Around the nation this week, the tense topic of the HSC exams is on everyone’s lips.

“It’s too much pressure for them,” say some.

“How are they meant to make career choices at this stage?” say others.

We can all recognise, and remember for ourselves, the immense stress of this stage in a teen’s life.

HSC stress. Seriously, when did it become such a big deal?

And yet, it feels more intense than ever. Teens are working overtime to make sure they succeed in the testing that they have been utterly convinced will shape the remainder of their lives. We’ve heard about kids popping No Doze caffeine tablets, and stolen Ritalin ADHD medication, just to stay alert during the 5 hour marathon exam sittings.

The pressure is well and truly on.

As someone who sat the HSC exam over 10 years ago now, the feeling of dread and angst still hasn’t left me.

I couldn’t tell you a single question I was asked on the tests, or even where I sat it. I hardly remember finding out my result, or my reaction, or my parent’s reaction.

But that feeling? That anxiety that this was it: my moment of reckoning had arrived – well, that will never leave me.

As I have observed the strung-out teens putting themselves into overdrive for these few hideous weeks, the penny dropped. This isn’t the last time they will be struggling with the advent of Huge Life Change.

Without sounding like a bitter old spinster, I do truly wonder if anyone has warned them that this is just the entry to a Suez Canal of life stages. This is just round one of a long journey of preparing yourself over and over again for ‘The Next Step’. They ain’t seen nothing yet.

In fact, this is just the first of many, many moments in their lives that they will primed and led by traditional societal constructs to accept and embrace a new chapter. Even if it’s not right for them. Even if they’re not ready.

Why? Because it’s the ‘right thing to do’.

At 17, when I sat my HSC, I had no idea what I wanted to do – right, wrong, or otherwise.

A naughty teen, I had spent my final year of high school in a country all-girls boarding school, and had lost all sight of the creative dreams and goals that had shaped my childhood years. I was a nice generic fish swimming upstream, with teachers and peers nipping at my toes to swim faster, swim further, swim in the direction that everyone else was swimming.

Needless to say, after an uninspiring few months at Uni studying – God, I don’t even remember what – I had thrown in the towel and was on a plane destined for a city at the other end of the country.

All of those months of studying for the HSC, sleepless nights, and endless career plans suddenly meant absolutely bloody nothing.

Me, age 18: In the months and years immediately following my HSC, I couldn’t have run further from the goals I thought I had set myself. So what was the point of the stress and anxiety?

At 27, I cannot help but feel I am back in the same place.

Except instead of standing on the precipice of childhood and young adulthood, I am now teetering on the edge of young adulthood and, well, REAL adulthood. Like comrades on the battlefield, my peers are falling one by one: pregnancy announcements, engagement announcements, promotion announcements.

People are moving overseas, moving up the corporate ladder, moving in with their boyfriends, and moving on from the lifestyle I am still very much at home in… that is, shopping, cocktails, and pizza-in-bed hangovers.

Alas, these traffic signs pointing us in the ‘right direction’ will be littered throughout our lives. In my case – big, red, signs, saying ‘Wrong Way, Go Back.’

In our teens we’re asked to choose our passion and our careers. In our early twenties we’re asked to find a degree and study for our profession. In our late twenties things start to get really hairy, with the onset of marriage, children, responsible drinking habits and mortgages. The thirties are reserved for raising a family, the forties for forging a successful career and fat bank account, fifties and sixties for spending the bank account and just getting fat, seventies for proving bones are still healthy… and the list goes on.

It is basic human instinct to look for these markers to gauge our own success – but, like our HSC school leavers, are we starting to take them too seriously?

Maybe we all need to be a little less stressed out about these ‘Big Life Decisions’ and a little more…well, WHATEVER!

I think we all need to start taking the same advice we are lavishing on school leavers, advice that un-doubtably is relevant for any age group.

Here are some lines I know I’ve been dishing out left, right, and center to any school leaver in my orbit: time to talk my own advice, me thinks…

Without sounding naff, aren’t these words to live by at any age?

Whatever anxieties we are faced with – growing up, growing old, growing apart – the antidote is always the same. Relax. Believe. Have some faith in your abilities. Know there are many options. Think logically. Think laterally. Think creatively. Don’t give into pressure. Relax!

So whether you’re a parent guiding your teen through these tough days of HSC and university selection, an arrested development Gen Y-er like myself, or just someone trying to take the leap into the next ‘stage’ in your life – remember this. Take it at your own pace, believe in your own journey (even if the traffic signs say ‘wrong way, go back’), and for God’s sake, don’t eat No Doze.

I hear they make you need to pee.