Vaping at 14
NOTE: The following article is the opinion of a 14 year old student. Nothing in this article is at all intended to be factual – but the sharing of her own thoughts and feelings.
As you are probably thinking that I am too young to be vaping and smoking or that I am ruining my body, all for one thing, to make me seem “cool”. Well there is more to it rather than what is on the surface. It is not just vapourised smoke that passes through your body, it is more.
Personally, I don’t think that vaping is necessarily terrible for you but then again I am the type of person that is down to do anything and everything. It really just depends on your self-control.
I have a lot of PTSD from drugs and loud music because one of my past parents partied, drank, and did drugs. It wasn’t bad, but the thing is that they had kids and it didn’t click that they were a parent, not a teenager. They couldn’t get a hold of their life so they turned to drugs for an escape. They haven’t gotten the hint yet that they don’t have any of their children in their care, because of how out of hand they got with drugs.
My childhood was not the best, my father left to go live down south while I was at the age of three. I also got taken off my mother in 2019 for various reasons. I moved in with relatives and have been with them ever since.
Going through all these transitions from moving from house to house and from one family member to another put a lot of stress and anxiety on me. As a young child, I did not know how to express these feelings that were bottled up and held captive inside of me. Going from child to teenager, as you know the emotions intensify and become more overwhelming. This had a really big toll on my mental health.
When I moved with relatives, it felt like my whole life went from living freely, to being supervised 24/7. Everything that was okay before, I now get a consequence for it. I started to self-harm at the start of the year. Within this time I saw that one of my friends had a vape, so I thought that I might just have one hit to see what it is like. After that, I continuously had one hit after another and now I can not stop going back for more. About 3 months into vaping, I felt more relieved and less stressed.
My brother passed away recently, at just the age of five. I found this out one morning before leaving to get on the bus into Rangiora. While sitting in one of my friend’s rooms upstairs it just hit me that my little brother is dead and that I have failed as a big sister to protect him. I felt all the feelings come up and hit me like a bus right in the head. I grabbed a vape and started to hit it continuously and felt my head get calmer and calmer. It is crazy how one thing so little I can hold in my hand, in my opinion, helped relieve my mental health issue. Some people do not get the positive effects it has on someone’s life.
Some of the reasons I started to smoke and vape are to rebel against my guardians. Having super strict rules like this is just telling a teenager to do the opposite. If I don’t try out my own boundaries and experiment while I am young, I will just go off the hook when I am free and older when no one can look after me. Sometimes it is too hard with my current caregivers. I get punished for everything and my only escape is when I am with my friends. If I didn’t have the people I have today to enjoy life and vape with, I would probably be somewhere doing the same thing, not safe, and getting peer pressured into things I don’t like.
That’s why I don’t think that letting your kids do things like vaping is such a bad thing. I know the thought of it is scary but in the end, a teenager is going to do what they want and if you don’t let them do it under your care and safety they are going to do it somewhere else, most likely not safe and in potential danger.
Anonymous Youth
