I grew up in a town with a little more than 4,000 people, and I went to the same school with the same 40 kids, for 13 years of my life. When you live in a town and go to a school where everyone knows everyone, gossip and drama spread quickly.

Most of the people in my grade were extremely similar: privileged kids whose parents worked at the university or were doctors. They spent too much time playing sports and partying on the weekends, and not enough time studying or taking a moment to pay attention to the world around them. As someone who was never very interested in sports or partying, I had a difficult time finding a group of people that I felt I could be myself with. I was a music kid-- the one in the choir and in the band, and the one that took lessons and went to the practice rooms during study halls. I spent my high school years quietly observing and blending in, not wanting to be noticed unless I was on a stage.

When I went home every day after school, my family got to see the real me: loud, vivacious, funny and sassy, but for a while, there was a period of time where I didn’t get along with any members of my family. When I got home after a 7-hour school day, I was too loud and too sassy.

My doctor had to tell my parents that the most likely reason for my acting out was that I was constantly putting on a façade in school, and when I got home after seven hours of wearing a mask that wasn’t my own, I was overwhelmed, frustrated and exhausted and that I just wanted to be myself which led to me being myself in extreme.

After this, I was more conscientious of how I acted when I was home, and I started coming into my own and opening up a little more during my senior year of high school when I got the lead in the musical. The main reason for this was that it had slowly started to sink in that maybe I wasn’t meant to be a wall flower. I started to believe that I was made for the city: I had a big personality, a big voice, and even bigger dreams.

Now that I’ve almost finished my second full year at a college four times as big as my hometown, I am able to see how strongly I suppressed the person that I actually was and wanted to be: a strong, independent woman who would use her voice to speak up for herself and for those around her who weren’t fortunate to have their own. A talented performer and someone who loved to make people laugh. Someone who wouldn’t let herself be ashamed of being intelligent like so many women and girls in today’s society do. Someone who would put every part of herself into whatever she did, and someone who would love and support her family and friends with an undying passion.

In that small town that I grew up in, without realizing it, I let myself fear deviating from the norm and I did my best to slip between the cracks and to go unnoticed. I let myself do what I could to please the stigma that was set in place for students and children in a town like ours.

But when I escaped that small town?

I discovered the person I was supposed to be all along.