While hunching in my awkwardly shaped dorm room chair, drinking my favorite mid-afternoon tea, I think back to the plethora of concerns and stresses I had as a child. My memories vividly remind me of this uptight, overly studious kid with too many self-acclaimed burdens. The atrocities I found in such little things then humor me now for I no longer consider them even the slightest of burdens. Granted, I have a strong sense of self and I am confident in who I am now, but as a kid, my persona had a missing piece. If I could change anything about the past, it would not be who I was, but rather the outlook I had.

Although life gets more difficult with age and opportunity, I actually find that mishaps and responsibilities become easier to handle. If there is any advice that I would have needed to hear; it would have been to just relax. The fact of the matter is that we are given so many expectations as young children going into adulthood. We leave the house with this dependence on our parents and are expected to handle things on our own. So of course, there is this fear of failure rooted in the fact that society advocates only success. There is never acceptance of being average, one always has to be great, to the highest potential. In truth, this is what messed me up. I wanted to be independent way too fast and I just didn't know how. And the added fear of judgement was always a determining factor in the way I acted or how I tried to come off towards of other people.

Once I hit my junior year in high school, I had this profound sense of self, which has radiated even more within the past year. By being just me, I have so much confidence in what I do. If I had known this in prior years, my concerns, stresses, burdens and everything else would have diminished much faster and I would have been able to handle mishaps one hundred times better than I did. So this ideal is key: we should teach kids to be confident in who they are at a young age so that they don't have to waste so much time figuring it out. It's hard to truly know who you are and what your're about, but when you have everyone nagging at you to from all different spectrums, it becomes even more difficult. Therefore, teaching independence should be a staple in the way we bring up children.