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| Good meme, good meme. |
I stay active on social media, but I close of many parts of my life to the world. It's not because I'm busy (although that doesn't help). Many aspects of my life are painful to talk about.
Yes, I know the old phrase "It's not about how many times you fall down, but how many times you get back up." But 2019 has been a slippery set of stairs. I've progressed beyond the points where I fell, but I still feel my bruises with every step.
I felt unreasonably insecure when the people around me had different experiences than I did. Either I was behind on something that happened at different times for everyone, or I was a worse person because of something I had no control over.
The ways I differ from many people in my environment are the following:
- religious upbringings
- decisions to continue religious practice or not
- romantic relationships/sexual experiences or lack thereof
- relationships with our parents
- relationships with our friends from high school
- use of alcohol or drugs
- medical needs
- view of how intelligent we are
- political views
- socioeconomic status
- gender and sexual orientation
- personality
- body image
(most importantly)
- combinations of how all of these shape our lives
When I started writing this post, I had been kicking myself for not "getting everything out of my college experience" because I hadn't partied as much as my friends in the year ahead of me or that I hadn't had a relationship since last May while my classmates are getting engaged. This semester will also be the first time I have gotten anything below – here it is – an A- since eighth grade.
All of these things that make me stumble continue to catapult my simple reflection into a fundamental attribution spiral. Maybe I'm not in a relationship because of the weight I've gained or how my hair hasn't achieved "maximum femininity." Maybe I don't talk to my classmates from high school because of how isolated I feel in terms of my sexual orientation and political views.
Now I want to tell you how I got out of it.
Over the last year, I've been talking to my friends for whom I originally had romantic interest (bear with me). What sucks is that I never really thought to ask why things didn't work out the way I thought they did or why they decided to continue a platonic relationship. Like anyone else, I was afraid of the answer. Whether I've asked or the conversation naturally progressed in this direction, the crazy thing is that I found a common denominator of why they wanted to be my friend. The conversations usually have these elements: "It's because I think you're cool."
"I'm COOL? *weird laughter* Well then I tricked you, because you are surely mistaken..."
"You seem so confident. You own every (weird) thing about you. At the same time, you try to lift people up and help them see how they're cool."
"Because you are cool. You're a baller,"–I didn't say that because I'm a white choir kid, but that's how I thought to summarize my thoughts.
"You'll get to that person or those people that want that feeling all of the time, and they'll hold onto you."
I want to address my fellow college cohorts and prospective students: what makes you different does not make you wrong or right. It also doesn't make you better or worse. The people that you will encounter and will inevitably never see again after a certain point won't remember you in a positive or negative light solely because of how you vote, who you do or don't date, or how you look. They remember you for being the person that you are and how you become the person you were meant to be. That person is always going to be so uniquely you that it feels isolating. But people are going to like it. It took me a few years to understand, but great things are going to happen to you in your own time.
