It's All Relative

New experiences can be extremely terrifying, but they can also be enlightening and even eye opening. On Monday August 6, I moved into college as a first time freshman. Talk about scary, right? Especially since I have never spent more than a week away from at least one member of my family.

Not only that, I moved in almost two weeks early before classes started to participate in a camp for the theater scholarship program that I am a part of within the school.

Now, I love theater and I love singing, but I am primarily a dancer. As in, basically all that I have done—all that I have had time for the past 12 years was school, church, and dance classes. In actuality I have very little theater experience, so all around I was a nervous wreck come last Monday.

But on Tuesday, when camp activities started, my perspective started to change.

We had dance trials so our director could assess what level we were capable of dancing at and what sort of choreography she could do with us. Suddenly, I was at home!

The combinations and moves were simple and I could breathe and really feel like myself, like I was no longer pretending to be something that I had wanted to be. And something incredible happened:

The director asked me to demonstrate a move and I stepped forward to do so and the whole group watched me with awe. Actual AWE.

Now, I am not a bad dancer, but being surrounded with other dancers my whole life, I had never really felt that I was that good. I was maybe a mid level dancer at my studio and I had felt like a pretty inadequate dancer for most of my life. You know how it goes after all, a lot of self image issues and self esteem issues can result from a lifetime spent dedicated to the arts. There is a saying in theater and sometimes, in life: there is always someone better than you. It is meant to keep egotistical people humble, but it is not a very good saying for people with low self esteem issues to begin with.

Then, I came to camp, and I was suddenly viewed like one of the professionals that I had idolized in my dance company for all those years. I was the specialist. It was something I had never experienced before!

Not to say anything against my dance studio, they aren't rude and they didn't put me down, but among forty dancers that had trained for as long or longer than I had, it was hard to have confidence, hard to shine.

But then, I came to college! I changed my surroundings, and the people that I surrounded myself with and I'm no longer seeing my many years in dance and few years in theater as so much of a set back going into this theater experience.

I can now see that it's a valuable asset!

I may not have as much acting experience as my fellow group members, but I have more dance experience than most of them combined!

This isn't meant to brag, or to show myself off, or to put the other members of my theater group down, this is to make one simple point: when you're surrounded by people of a certain skill set, you may feel like you're a dime a dozen. But when you take a look from a different perspective, you can see that your skills are more valuable and more rare than you realize.

I read somewhere once that we might find ourselves plain looking or even bad looking for the simple reason that we've gotten used to our own beauty. That same concept applies to our skills and abilities.

You are more beautiful, skilled, and valued than you realize. Sometimes all you need is a different perspective to realize that. Love yourself and the abilities that you have worked so hard to cultivate even if they seem ordinary to you now. You never know, in the future, that 'ordinary ability' may become one of your greatest assets.