Talking Teenage Life

When I turned 13, I thought that the next seven years could define my life. By the end of them, I knew I would have made big choices that could define my future such as A Levels, and whether I would go to University and what I would study.

This felt really daunting at the start so I spoke to my Dad and he suggested to start a podcast.

This was something quite daunting and I’d never done anything like it before. I would be meeting new people, interviewing them, editing episodes, and publishing them for anyone to hear. As quite a shy teenager, this felt a little bit scary but also exciting and so Talking Teenage Life was created.

The first series I interviewed ten different people, and recorded the episodes in person. After the first interview, I remember feeling such a buzz and excitement and I knew that I would love creating this series.

Then lockdown happened and I had to move the interviews to Zoom which added another dimension when it came to editing but I learnt so much from these first series and chatted to some incredible people.

Each conversation would involve hearing about the interviewee’s teenage years, what they had done and learnt since and the last question “what would you tell your teenage self?”

For the third series, I branched out and actually got more teenagers involved. I looked at eight different topics that most teenagers are affected by and spoke to an adult ‘expert’ about their experiences, and two of my friends who had been impacted by the subject of the podcast.

For the fourth series, I joined Trevor Waldock who created seven questions that would help young people have a clearer idea on their future. I spoke to him about how to answer these questions and then would discuss answers with a three of my friends from school.

The whole podcast is something I look back on and can see how much I’ve grown from the first ever episode to the last one. It’s still available on podcast platforms and I hope that it’s still informative and applicable to teenagers now.

It was hard to come to terms when I turned twenty that Talking Teenage Life was no longer applicable to me, but I hope that I have taken a lot of advice given to me and I definitely feel I made the most out of the seven teenage years.