We Heart It
Before the New Year, the lovely Hannah Brencher wrote a post about people. You as people; me as people; other people as people; and learning to be okay with our humanness. To love it, even. “Learn to stand in front of the mirror without cringing,” she wrote, and when I read that sentence, I felt like she was calling me out like that professor in British Lit noticing I wasn’t taking notes on her lecture. “It’s not her business whether or not I’m taking notes,” I complained to Emily later. “What if I was one of those people who learned better from listening without the distraction of trying to write down only half of everything she says?” What I wasn’t understanding at the time was that it was my professor’s business. It was her business to the extent that, even though she came off brusque and maybe even a little intolerant, she cared enough about her students, or at least about me as her student, to embarrass me a moment so that I could get it together and start engaging. Teachers have always had a way of singling me out from other students based on potential that wasn’t fully realized or appreciated by myself. It was as if they were saying, “You could be doing so much better.” And the truth was always that I could’ve been. I still could be.
Hannah has a right to tell me I need to learn to love myself, even though she doesn’t know me. She has a right to these words, because I believe she really cares about what she’s writing and the people reading it. It took reading her post to fully understand how I was perceiving myself. It was something I’d thought before, but tried to deny the honesty of it, because I didn’t want to be that girl. I think after the whole ordeal with Kyle, I kept telling myself that he wouldn’t like who I really was even if I had kept his number and called him. I told myself that I was entirely too nerdy, dressed like a marm, and probably wouldn’t put out as much as he’d want. But after I read Hannah’s post, I realized I wasn’t being fair to Kyle at all, whoever he really is. And I certainly wasn’t be fair to myself. “I mean, I’m just a total nerd,” I said to Emily the other night. “Just completely, irrevocably nerdy. I just am.” “And there’s nothing wrong with that,” she said. “You just have to say, ‘hey, I’m a nerd,’ and not care what anyone else thinks.”
I never envisioned myself being that girl who seeks validation from the attention of guys, but recently I had to admit to myself that I’d been acting just the way for a very long time and really needed to cut it out. As far as I know, Katniss Everdeen would’ve just as soon stuck an arrow in Peeta’s ass as smile at him, and seeking validation is more the behavior of a middle and high school-aged girl. Even though I’m sure I’m not the only 20-something female guilty of it, validation isn’t something I want to feel just because a handsome marine decides I’m attractive enough to kiss. Deep down, I know there is nothing wrong with me. So, I love books, snort when I laugh, have a sometimes annoyingly enthusiastic obsession with Harry Potter, talk with a British accent for fun, and have a semi-romantic view of the world? That’s just who I am, and I need to learn to stand in front of the mirror and look at it without cringing. Usually after my talks with Em, I feel a lot better, relieved even, like I can go on about my day with nothing over which to worry. But even still I feel cornered by own discontent. “I feel like I’m having an identity crisis,” I told her. “Or, not really an identity crisis, but that I feel…inadequate.” She nodded. “That sounds about right for your early 20′s.”
I’ve had people tell me this before. That if I’m having these feelings, it means I’m doing my 20′s right. I guess the real challenge isn’t so much learning to love myself for who I really am, but learning to be content with the difficulty of growing up until I get to that point where I really am happy with myself. The challenge isn’t looking in the mirror and being happy with what’s there, it’s looking in the mirror and knowing that the reflection staring back at me may not be exactly what I want to see right now and deciding to love it, anyway.
