One of my favorite song quotes is “Do you like the person you’ve become?” from “The Weight of Living” by Bastille. When I first heard that lyric, I was happily humming along in my room doing homework. The more I listened to the song, the more it stuck out to me. I kept repeating it to myself in my head: “Do YOU like the person you’ve become?” I realized how great a question it was. Do you like who you are?

That question was initially a foreign concept to me. Do I like the person I am? I had never asked myself that before, never really been concerned with how I viewed myself; my concerns had always been regarding how other people perceived me.

For a long time, I molded myself in to what I believed other people wanted me to be. Almost everything about me was to please other people. I wore clothes people liked, I listened to music everyone seemed to like, I talked and walked the way everyone else did. Everything that made me, me, I kind of hid because I was afraid of what people would think. I even hate admitting that because it makes me sound fake, and I guess in some ways I was, but I also think I wanted to be liked, and who doesn’t? I think a lot of people (especially in high school) place other people’s opinions of them before their own opinion of themselves.

The more I thought about it, the more I started analyzing myself, and realized there were things about myself that I wasn’t proud of. So I changed. I wanted to like who I was, I wanted to be proud of who I was, and mainly I wanted to believe in who I was.

People are always saying how the only person who is truly always there for you is yourself, how at times all you have is yourself. Well all know this, we all have experienced this, yet we still put other people’s opinions above our own. We should like who we are and we should be able to stand behind who we are because if we can’t, who can?

So ask yourself if you like the person you’ve become. Ask it often because we are adapting and changing constantly. Be honest with yourself, be brutally honest.