good morning, good evening, and good night

Hi,

Today's blog is gonna be a bit more personal.

For so long, I thought that I didn't care what others thought. I didn't care if I was an awkward unattractive loser nerd since it "didn't matter". But I didn't realize just how much that affects ME. Inevitably, your own perception of yourself is bound to be at least guided by how everyone else defines your qualities. "Smart" is good, "dumb" is bad; "pretty" is good, "ugly" is bad. Not caring if other people miscategorize you negatively is one thing, accepting that categorization and just arbitrarily saying you "don't care" that you have that negative quality is another. And I, very obviously, was doing the latter. 

Now you might be thinking "Well, obvious solution, switch to the former!"

If only it was that easy.

Kids are cruel. No matter what age they are, school kids are cruel. It is a tight-knit community where everyone knows everything and there is such an obvious social hierarchy that ignoring it is nearly impossible. You fall too low and you're getting erasers and paper pieces to the head, laughs behind your back, taunting, so on. Now I was lucky enough that I wasn't openly bullied after 5th grade, but I could still feel where I stood in everybody's mind from how one or two mean kids would act as if I wasn't even human. Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming them for any of this. I was a stinky unkempt little loser and I wouldn't have realized any of that had they just treated me like I was on "their level". 

Then I learned makeup. I learned how to dress "normal". Because that's way easier to do than to rewire your brain to completely ignore all outside input on your identity. And learning to be normal is necessary, if only to understand how everyone else thinks. 

And it worked. If i wore makeup, if i wore less colorful, form-fitting clothes then people would start seeing me as a human being again. And that made me realize that I was never ugly, I was never a loser. I just didn't know how to present myself.

And then I got addicted on that high. On that feeling of being respected as "one of the normal people". And I did more and more to fit in. Changing my style more, getting comfortable with showing more skin, wearing a colder default expression, talking less excitedly, learning to do makeup better, and many other such things. 

But then came the feeling of losing who I was. Losing all that made me, me. All that made me unique, all that made me worth walking up to and starting a conversation with. I tried to get over that by expressing as much of myself as I could in a way that still fit within the small set of qualities that are normal. Wearing my favourite color all the time, dying my hair, wearing a pin or two on my bag, hanging keychains on every little space that could hold them. But that still didn't feel like me. The personality I was displaying wasn't mine. It didn't feel nice, it wasn't comfortable. And the respect it gained me within that tight-knit community was only partial: The initial image of a loser was still apparent in everyone's mind, for them I was just a reformed loser that they could have a little chat with every now and then but could never really be actual friends with.

I had learned how to let go of discomfort, to adjust my view on life to one that allowed me to accept and live with any situation in peace, but then I had lost it somewhere along the way without even realizing.

And so, I changed again. I started doing hobbies I always enjoyed, watching things I always knew I liked, wearing the clothes that have made me the most comfortable. I still cared about my image, but only within my own mind. If I could perceive myself positively, then nothing else mattered. If what I wore made me feel pretty, it didn't matter if someone else thought it was over the top. As long as the way I was expressing my emotions made me feel comfortable, it didn't matter if others didn't get them. Because I was living for me again, and that was not only enough but instead all I could ever ask for. I began accepting myself again.

That didn't mean I wasn't social, I always have been. In fact, depriving myself of that was another mistake I had been making for a long while. This just meant that the people I would keep in touch with now would be people I am my true self with, as I now always am. And that was, unsurprisingly, most of my friends. It was even easier to socialize outside of my already existing large social circle, as I now no longer had a facade I had to treat delicately as not to break.

What this rollercoaster of self-depracation to self-glazing is concluding on is, therefore, the fact that I am very content with where I am in self-discovery right now. I can't say I know everything there is to know about myself, but I've (re)reached a point where I am content with and will be content with all that makes up the individual that is me.

Damn, that's long.

TLDR; i felt like poo then i changed myself to not feel poopish but then i didnt like that so i learned to be myself without feeling like poo so yay!

this might not make perfect sense because I did skip over a little arc there where I reached this exact point but then senior year was so academically horrifying that my mentality reverted lol but either way thank you for following me on this little fleshing out of my mental journey! i know i personally wouldve gotten bored and left on paragraph 2