Sometime last month, I ran into a classmate from high school on the T who, when I told him I was a writing major in school, said he remembered me always carrying or reading a book. That certainly hasn't changed: I still keep magazines, articles, books, and a journal with me wherever I go, at the ready as the opportunity arises. But what I came to realize was that if this was how one former peer viewed me, that he wasn't alone. I was by all accounts the quiet redhead--the one who opened her mouth only sometimes in class because she was so worried about misinterpreting passages, miscalculating an equation using the quadratic formula, missing some bit of information in her homework readings.
Intellectually, I proved myself in drive and hard work. Socially, I floundered around in the middle, known but not well. I had friends, and study partners, and lunchmates. I was smart, I was kind, I was painfully shy. By senior year it seemed futile to expend my efforts to create relationships that would last, to try and reinvent my image, when I was already very much looking forward to putting this chapter of my life behind me. I finished my four years the same person I had always been, with a little more direction and wisdom in me. I vowed to break my mold, because I was tired of being seen as the quiet one. I was tired of seeing myself in that lens.
Labels hold immeasurable power over us, and the more we are told we are something, the more we will believe it. Eventually, it comes time to break the chains that they have cast over us. Being considered quiet isn't the worst thing in the world, though it had its limits. I didn't think I could suddenly gab away before or after classes with just anyone, because it wasn't the person I was, or was supposed to be.
The thing is, we are ever-evolving versions of ourselves, never the same from one day to the next. We are not limited to the molds we filled in high school, because four years do not define a human life. Those qualities, those facets of our personalities that we let others see of ourselves are us, but not all of us. In high school we are a shimmer of the adult that is to follow. You are not confined to the singular things that made you, "you". We all made mistakes, we all questioned the future, we all made subjective decisions. Cut yourself some slack. You are WAY more than any of it. And, hopefully as you are seeing, none of it matters.
Don't let who you are inhigh school define your perception of yourself beyond those four walls. When I broke free, I found college friends considering me more of an extrovert than an introvert. But even more, I found people who have challenged the views of myself I carried around for so long, and who accept and love the lady I am, that quiet side at all. But they don't see me as that alone. I don't, and won't, let them.
