Ailin is a regular teenager but she holds a weight most adults would struggle to carry

Ailin is a regular teenager. She loves music, and the beach and she's busy studying for her HSC. She's truly as Australian as it gets. But Ailin holds a secret - a weight even most adults would struggle to carry.

"I'm not an Australian citizen and never will be".

Ailin throws everything she has at life, because she's been given a second chance.

"I love music, I go to the beach a lot. I play sports with my mates," she said.

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She's too modest to say that she volunteers, teaches Ukrainian children English, works part time and plays representative basketball.

Ailin is a high achiever.

Except there's one thing that makes her different.

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Ailin's parents fled Iran in 2013, with their then three-year-old daughter.

Forced to flee following threats to their lives, they boarded a boat bound for Australia.

It was a time when nearly 17,000 people had made that perilous journey in the months before Ailin and her family, some died trying.

The Rudd government wanted to stop people smugglers.

The new law stated that if you come by boat without a visa and you're processed offshore, you can never permanently call Australia home.

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Ailin arrived four days too late.

She and her parents were sent to Nauru for processing.

"I remember white tents and I remember being hungry and I remember my mum and how she was thinner than I had ever seen her before," Ailin said.

Ailin and her parents were eventually transferred to Australia for medical treatment, and after years in community detention were allowed to stay in Australia on a bridging visa.

But that visa only allows them to stay here basically as a guest, requiring them to reapply every six months.

She is officially recognised as a refugee.

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Ailin also can't leave Australia because she wouldn't be allowed back. Plus, she's not allowed to do any study beyond high school because of the type of visa she is on.

"Unlike my friends and everyone else, I don't get to pursue a further education and can't go to university and pursue my passions," Ailin told A Current Affair's Allison Langdon.

"I would like to study something in radiation therapy or something to do with medicine and be able to go and help other Australians.

"I can't do that because of what I had to go through when I was a child."

Ailin puts a face to a law that, yes, stopped the boats, but with unintended consequences.

She's one of 126 children who came here as kids or babies, now left living a life in limbo - a forgotten child of Nauru.

"I am forgotten, yeah," Ailin said.

"Every experience I've had that is significant or that I remember or that actually I hold dear to me, it's here and it is Australian and I am Australian. I don't know anything else."