Everything Great About Being Bad

By: Kamora Young

Instead, in lieu of letting my words get lost in my Notes app, I have an open, long-running Google Doc titled “Every time the words come to me, just write.” The most recent time I needed to revisit my Doc, I found a lone sentence in a new tab, written by me at 11:11 p.m. last Thursday: “Everything I do now is things that used to freak me the f**k out… like loud music.” 

Okay, it may not make a lot of sense grammatically, but it makes sense to me. As a kid, I hated it when my parents played loud music in the car. All I could do was retreat to the back seat and wait for it to be over. Nowadays, the racket is endless at live shows or on dancefloors. 

Pacing in the dorm laundry room, I called my aunt after a particularly disastrous night that even landed me, a former second-grader who’d cry if her behavior card was ever changed from green to yellow, in a bit of trouble. She assured me not to fret and that there’s a first time for everything. It was there that I realized that not everything changes after childhood. 

My biggest, most deep-seated fear is messing up. There’s a huge, bug-eyed, stupid Bigfoot-esque critter in my mind that tells me to have control over my life. Whether it’s in food and watching which calories go in and out and when, a social life, or finding the next thing to add to my resume or prove myself in, I realized that trying to ‘make right’ with the universe is really the thing that’s holding me back. 

Being bad doesn’t have to be aligned with the dictionary definition of the word. It can mean being brave (sometimes, for me, that’s even just raising my hand in class on a bad day) and nose-diving into the things that freak you the f**k out… like loud music.

• college
• mental health
• mindset
• personal growth
• reflection
• self discovery