Trent Dowd

Trent+Dowd

Corey Brown

When I look at our society the way it is, the only thing I can think of is disgust. I don’t really know how to explain it because it’s different for everybody. To go along with that, trying to achieve the standards that people have set for you is very difficult because in their eyes, you’ll never be good enough, and I feel like that one of the hardest things about being a teenager.

What bothers me the most about myself is the fact that I’m way too kind to people. I swim oceans for people who can’t even cross bridges for me, and I don’t like that about myself.

One of the worst things that has ever happened to me actually wasn’t too long ago. My best friend Matt lost his mother. She was like a second mother to me. She changed my life and changed my daily routine, and I know have to go through not saying hello to her. It’s a feeling of emptiness.

My biggest fear would be losing my parents: without them you are truly nothing, they brought you into this world and you are supposed to raise you into it, and if they aren’t there to do that, what else do you have? Tying into that, I believe our family to fall into the middle class. By middle class, I mean, money is everything to me, no matter what, money everything revolves around money. It buys food, clothes, and it can even get you a home.

Without money, you wouldn’t have anything. I would like to grow up and be in the middle class also, but I’d like to make more money than my family does, just because I’ve seen how much people can struggle with even what we have now.

-The American Teenager Project was inspired by a book and online nationwide project by photographer Robin Bowman and educator Julia Hollinger that collects interviews with adolescents in order to respectfully share their stories and build community.  BCS students in grades 10-12 recorded interviews with one another and used those to write profiles of their classmates. We will publish these throughout the school year.