aunts…different family members, both my parents unfortunately had their problems, they were in an out of jail. So high school was different and growing up was different experience than most kids, not all kids but most kids.
Both my parents had drug addictions and both…broke the law. My mother and father were divorced and I lived with them, either one of them separately when one of them was in jail or in prison and when the other one wasn’t, I was able to live with them. But there were times when they were both incarcerated so I had to move around because of that. Obviously it’s apparent their problems caught up with them and they had to face the consequences, and my sister and I saw that.
So when I moved back in with my grandmother, for the first time, I went back to the Dells High School. I hadn’t been back in that area for a while because I moved around a little bit when I was younger so when I got back making friends was a little more difficult because people had already had their friends and little social groups set up so it was hard for me as a person who doesn’t mind who they are or hide who they are, it’s hard to get in to these groups, because it’s difficult for them to accept me and I wasn’t necessarily accepted but later on as I got involved in other activities and people got to know me and stopped judging me, you know how I look or what I said and people warm up to you and you take it with a grain of salt that everyone’s different, but you can still be friends. And I developed this really great group of friends who helped me out a lot in high school. You know, like, when things got tough at home. I didn’t always have friends, and when I moved around to different places it was hard to make friends and to keep friends.
In my school, peer pressure was obviously there. Peer pressure still exists. A lot of people say it doesn’t because they don’t use those exact words to describe it - but it’s still there, I know it still exists. It’s still there in a subtle way, a subconscious way. You don’t realize it but you’re being pressured, and you can feel it.
Everyone, especially myself…you look for a place to fit in and you want to find people you relate to. So there’s the pressure to see if you want to be with those people do you want to do what they do, you know, it’s hard to figure out that, but as long as you, at least myself, I didn’t want anyone to define me, I didn’t want drugs or alcohol to define me or make me make bad choices because I could see the consequences from my at home life. So I didn’t want to do those things, or succumb to the pressures (I guess you could say) but I hung out with a lot of different people and I never judged anyone for the things they did, I was still their friend but I definitely watched out for myself.
And, I didn’t want to be ostracized by the other kids because I wasn’t drinking or smoking or whatever, so I still went out and to parties with them. Because, like, going to parties can still be fun but in my situation it was hard because people would come up to me and be like, ‘why aren’t you drinking, why aren’t you smoking?’ and kids come up to you and ask you those types of questions so they can find out why you’re not doing it and they can get you to do it as well. They want you to get on board and like ‘ride the train with us’ so it kinda gives them the feeling what they’re doing is right. But you know, when I would say, “I don’t want to” or “It’s not what I want to do,” they would just say okay. A lot of times people think that if you say no people are going to make fun of you but they won’t. I don’t think that that really happens anymore. If people do that, it’s pretty ridiculous on their part to act that way to someone who is making a good choice when they’re obviously not.
Heh, this is Lisa again, thanks for listening. Check back again soon when we have more podcasts from teens around the country. If you want to be featured, visit the podcast section on AbovetheInfluence.com for more on how to do that.