Free To Be Me

This is definitely a “if I knew then what I know now” kind of thing. Through the process of reading all of my old journals, I can clearly see lessons I’ve learned since scrawling those emotion filled words back when I was a teenager. My post A Conversation discusses it in more depth. I want to tell my younger self so many things. I see how our life turned out. Those boys that we were too obsessed over in high school…they have zero to do with our adult life now. But I guarantee she wouldn’t have believed me. She was firmly convinced that she was going to marry one of them.

Honestly though, the things I experienced throughout my life have shaped me into who I am now. And as I’ve reflected on the changes in myself over this past year, I’ve come to realize that I don’t think I’ve actually changed. I really think this is who I’ve always been, but past traumas made it so that I felt afraid to show off who I was.

So, to get back to a specific lesson I wish I had learned…I’ll go with the advice I used to always give to my students who left my school in the 8th grade and went on to high school. I always told them to be themselves and not change who they are for anyone. I wish I had done that in high school. It’s hard to do it then though. Peer pressure is intense at that age! But now, as a woman in my 40s who is just now becoming comfortable with being myself, I know that is a very important lesson. Being authentically me is the key to living a happy life. I wish I had learned that sooner, but I’m glad I learned it at all.