Earlier this semester, a freshman in my Shakespeare class told me she thought of me as an authority figure and a role model. Confused, I asked her why. She told me I seemed confident and like I knew what I was doing. I laughed. We were sitting at Waffle House at 10 p.m. practicing for our final performance for that Shakespeare class. I hadn’t showered that day, I had gotten only a few hours of sleep the night before, and I had just eaten a large order of hashbrowns as my first and only meal of the day. Knew what I was doing? Of course not. But confident? Yes.
Before I came to college, I always felt like my accomplishments defined me. If I was a high achiever, I was a good person. I could be happy with myself if I kept getting A’s, and I could be confident in myself if other people confirmed to me that I was doing well. I didn’t realize how unhealthy that was, because I was doing okay. I had leadership positions in my clubs, I was drum major for my high school band, and I graduated valedictorian.
When I got to college, that all fell away, and so did my confidence. The A’s didn’t come so easily, and without the net of support I had back home, my faith in my future plans faltered. I switched majors, and sophomore year was better, but I still felt unsure. Being in college, especially with plans for graduate school, it is impossible to know if your future plans will pan out exactly how you want them to. If I didn’t have confidence my achievements would continue, how was I supposed to have confidence in myself? This year, through a whirlwind of opportunities, successes, and yes, many failures and disappointments, I finally learned to love myself, regardless of what the world thought of me.
Yeah, it’s impossible to wake up one morning and decide that you are no longer going to value your worth on the opinions of others. It took me a long time to get to the point where I could sit in that Waffle House with my classmates, with so much uncertainty in my life, and still love myself enough that others could see it. Whenever I get a grade I’m not happy with, feel like I’m not participating in enough extracurricular activities, or begin to stress about graduate school, I remind myself that there are so many other important things I do that make me valuable as a person. I take a moment to think about all the wonderful friendships I’ve made in college and that those friends don’t care how many scholarships I’ve earned, how many leadership positions I hold, or whether or not I screwed up and spelled my own last name wrong in the header of the fourteen-page paper I submitted at 11:57 p.m. Tuesday night. (Whoops.) They care about how much fun we have together and that we are always there for each other. GPAs, scholarships, and leadership positions are important, of course, but not so much that they should become the only thing that matters. It has been hard to shake a mindset I’ve had for most of my life, but it is definitely worth it. I still struggle, but it gets easier every day, especially when people tell me they can see how much happier I am now. When someone else sees me as a role model because I have confidence in myself and who I am, that’s when I know that learning to love myself has been so worth it.
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