For those of you who have been reading my blog for a while, you know that I’ve struggled with self identity and the different levels of self hatred from my history of being bullied. The entire purpose of Bri 2.0 was me finding reasons to like myself. And since coming to college, that goal has been fully achieved, and as I tweeted on October 20th, “I’ve reached a level of emotional maturity where I no longer hate myself. I hate everyone else.”
It was meant as humorous, as a satire, but there’s a point in it that I wanted to remember.
A lot of my epiphanies regarding myself in the past year have dealt with the realization that I can’t control the actions of others, only my response to those actions. I’ve come to accept that people, in general, kind of suck, but that’s not an excuse to mope and hate myself.
Look, I know a lot of you can relate to the constant feeling of hating yourself. Maybe you hate your body (like if you have an irreversible pear shaped one with a butt that rivals mountains), or a feature on your face (like a massive nose, for instance, or eyes that never stay open in pictures so you always look crazy), or maybe you hate some sort of personality trait (like an inability to move on or react properly in social situations). Self-hatred is pretty universal.
But somehow, I’ve moved past this stage. I really don’t know what it is. I think maybe I’m just too busy to hate myself any more. Like, there really isn’t time for me to pine over my appearance in the mirror because I share a bathroom with thirty other girls and I’ve always got something else to do.
I think one of the big reasons is that people aren’t nasty to me in college. I’m not wildly popular and people aren’t always knocking on my dorm room door to see if I want to hang out, but no one is outwardly mean to me and no one has talked behind my back about how much they dislike me*. In fact, people here actually think I’m funny. My forensics team thinks I’m hillarious with my toilet humor, and people look to me for comments in class to lighten things up.
People in college didn’t grow up with me. They have no context for my behavior. They just appreciate what I’ve become. No one here knows that I used to wear grandma fitting pants and tennis shoes, or that I used to remind teachers about homework. No one here remembers the time I sneezed and caused a boogerpocalypse in 7th grade art class, and no one knows who I’ve dated. No one knows me as the Yearbook Nazi or the Tyrant Commentary Editor. Sure, they still think I’m a bit weird, but it’s a weird that can just pass as eccentric in a college setting.
Here, people see me for what I’ve always wanted to be; a writer who likes to get her hands into any kind of creative outlet available. A blogger with an offbeat sense of humor. A nerd with a veritable social life.
As much as I hate to admit it, people around me do have an effect on how I feel about myself. It’s hard to block out environmental influences, even in this increasingly individualized age. So I’m glad I’ve managed to find an environment that likes me for what I am, not what I was or what I should have been. I didn’t think I reinvented myself in college, but maybe I did.
*This happened a lot in high school. No joke.
