I’ve always considered myself to be a pretty independent person. From a young age, I had to learn for myself that things aren’t always going to work out the way you want them to, and not everyone is going to like you, let alone love you. When you grow up with constant uncertainty of who’s going to be your friend this week or who’s going to turn their back on you next, the lines of every single relationship you have can get kind of blurry. So with this being said, I definitely had to do a lot of shape-shifting. I always say I’m independent, but unfortunately, I’ve always been pretty impressionable too.

It’s hard to find your real voice when you’re drowning in the overwhelming crowd of people who are constantly pulling, tugging, shouting at you “THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD BE." Though the physical image of me would never fit into the groups I wanted it to, the inner me always wanted to belong. Just like every other teenage girl around the middle school age, I wanted to be pretty and popular. It seemed to me that all of my friends had already achieved this goal, and there was me, the ugly and chubby girl who boys never gave the time of day. I wanted too badly to have the size 2 waist, the skinny face, the thick long hair, and the perfect Aeropostale skinny t-shirt figure. Sometimes I would look in that stupid mirror and question why my popular friends even wanted to hang out with me when I couldn’t even stand to look at myself.

There was one summer where I started making a point to eat healthily and I ended up losing around 30 pounds. I didn’t even realize how significant this weight loss was until now when I look back at pictures of myself. I thought this was going to end up changing my life for the better, but it turns out I wasn’t any happier and people still treated me exactly the same, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It was bad in the sense that I didn’t receive better treatment from the people who only saw me from a physical standpoint, but also good in the way that I finally realized I had to be doing something right as a person. The people who stuck with me through it all had to see something special in me, so at least I had the whole “good personality” thing to my advantage. It didn’t all happen in a day, but things started to fall into place for me. The figurative veil had finally been lifted from my eyes and thus the road to self-awareness and self-discovery had just begun.

When you’ve been chasing after the ideals of other people for so long and just falling in line with everything you’ve been told to do your whole life, a lot of things can come as a surprise when you snap out of it. I was finally free from the oppression of acceptance and I realized I could be absolutely anything I wanted to be, in order to be the best inner version of myself. Being self-aware is a powerful ability that can have both negative and positive effects on a person. But at least the power of self-awareness gave me the energy I needed to not consciously care too much anymore about the judgments of other people.

A lot of things became very clear to me. I didn’t need to be the doctor or lawyer that society told me I needed to be to “make money.” I didn’t need to believe everything I was raised to believe by my family and friends, especially when it came to religion and politics. These, and many other important factors of a person’s beliefs and social life were now all up to me to figure out, and I didn’t have to listen to others unless I wanted to. All I know for sure is- I have always made my best effort to discern right from wrong, and I will never stop trying to be a good person no matter how bad things get.

Self-awareness is a path that has managed to help me get to where I am today, but unfortunately, self-acceptance is a whole other road that I admit has always been a hard one for me to travel. I was, and still am, afraid that I’m not always living up to my potential, and this mindset likes to eat away at my self-esteem a lot. But, sometimes I like to look back at all of the things that I have achieved solely by what I am and not what I look like, and I tend to feel a little prouder about what I’m on the way to being.

So when IS it the right time to stop following? I guess there isn’t always some pivotal or significant moment where the flip switches inside of you and you know. Maybe the switch hasn’t been flipped all the way yet, and it might never be. But every day that you stand up for yourself, are aware of how you actually feel and can appreciate the little things that make you, you, you're one step closer to the best version of yourself. These things take time- life’s about the journey, not the destination- but somehow they always have a way of working themselves out in the end.