For as long as I can remember, my mood swings have been sporadic, going from 0-100 in a snap. Growing up, I didn’t know why I got so upset, especially at petty stuff. I don’t know if my parents understood why I acted like I had no control over my feelings. I know I didn’t get it. When I had freak outs at home or school, I would watch myself acting a fool, hating myself for making things worse than they already were. But I couldn’t control it. It was scary, exhausting, and humiliating. Early on, I saw myself as immature. Even though it wasn’t something adults said to me regularly, I knew that my childish behavior defined me (to a degree). Through grade school, middle school, and high school, I held onto the hope that when I turned 18, I would magically mature both mentally and emotionally, and I would become a wonderful, productive member of society. On my 18th birthday, I realized maturity didn’t come with age, or at least, not that particular one. In my mind, the next big adult birthday was 21, so I waited and hoped that it would bring the maturity I perceived myself as lacking.
At 21, it was quite possible that I was even more juvenile than I was three years prior. I felt like a completely different person every year of college. 21-year-old me was boisterous, loud, and obnoxious. I acted like I didn't care about anything because I thought if I acted that way, then I would genuinely start to believe it. Fewer emotional outbursts tricked me into thinking I had finally entered into the world of adulthood. I neglected to think about my thinking, and how little it had changed in terms of rationality. I made stupid decision after stupid decision, and it wasn’t soon before long that the freak outs started happening again.
That same year, I got a job at a coffee shop that no one has probably heard of and became the resident fool. I quickly earned a reputation among my coworkers for being whiny, offensive, and in desperate need of a filter. Yet, somehow, they tolerated the endless stream of “that’s what she said” quips and other unprofessional, awkward performances I committed on the floor. Patiently, my boss put up with it, scolding me the way a parent scolds a spoiled child: gently, and with no repercussions. For about a year and a half, I continued to go along with the IDGAF mentality I thought I believed in. Slowly—and I mean very, painfully slowly—this started to change.
I can’t remember the first person at work to mention the concept of self-awareness to me. I had heard the term before, or at least, I knew how to define it. But I didn’t know what it meant. Better yet, I didn’t have a clue as to how to apply it to my own life. Self-aware? I was self-aware. I was aware that I was a barista, a student, and a girl young woman young adult woman, among other things. At that point, I didn’t care about being self-aware. After all, I was me, and I wasn’t going to change just because someone didn’t like it. I thought nothing more of it until the next time a coworker mentioned it to me. This time, it was a supervisor I was becoming close friends with. We didn’t work together too often, but when we did, she gave me pointers in a way that made me understand what a big deal self-awareness is. I have always embarrassed easily, so when something in my brain clicked and I finally realized how stupid I had been because of a lack of self-awareness, a whole lifetime of embarrassment came gushing over me.
For a while, I became even more self-conscious, but it was based on how I thought others perceived my actions, not on my appearance. I started coming to work feeling guilty and ashamed for my previous unprofessional nature. The awareness that my supervisor instilled was not a tool to bring me down. I knew that she was trying to make me a better worker, and a better person. My biggest frustration was being the obnoxious barista that was okay in small doses but no one really wanted on a shift with. I worked to change this so I could make a new reputation for myself. It took months of observing the other supervisors’ behaviors and remembering to apply my knowledge to my actions. It was a very complicated, confusing time. To simplify, I was Michael Scott, and I wanted to be Jim Halpert. I could still be the funny guy, but I had to tone it back a few notches.
Developing self-awareness made me aware that I kind of sucked. The emotional and mental maturity I desired for years seemed forever out of reach. I thought about not just my actions at work, but as a person, since I moved out of my parents’ houses. I thought about people I had stepped over to make myself look better, or friends I had dropped just because I didn’t feel like being friends anymore. In generally, I felt that I had become way more self-centered than I ever wanted to be. With this information confirmed in my mind, I made a mindful decision not to be that person anymore. When I was a kid—and even sometimes as an adult—I sometimes saw myself out of my body when I entered into a freak out. While I practiced being self-aware, I tried to do the same thing and watch how my words and actions affected others. I mentally critiqued whatever interactions with friends and strangers I had and told myself what I should or shouldn’t do next time.
In the years since I first started working on this thing called self-awareness, I have become a happier person because I feel like a better person. I often still feel a lack of control over myself, but I know that it isn’t all the way true. In my mind, there is a picture of my ideal self, and every day is a chance to sculpt the current version of me into Madison 2.0. I still might have freak outs, and I still might be unable to process information with the same grace and poise as some of my other friends, but I know that these things get easier the older I get. Even though I’ve only been 24 since the middle of August, I feel as though I have done more maturation in this one month than I did the entire time between 18 and 23. The reason I craved adulthood so much as a kid was because I thought it would end the mood swings and irrational thinking.
Rather than asking myself, “Why am I like this?” when I do something childish, I forgive myself for messing up (not always the easiest thing to do) and move on with my life, because I can’t go back and change what happened. The only thing I can do is keep pressing myself to get better so I will make fewer mistakes in the future. Just like I have no control over the past, I have no control over the future. The present is pretty shaky sometimes, but I can do my future self a favor and take some pointers from my past self so that in the present, I can act in a way that is beneficial, or, gosh, even mature.
Some of my friends and coworkers (some of them are basically one and the same) comment about how adult I am, and how my life is just so together. Every time, it boggles my mind because I don’t see that at all. Then, in the same breath, I tell myself that I’m doing pretty all right, and that I should pat myself on the back because just a year ago, no one said that kind of thing to me. Being an adult doesn’t mean someone is mature, and being mature doesn’t make someone an adult. I know that becoming self-aware was the moment in my life where I drastically changed as a person because it forced me to stop living passively and to start being proactive about the kind of person I want to be. I might think I’m a long ways off from where I should be, but I’m also a lot closer than I was before.
