Tag: teenagers

Like a virgin

Like a virgin

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This week I want to talk about the one thing that FILLS the minds of people of all ages, especially those around my age and younger: sex – more specifically, losing your virginity.

It’s a big topic since everyone’s sex life is such a huge deal in today’s society. People put so much pressure on when and how they should lose their virginity, that the act itself is made out to be this big, momentous, personality-shaping, potentially life-ruining moment. To a large extent, I agree that the details of when and how you have sex for the first time are massively important, but not for the same reasons society forces us to believe.

First of all, I don’t believe that there’s a ‘right’ age to do it (except past the legal age obviously). Whenever you choose to have sex, as long as you’re both safe, able to change your minds and feel ready, then so what if you’ve known each other for years or for hours? There’s no need to build it up to be this moment where you need to have been in a relationship for years, on some romantic weekend away, with rose petals on the bed. Let’s be frank, for most people it’s kind of messy and uncomfortable and anticlimactic. Oh, and for most girls, it hurts like a B**** (!) for the first time: yeah, they don’t mention that bit in the movies, do they?

Also boys/girls (but mainly boys): if the girl bleeds, then just be a nice guy and don’t freak out about it. You may not have known that sometimes that happens (and that it’s tOtally normal) but equally, the girl might have had no idea either and your reaction will be a big deal in how she feels about it and herself – both at the time and afterwards. Speaking from experience, the boy I lost my virginity to wasn’t a saint in how he treated me overall, but when I bled he didn’t care one bit so neither did I – if you’re reading this buddy, thanks for that. Xx

Having worked at a girls’ school and just generally being surrounded by people, it’s clear to me that popular culture’s airbrushed narrative of sex and the loss of a person’s virginity is toxic for the individual. You have girls and boys with these unrealistic notions of what sex is going to be like, ultimately ending with disappointment when their reality doesn’t match what they expected. I have so many friends who’ve felt like they nEEded to lose their virginity before University, or in the first week, just so they didn’t have to carry the shame of not being experienced in that area. Sex is a super intimate thing to do with someone, and like everything, you get better with practice.

Personally, I don’t have anything against one-night stands – hey, if you’ve got an itch to scratch, then do you (!safely!) – but I very strongly believe that they should NOT happen through someone being ashamed of being a virgin. That shouldn’t even come into play.

So, if you’re reading this as a virgin, then please don’t force yourself to rush into it just because you think you need to, and don’t expect it to be perfect! I mean, I lost my virginity at 17, but at 20 I’m still yet to thoroughly enJOY sex because, fun fact: it takes a lot of females years of being sexually active and a few sexual partners to get the full experience we all hear so much about. So if you’re in that position too, then it’s cool man, you’re not the only one. Plus, just because you don’t have an orgasm doesn’t mean that it’s not fun.

If you’re over the legal age, feel ready, and are safe (in every way), then you’re good to go. But if you aren’t ALL 3 of those things- even if just 1 of them isn’t right- then like I told my Year 11 girls who asked me about this when I was a Teaching Assistant, the braver and more worthwhile thing to do is just wait until you can tick all 3 of those boxes. Looking after yourself is a l w a y s a good idea, especially when it comes to sex – and that goes for e v e r y o n e.

Losing your virginity might be a bit of a flop orgasm-wise, but as far as I’m concerned sex should always just be fun. So do it with someone that you like and feel good around – that way, it’d be hard not to enjoy it.

A n d u s e p r o t e c t i o n k i d s !

Life in the Nepali jungle

Life in the Nepali jungle

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

To be honest, the first thing I want to say about Nepal is that it’s just a ridiculously beautiful country that everyone should visit. So that’s the core of this blog established. But hey, whilst we’re here we may as well elaborate. ONWARDS.

Nepal is super famous for it’s mountains, the Himalayas, and all the amazing hiking routes they offer. Saying that, my experience was spent living and volunteering in the heart of the Chitwan jungle. Needless to say, the scenery was some of the most stunning I will EVER see. I could go all English Lit student and spend paragraphs describing it but even then I could never ever do it justice with words. So, to be brief: we woke up to the sound of monkeys and showered surrounded by geckos. Enough said.

3 weeks in this country introduced me to so many breathtaking things: one of the first to strike me, was the overwhelming poverty of the people. You hear so much about third world countries in the news, and see adverts on TV showing images of starving children so often that somehow the tragedies become trivialised. When physically seeing the way some people live every day in a glorified hut in the middle of nowhere however, you’re forced to understand the reality of true poverty. And it’s astonishing.

Actually, the first scene I saw when driving from Kathmandu airport was a naked child relieving himself on what can only be described as a mound of rubbish by the side of a dusty road. But poverty in Nepal manifested itself in so many more ways than just stark images such as that.

I worked as a children’s English teacher with 2 other English girls, and 1 Montenegrin girl in a Buddhist monastery for most of the 3 weeks: the children’s ages ranged from 6 to 18 and there were around 100 of them, some orphans and some not. The Nepali government’s textbooks we used to teach were riddled with grammatical errors and nonsensical sentences. We would correct these mistakes in front of the classes as we read the children the same thing they’d been reading for months, only now we told them what they thought they’d already learnt, was wrong. We constantly fought against confusing them in order to teach them correct English. The kids themselves were an absolute joy to teach: they tried so hard to follow everything we were saying as they scrawled notes in their beloved (dilapidated) exercise books.

The poverty they experience is all-encompassing. As mentioned, their school equipment is basic to say the least. They eat the same thing every day so their level of sufficient nutrition is non-existent. They rinse their plates under a tap and eat with their hands. They wear the same school uniforms every day and the clothes they have for leisure are clearly second-hand, since they’re covered in holes and stains. They live in the most basic housing and their bathrooms are definitely not sanitary judging from the smell. They shower and clean their clothes in the same area outside with minimal soap. Many of their little bald heads show the marks of ringworm.

These children deserve so much more than the amazing staff of the monastery could ever give them. The nuns and teachers devote most of their lives to the kids and the amount they care is tangible, but there is seriously only so much that they can do with what they have. It became painfully obvious to my 3 new friends and I that everyone there couldn’t even fathom our European lives, nor would we ever really be able to explain it to them.

It’s obviously heart-breaking that people live in situations such as this, without the basic resources the West don’t even pay much attention to. That being said, we, the ‘privileged’, can learn so much from people such as those I met in Nepal. The children and staff in the monastery might have lacked so much when it came to physical things but their love for life and each other shone a different light on my world.

I spent every day in that monastery in total bliss: listening to them sing in the temple at dawn, mealtimes and dusk; lying on the roof with my friends watching my first ever shooting star inside a sea of others; laughing with children and adults who tried so hard to, but could barely understand much of what I said, and most of all, just not even slightly caring about material things. My parents never encouraged me to care much about objects, but the reality is that our society conditions us to rely on them no matter how hard we try.

Obviously we could and should supply these people with more money and resources. Everyone already knows that. On a human level though, I think that every financially comfortable individual should be physically exposed to true poverty. Then assess their own privilege, hold back their pity, and celebrate how humans always find a way to survive, and how they smile whilst they’re at it. Those kids in that jungle are financially poor but I know so many people in the West who are a whole lot poorer than they are when it comes to an appreciation of being alive.

So all in all, Nepal taught me to just take a second. And enjoy.

One for my girls

One for my girls

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

It was my privilege to work as a Teaching Assistant in a local Secondary School as my main job of 3 in the first half of my gap year. The students I worked with were mostly those with learning and behavioural difficulties: some with diagnosed disabilities and some without. What grouped all of them together though was that they had exactly the same teenage struggles as each other, and every other teenager in the world. That being said, this school was totally different from the one I’d just left as a student. It was an all girls’ school for a start and I can safely say that the single gender had a profound effect on the vibe of the school- more so than I’d first expected. It became clear that in this environment the tendency of teenage girls to gossip and marginalise others was amplified. But so was their kindness and infinite loyalty to each other. To add to that, the girls were mostly from first, second and third generation immigrant households. Generally speaking the students themselves shared cultures and religion, it was only the staff and the part of England in which they found themselves that were different.

These girls were some of the most generous and loving people I’ll ever have the pleasure to meet, and I write this with the utmost respect and affection for them. I’d like to be clear in that what I write is with them in mind, not as part of a patronising privileged white girl social study. We came from completely opposite walks of life, yet our similarity in age allowed for me to be gifted a very honest insight into their lives and minds. They did still call me ‘Miss’ though lol.

But in order to paint a picture of the specific obstacles in their way, I’ll have to set the scene more plainly.

It’s a fact that most of the girls at this school had never been on a bus or a train on their own before. It’s a fact that many believed they’d be attacked if they did. It’s a fact that most of the girls had never been to the next nearest city before. It’s a fact that many of the girls spoke English as their second language, even though they were born here. It’s a fact that very few of these girls had friends outside of their race, culture and religion, let alone socialised with them. It’s also a fact that these girls were as, if not more, curious about life and everything that comes with it as their white middle class peers attending schools 5 minutes down the road. But it’s a fact that satisfying their curiosity was not as easy for them to do as for their peers.

In my capacity as a young, white, female TA I appeared to these girls as an outsider when it came to culture, race and religion. That being said, I was lucky enough to make some of them feel like they could confide in me and ask questions that they simply couldn’t comfortably ask anyone else in their lives. Now I’d just like to mention that I worked mainly in the Science department and that the majority of these queries came from the worst-behaved students in the entire building: my delightful 15-16 year olds. That should explain how these questions came up in lessons. Sex Education happens in Science for example. Yeah, now you’re with me. 🙂

A few questions that come to mind now are: ‘Miss, what is contraception?’, ‘Miss can girls enjoy sex too?’, ‘Miss, it’s legal for an 18 year old to have sex with a 15 year old right?’, and ‘Miss Douglas, is it wrong to be gay?’. The last one especially affected me. It’s 2019. A 15 year old girl living in the North of England shouldn’t feel required to ask that anymore.

Academically, these 15-16 year old girls often fell short of the government’s target system because they saw little reward in studying. What they felt success in was that they could make each other laugh. Oh and they sure made me laugh. These girls were so funny.

As a consequence of not being in the top set however, they’d often call themselves stupid. But truthfully, being able to read what will make an entire room laugh time and again is also something that requires real intelligence. For a few of them, school was an escape from some really dark things going on at home. They cared little about their education because they didn’t see how it’d help with their own troubles. Fortunately though, the friendships they all forged with one another and the laughter they constantly experienced together made for a welcome relief. And I had the honour to regularly laugh until I cried right along with them.

Working with these girls and being able to infer the struggles they were having from the questions they asked me, showed me just how much of a privileged white girl I truly am. My experience of school was easy for the most part: I had a good home life, good grades, good friends, amazing support for every aspect of my disability and whilst I’ve never been rich, I’ve never known what poverty feels like. Like many teenagers in every school, some of these girls had it a lot rougher.

But would I ever dream of patronising them? Absolutely not! They’d have my life! And I respect them far too much for that. My girls are strong young women. It’s true that some of them might never be able to wear the clothes they really want to, or love who they want, or go where they want, or try to find a job they fully enjoy. But I sincerely hope that they’ll keep the kindness, generosity and fiery sense of humour that I got the pleasure to observe for 6 months.