In adolescence, I felt like my emotions were explosions waiting to happen. One moment I was fine, and the next moment I wasn’t. I used to think I was unstable or flawed. But later I learned something that made everything make sense.
The book Why Doesn’t My Teenager Talk to Me? explains that youth is a biochemical storm.
Hormones like cortisol, dopamine, and serotonin swing unpredictably during these years. That’s why teenagers become irritable, withdrawn, or overly reactive. It isn’t because they’re “bad,” but because their internal chemistry is constantly shifting.
But here’s the mistake many young people make:
We think the storm is us. We think the emotion is us.
When sadness appears, we think I am sadness.
When anger rises, we believe I am anger.
When anxiety hits, we panic as if it’s permanent.
But the truth is far more freeing:
You are not your emotion.
You are the one who observes it.
Once I understood this, everything changed.
The storm inside me didn’t disappear—but I learned not to drown in it. I didn’t have to react to every impulse as if it defined me.
The book points out that teenagers often shut down not because they hate their parents, but because they cannot regulate their overwhelming inner world. Withdrawal becomes self-protection. Anger becomes a vent for pressure they can’t articulate.
Seeing this helped me stop blaming myself.
And more importantly, stop blaming others.
Youth is a turbulent mirror.
It reflects chaos, insecurity, uncertainty.
But behind the reflection is something stable:
the awareness watching the rise and fall of emotions.
Peace doesn’t come from controlling the storm.
Peace comes from realizing you were never the storm to begin with.