In reality, I have had a miserable freshman year. I have an overwhelming feeling that I am wasting my life. The classes I am taking have overall bored me and seem irrelevant to the life I wish to lead after graduation. The student organization I joined turned out to be more work than some of my classes. The expectations of making tons of friends returned back empty. I have spent most of the year alone in my room. Because I am an extrovert this experience has been painful and deeply depressing. It reminded me of the many lonely years I spent in grade school without a close best friend.
I was always seen as a loner, even by my family, but in reality all I wanted was a big group of friends to hang out with. From first grade on, I was in the gifted and talented program. It placed me in the classroom with most of the well to do children in my school. My homemade clothing, crooked teeth, and long hair made me different—they all wore Limited Too, had braces, and short bobs. I never fit in and was considered a poor outsider by the children I attended first through sixth grade with. Even though my family moved into the middle class ranking, this classification never wore off. As I entered middle and then high school in Mineral Wells, I was never accepted by the popular crowd that made up my pre- AP classes. I considered myself better than mainstream students and their conversations and mannerisms often bored or disgusted me. I remained a loner. When my family moved to Temple, I was determined to start over. And I did. My sophomore and junior years were hard; I had never really had but one or two friends—I did not even know where to start. But by my senior year I had definitely made progress and friends. The only problem was the friends I made had been friends since second grade. Although I was accepted into their group, I was never as close to them as they were with each other.
Taking a year off before coming to college did not help much either. I was separated from all the experiences my friends were having and had little in common with them when they arrived back home during spring and summer breaks. I was working forty to fifty hours a week while they were partying the nights away and sleeping all day. Needless to say, my high school buddies and I grew further and further apart during that year. My co-workers quickly replaced my high school buddies and became my new friends. Soon I was dating Johnny and the need for a close girlfriend did not seem to matter as much for quite a while.
When I arrived at college after my year long break, I was sure that with sixty thousand students on campus I was certain to find someone that I could call my best friend. When that did not happen, when I did not even come close to making real friends—that is when depression set in. What is the point of living life when it must be done alone? Sure I have a boyfriend that loves and adores me. Yes I have a family that will always be there. But they are an hour away and while I am abundantly thankful for them, I wonder if I will I ever find someone of the same female sex that relates to me, to gossip and shop with? I have begun to wonder, and this wondering lead to self-contemplation. Thus I began my search to see and to understand myself for who I truly am not who I want to be. I wanted to find and unify the person within.
Having plenty of alone time has forced this self-contemplation upon me. My seminar class on the autobiographical impulse in female writing opened my eyes to the same impulse within myself. As a professor once told me, “You a
re a poet. You will feel emotion stronger than the everyday person. Your pain will be ten times the pain of any other, but your happiness will also know no bounds. Until you embrace your emotions you will never know yourself. You will write best when your emotions are at their highest peak.” This is where I my journey begins—with my emotions. When I felt depressed I sunk as far into the depression as I could. When I felt alone I was often surrounded by a street full of people. When I was happiest I was surrounded by the people that I love or lying in the arms of the man I love. I was most content napping outside with my cat in the sun. I was most unhappy when I was alone.
While consciously experiencing these emotions and taking consistent journal entries, I gained a higher awareness of myself than I thought was possible. My senior English professor had told us that the most important thing in life was to “Know Thyself.” I took this advice quite literal then and have continued to expand my knowledge of myself throughout the year. I learned that I am not a fighter, but instead that I often run from things that scare me. I realized that I often take on more than I can handle—telling myself that I can—which leads to feelings of being overwhelmed. I run from these situations, becoming depressed and angry with my lack of ability to cope. I found that I often bottle up emotions inside, allowing them to erupt unexpectedly on an innocent person. On a more positive note, I learned things about myself I liked as well. I realized that I do not mind that my skin does not tan, or that my freckles stand out when I spend time outside. I love my body and except for my teeth cannot think of one thing that I would change. I found that I am an accepting person: I rarely judge people on their appearance or speech. Trust is a virtue that I learned somewhere; I am open with people easily and (maybe naively) expect the best from everyone. I learned that following my own heartbeat and learning more about myself makes me a more confident, self-assured, happy person.
More important than all these things, I have learned to listen to the small voice inside myself. Much like Siddhartha, who searched for the person behind the emotions and
senses only to find that the emotions and sense was the real person, I have embraced that person. I learned that external unity stems from internal unity, and internal unity cannot be achieved without listening and learning from yourself. Siddhartha sat by the river for many years and listened as all the voices came together to form the holy “OM.” As I place all the parts of myself together and learn from each individual as well as the whole, the voice within composes who I am, who I have become, and who I will be. I am all these people and none of these people all at the same time. I can genuinely say that this person has been reached without peer pressure or outside influence, but through a year of solitary soul searching. It has been painful at times and joyful at others, but overall it has been worth it. I feel stronger and ready to take on the world. Although my freshman year has been lonely and not at all what I expected, I am truly thankful that I have had a chance to really face myself in the mirror and see who I am and what I am made of. This is me. This is who I am.
Word Count: 1402
