Here is the feeling: that there is something specific about your situation, or about you, that nobody around you actually gets. And that explaining it would either be impossible or would go badly.
Let us take that seriously rather than talking you out of it.
Some of it is probably true
Adults will tell you they understand. Often they partly do and partly do not, and pretending otherwise is one of the more annoying things adults do.
Things that are genuinely different about now:
- Everything is permanent and public in a way it was not for your parents
- You are compared to everyone, constantly, with numbers attached
- The pressure around exams and the future is real and is not imagined
- You are expected to make decisions about your whole life at seventeen
- There is a lot of noise and very little quiet
So when an adult says “I was your age once”, they are half right. The feelings are old. The conditions are not.
You are allowed to say that. I know you had a version of this. I do not think you had this version. Most reasonable adults will accept it.
And some of it is the age itself
This is the part that is harder to hear and is worth knowing anyway.
Feeling fundamentally alone and unknowable is one of the most common experiences of being between thirteen and eighteen. Not because teenagers are dramatic — for a specific reason. You have just developed the ability to observe your own inner life in detail, and you have not yet had much practice putting it into words, or much evidence that other people have one too.
So you are experiencing something enormous and assuming you are the only one.
Almost everyone around you is doing exactly this. Almost nobody says so. That is why it feels like you are alone in it — the evidence is hidden by the same silence you are keeping.
What actually helps
Tell one person one true thing. Not everything, and not the whole explanation. One true sentence to one person. The relief of being partly known is much larger than you expect, and it is the thing that starts to break the loop.
Lower what you are asking for. “Being understood” completely is rare for anyone. “Being taken seriously” is much more available and does nearly the same job. Aim for the second.
Write it down. Not for anyone. Feelings you have never put into language stay vague and enormous. Written down they get edges, and things with edges are easier to carry.
Find people who are like you in a specific way. Not people like you generally. People who share the one thing — the same interest, the same situation, the same question. That is usually where actually being understood shows up.
Be careful with proving it. There is a version of this where you start collecting evidence that nobody understands, and stop noticing when someone does. That is worth watching for, because it makes the feeling true.
The faith bit
If you are around church, you have probably been told God understands. Whether that helps depends entirely on what you are feeling, so here is the more useful version.
The Bible contains a startling amount of people saying almost exactly this. The Psalms are full of where are you, how long, nobody sees this. Elijah, after an enormous success, sits under a tree and says he is the only one left — and he is factually wrong, and God does not argue with him about it first. He gets fed and allowed to sleep before anything else.
That last detail is worth noticing. Sometimes the first thing that helps is not an explanation.
Being known and being understood by people are different things, and one is available even in a stretch where the other is not.
If this has been going on a while
Feeling misunderstood is normal. Feeling like this constantly, for weeks, with everything flattened out, is different.
If you have stopped wanting things you used to want, if you are not sleeping or eating normally, if you have thought about hurting yourself, or if you have thought about not being here — please tell someone today.
Childline Kenya is free on 116, any time, from any phone. The person who answers does this specifically, you will not be in trouble, and you are not wasting anyone’s time. There are more Kenyan services here.
That feeling — that nobody would understand — is exactly the thing that stops people reaching out. It is also, very often, wrong.
Common questions
Is it normal to feel this way?
Extremely, and more so between about thirteen and eighteen than at any other point. That is not a dismissal — it is genuinely useful information, because it means the feeling is a stage you are in rather than a permanent fact about you.
What if I try to explain and they still do not get it?
Being understood completely is rare for anyone at any age. What is much more available is being taken seriously, which is a lower bar and does most of the same work. Someone who listens properly without fully understanding is worth a great deal.
What if I do not want to talk to anyone?
That is allowed, and it is worth noticing that not wanting to talk and not being able to are different things. If you have wanted to and could not find the words, that is a different problem with a solution. If the not-wanting has lasted weeks and everything else has gone flat too, tell someone anyway.