Impressing Myself
Personally I want to impress myself; I want to look good so that I'm happy; I want to get grades I would be proud of; I want to do or not do make up to feel confident in myself and in my appearance; I want to wear a skirt because I felt like it and not because I wanted to impress a guy; I want to eat and manage by body image to be happy with myself, not to please society's expectations of my body or my looks. Over the past couple of months, I've repeatedly been hearing assumptions of why I'm wearing a floral skirt one day and sweatpants another or that I'm participating in the activities that I have chosen to in order to impress colleges. Although my two examples may seem to be on different parts of the spectrum, they still relate in the sense that those two situations please other people, a certain institution, or society in general, and not me.
Over the years, I've been called many different things and thought about in many different ways and for the sake of this blog post I'd rather not get into the details of it, but I've learned to not let it bother me because I am who I am and the person who I really need to impress, please, or make happy is myself because I will be me for the rest of my life and it's easier to come to terms with that fact and make the best out of it rather than to live my life attempting to appease everyone in a 5 mile radius. But this isn't to say that we should totally disregard other people because I understand, I don't live alone and my actions affect others. Rather what I'm saying is that it's important for me, for all of us, to feel comfortable with who we are and remember that we can't please everybody, but the one person we truly know well enough to please is ourselves: whether that have to do with grades, interests, extracurricular activities, daily calorie intake, goals, aspirations, body image, etc. We should first look to make ourselves happy because happiness is very visible. We smile, laugh, enjoy, and think positively and I think that should be enough to appease everybody's wishes and thoughts.
(p.s. For the record, I wear skirts because they feel and look nice, and I wear sweatpants because they're comfortable. And the extracurricular activities that I have chosen to partake in allow me to propel my future aspirations and help hone my interests in life and they bring joy to me everyday. Yes, colleges will see them, but I'm not in these organizations because of the colleges - but that's for another blog post, right? ^_^)