Growing Up

Of all the cliches about growing up, I’d have to say “it gets better” is one of the more accurate ones. That is not to say that things won’t ever go wrong, or that there is a specific timeline in which “things get better”. But in the most general and broad way, things do.

From the time I was able to make a cohesive, self-aware thought to my freshman year of college, I swore life was a never-ending joke, and a bad one too. I had a good life, a life that I am so grateful to have, but the bumps in the road of the story of my life could be a bit nauseating.

I was always good at making friends, but for a really long time, I didn’t want them. Anxiety and depression runs on both sides of my family, and it started at a really young age for me. This, paired with the fact that I’m introverted, made for a very mentally exhausting school career. I remember coming home from school in seventh grade and crying into my mom’s shoulder because I was so tired. It wasn’t lack of sleep or all the hard work I was putting into school; it was my social battery running low.

I have a lot of memories coming home from school events, hang outs with friends, and sometimes just weekdays after school crying to my mom how I wished I could have fun without feeling so tired and anxious. It was at this time too that I began to wonder “why” in many different contexts, but more specifically: “Why stay here?”

I struggled with the idea of being a part of a functioning, working world and not feeling like I had a place in it. There’s only so much a thirteen-year-old girl can contribute to society, but it still troubled me that I was a fleck in an expansive universe. These anxieties lessened with age as I realized not everything has to matter and not all things need reasoning. Sometimes we do things because we want to, and it can be as simple as that.

High school, though not all that different from middle school, really helped get me out of my shell. The class sizes grew, the people were new, and the teachers were more serious. This combination meant a lot of things for anxious kids like me. It meant that it was okay to keep my head down and do my work, because that was expected. It was okay to not talk in class because everyone was new. This is when things began to change for me.

I realized that being in a crowd of people, the chances of people caring about what I looked like or what I was doing were slim. This is when I started doing more things for myself. One of these things being clothes. I started dressing how I wanted and because of this, I made some of my best friends. It helped my confidence too. The point of me saying this is that at some point, you learn to let go of things that don’t really matter, and things begin to feel so much easier.

I’m 20 years old, hardly wise and mature, but I will say that after 20 years of being here, things do get better. I couldn’t tell you when or why, but over time, the weight of the world starts to feel a little lighter than it used to. I went through a lot in the beginning years of my life that change the way I looked at life, and for a long time I thought I would never find comfort or happiness.

There is no guarantee in life. We cannot predict what will happen, who we’re going to meet, or how things will go. If I had one thing to tell my younger self who struggled so much with self-image, socializing, and feeling content in the world, I would say to hang tight. Things are not always as bad as they seem, and there is life beyond school walls. There is so much I have not learned or seen, and after struggling for so long, I think I finally realized that.