Unique: being without a like or equal.
Senior year is the epitome of every high school career. It is the year all high schoolers suddenly have to start making big life decisions for themselves. Students are encouraged to find their own, unique selves by senior year. As Troy Bolton once said in the movie High School Musical 3, “East High is a place where teachers encourage us to break the status quo and define ourselves as we choose.”
So, what is a girl to do when her definition is read to her in front of the entire class?
Senior yearbook superlatives are meant to be a fun event, but for me, it was a scarring experience. I had spent my high school career blissfully ignorant of most of my classmates and instead focused on my friends and I supposed to myself that I had gone unnoticed by everyone else as well. If anyone reading this has ever attended high school, you undoubtedly know how mistaken I was.
Names were being called out all around me for the titles of, “Drama Queen and King, Best Dressed, Cutest Couple,” and I was secretly relieved when I wasn’t summoned up on the stage to have my picture taken until…
“Most Unique, Samantha Hilyer!”
That was when my heart dropped, and my stomach twisted itself up into a knot. As it turned out, I hadn’t been as invisible to everyone else as I thought. In fact, people pretty much labeled me as weird.
Now, in answer to the previous question, my response to the situation was to cry in the bathroom.
I bet you were expecting me to write that I had this sudden, big defining moment where I stood up and made this great speech about how we’re all unique, and then all my classmates would cheer. Unfortunately, I am not cool, basketball star Troy Bolton and my life is not a musical. I’m more of a Moaning Myrtle from Harry Potter, flooding the bathroom with my tears, not to be over-dramatic.
My definition of unique was ugly and so I felt ugly. I graduated high school with the image in my head that I was too different. And that’s just simply the wrong way of thinking about it.
As a freshman in my second semester of college, I can say that college has changed me in so many ways. I’ve started to embrace who I am. I like the idea of my individuality, my creativity. But I am still not strong enough to come to grips with my title of “Most Unique” in the most positive sense. I am working to amend my view and I want to encourage anyone who has ever felt excluded, laughed at, undesired and different to stop seeing a reflection of herself/himself in what other people say and start seeing that being different, that being unique is beautiful. Even when it feels like it’s the ugliest curse to be afflicted with.
Don’t let yourself be defined and contained by words. Be indefinably, positively, you.
HCXO,
Samantha