Sixteen year old girls are stereotyped as hormonal, mentally unstable, and overly involved in themselves. As a sixteen year-old girl, I'm here to tell you that those common thoughts are... true. As unfortunate as it is, we are as unstable as they come, but in my own completely biased opinion, we are that way for good reason. Although society thinks we have nothing to worry about and our lives are easy, they are in fact not.

Our weekends are booked. With all the high school activities like homecoming, extracurriculars and retreats, we never get a chance to just sit down and read a book, or watch TV, or hang out with friends as much as we'd like. Weekend after weekend we try to be involved so we can have an endless list of activities we can brag about to college admissions counselors and those snobby people that will either accept or reject all of our hard work those grueling four years.

From freshman to junior year, we've been preached to about what it takes to get into college and how hard we have to work in order to get in. Then as we enter our senior year we see those slackers we thought we were better than get into the same colleges. What was the point of all the work? The entire process of picking a college is exhausting in itself. Hundreds of forests have been mercilessly slaughtered for the sole purpose of telling me multiple times when some tiny, remote college that I have no interest in whatsoever is having their open house. "All 100 students of ours will be there!" No. I'm not going there. Then you have scholarships to stress about. For those of us who don't come from mega-wealthy families, this is the most important part of the extensive college process. We try all four years to get a 4.0 and receive that all-powerful "full ride" so we can somehow live up to the expectation of the family all because that one cousin that "made it big." Oh the pressure is on! And you know what pressure causes? Acne.

Acne is a teenager's worst nightmare, and it comes in vicious cycles. We get stressed out about grades, college, the SAT and booked weekends so we develop acne from stress. (And as a side not, how in the world does stress cause acne? Stress isn't a medical condition! It's not dirt that can clog your pores! Is my brain sending my skin messages that it needs to produce ugly red spots on my face because I have a B in Algebra? I think not.) After we have those spots all over our face, it stresses us out more because now we think that everyone is looking at it so we spend the entire day trying to cover it with our hand or any other handy item. After we are stressed out even more we get more acne, causing more stress, and in turn causing more acne. When does the vicious cycle stop?

So in conclusion, for those of you that think sixteen year-old girls have it easy, think twice because we have frustrations of our own, and not to mention red spots on our faces.