by Rachel Lamb, executive editor
“Do not compare myself to others, just myself. The only person that can be me is ME.”-January 18, 2013 (me was actually written in all caps by my 8th grade self).
Reading my middle school diary makes me feel like I haven’t changed at all since seventh grade. The only changes are that I’m definitely a lot less dramatic, and hopefully I’ve gained a more thoughtful perspective on the world around me. In my diary, I wrote about the same people that are now in my classes as a senior in high school, the same friends, the same procrastination habits and lots of the same worries and goals.
Like previous years, I filled my mind with goals of self-improvement as I approached the summer before my last year in high school. I wanted to “be myself”, stop procrastinating, be nicer to the people around me, think more about what I said before I said it, to avoid conflict, to be less sad and to be less anxious.
And as before, I guess I’ve continued to fail at achieving these goals.
Since third grade I’ve been on a quest to define myself, to not be the quiet girl, to not be the worrisome girl, to not be annoying, to not be untrustworthy, to not be jealous, to be patient. The list goes on to reach my, probably unrealistic, image of perfection.
And I guess in correlation, since I was in third grade, I’ve suffered from a detrimental lack of self-confidence. When I was in fourth grade, my GT teacher brought me into the hallway and looked me in the eyes and said “You need to be more confident, you got the problem right, trust yourself.”
I constantly wanted to be somebody else and it kind of sucked.
I don’t know why I beat myself up for not having myself figured out in high school or why I constantly push myself to reach goals that are pretty unrealistic, but I care, and I care a lot. Over the past few years, I’ve experienced different things that I could not have imagined then, met many different people, and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned to think critically and met a huge array of different, intelligent and powerful people. I have learned to take criticism better and even learned to manage my time a little bit better.
Yet as much as I wish sometimes they did, these changes didn’t magically make me the picture-perfect person I thought they would.
In many ways, I haven’t been a drastically different person. I still worry too much, get upset to easily, procrastinate a lot and often don’t think before I speak. And while I get myself into some interesting situations, one way I have changed in the past few years is I’ve started to be OK about not becoming some perfect person. Maybe that’s the real change I needed.
