A Worthwhile Journey

Frequently while growing up, I faced myself in the mirror and asked myself "who am I?"I longed, and still sometimes do, for a sense of a clear cut identity, of a sense of how I was different from everyone, but also of how I was the same. Both these questions came into play at different points of my life. The 'how I was the same' was at the beginning of my life until the end of my sophomore year of high school. The 'how I was different' became more important after that. In my quest of who to find out who I was I tried out many different identities, many similar to those people and characters that I longed to be like. This didn't get me very far though because after awhile, I tired of playing a role and I had to change, but never back to myself. Looking back on this, I realized I did this because as you grow up, you want people to like you and accept you. You didn't want the world to mock you for who you were. If you pretend to be someone else, and people don’t like you, you can blame it on who you pretended to be and change to someone else. But if you be yourself and people still don’t like you, you can’t blame it on an act, and you can’t change into a whole new person, because who you really are never truly goes away. I mean, you can only run so long from yourself before you catch up to yourself. I feared rejection based on who I was, which to me is the worst kind of rejection. At the end of that sophomore year though,I came to realize though, if you live your whole life through a lens that belongs to someone else, at the end of it all, you never truly lived your life. You can't let fear hold you back from living. You just have to be yourself.

So, after I came to this realization, I tried to find out who I was and how I came to be that way. After all, isn't there that saying that the journey is more important than the destination? Well, it's extremely true. I had to look at my life at face value and realize that all that had happened to me, those times that I loved, and those moments that I looked back in embarrassment at, had all formed me in who I was and will always be apart of who I will be. All the things I had been through, the ended friendships, the bullying, the times with my family, and every random moment in between have led me to this point. And finally, at the end of this journey of self-discovery, I found someone who I could be proud of. But I have to remember, this journey is continuous and will always be a part of me. We never stop growing. 

At some point in every life, this is all a journey we have to take, whether we are aware we take it or not. Our lives are full of moments, many that we take for granted, many that we remember as horrible or sad, many that are full of beauty. But they all take us to who and where we are meant to be.