Life Lived Happily Ever After

Life Lived “Happily Ever After”

A Twist in Endings

Once upon a time, in a faraway kingdom, there lived a widowed gentleman and his lovely daughter, Ella. Ella was a beautiful girl. She had golden hair, and her eyes were as blue as forget-me-nots. The gentleman was a kind and devoted father, and he gave Ella everything her heart desired. But he felt she needed a mother. So he married again, choosing for his wife a woman who had two daughters. The gentleman soon died. Then the stepmother’s true nature was revealed. She was only interested in her ugly, selfish daughters.

The stepmother gave Ella a little room in the attic, old rags to wear, and all the housework to do. Soon everyone called her Cinderella, because she got so covered with cinders from cleaning the fireplaces. But Cinderella had many friends; everyone loved her except her stepfamily. She was always kind and tried to help everyone out, but still she was greatly miss-treated. One day when an invitation for a Grand-Ball arrived she got excited but her evil stepsisters ruined everything, from her hair to her shoes. But later on with the help of her Fairy godmother she went and had a wonderful time with the prince, in the end living happily ever after.

Why is it that Fairy Tales always create a magical world for us with wonderful wishes, but in the end it never really comes true. Why can’t life always end with “Happily Ever After?” Turns out to be that Cinderella did not have to go through peer-pressure in school, emotional problems or any sort of abuse. So her life if not entirely easy was defiantly eliminated from the hardships that a normal teenager’s life brings on. Sometimes the best policy is to face the problems Head-On. But turns out to be in today’s generation more and more teenagers are committing suicide and ending their life; even before it started. They are not giving this new experience a chance to show them the delights of life. Statistics according to suicide polls show that every hour and forty-five minutes another teen commits suicide, willingly ending their young life.

So when asked the common question- What causes a teen to end their life forever? "High school and teenage years can be a miserable place if you feel like you don't belong. People can think you're 'different' because of the way you look, dress, or behave." (Professor from University of Utah). Many common points are brought to attention, but only a few are problems add up to the big picture. Adolescence is a stressful developmental period filled with major changes - body changes, changes in thoughts, and changes in feelings.

Strong feelings of stress, confusion, fear, and uncertainty, as well as pressure to succeed, and the ability to think about things in new ways influence a teenager's problem solving and decision making abilities. For some teenagers, normal developmental changes, when compounded by other events or changes in their families such as divorce or moving to a new community, changes in friendships, difficulties in school, or other losses can be very upsetting and can become overwhelming. Some problems may appear too difficult or embarrassing to overcome.

One reason is emotional problems; they can be troubling and arouse from many feelings. “About 4 out of 10 adolescents have cried and felt so miserable that they think so little of themselves that life does not seem worth living.”(Yellow Ribbon Campaign) These feelings create one of the biggest factors, depression. Suicide attempts are usually created when a teen sees no other way out of problems, freedom from emotional pain or no way, shape or form of communicating their inner thoughts and feelings of desperate unhappiness.

Another leading problem, even though most of us don’t realize it is school, considered a must in today’s society, a good education is valued higher than practically anything in today’s generation. But what parents might fail to understand is that not only is school an environment where their children get their education; it also is a social game of the best, the prettiest, the smartest, most popular and much more in the never-ending list of social status. Exams and work can become a burden at times and some teens take