I'll start by saying that we've all been that person at least once.

We've all been the person to hear that something we did or said was "weird." We've all been the person to occasionally judge ourselves based on who we are surrounded by, and we've all been the person to try to change something about ourselves to match what our peers were doing. High school can be hard to navigate, but since going to college, a lot has changed for me, and I'm someone who used to hold myself to ridiculous standards of who I should be. I'm here to tell you that there's hope, and you should never alter yourself to fit someone else's standards of what a person should be like.

As far as I can tell, I was the weird girl when I was younger. I wasn't really aware of my quirks until a girl at my new school tried to change me. I was perfectly fine being my unconventional self, but she thought it would be better if I listened to Katy Perry instead of Pink Floyd and wore Uggs with literally everything. I went along with it at first because I wanted to make friends, and figured that my friends were trying to help me by molding me into someone other kids would like. And to this day, I don't really know if that's what she was trying to do or not. Their motives didn't matter, though. What matters is that I didn't feel happy pretending to be someone I wasn't, and it's safe to say that as an eighteen year old college student, I've embraced everything about me that I used to think was weird.

And you need to do the same.

Let's face it; the older we get, the less we care about fitting the mold and looking cool to other people. I believe that's for one simple reason: everybody grows up.

Before you know it, you're going to be at a big university far from home without the same people you've been sitting with at lunch for four years. You're going to stop caring about looking good 24/7 because nobody goes to class in anything other than sweatpants. Once you hit eighteen, the only thing that becomes cool is learning to accept and embrace yourself with all of your weaknesses, especially the ones you wish you didn't have. The friends you'll meet in your future are going to want to spend time with you, not who you think they want you to be. Besides, if I've learned anything since leaving high school, it's that being genuine with myself as well as other people is really the only way to feel completely content.

Keep that in mind the next time you're tempted to judge yourself over what another person is doing. Also, if you don't wear that one pair of Uggs that everyone has with every outfit, you'll never stop regretting it.