Just recently I started reading Sophia Amoruso's #GIRLBOSS after it had been sitting on my bookshelf for months, and on my reading list for even longer. While I'm very far from wanting to start my own fashion business or anything like that, I figured it's a woman writing a book about how to be a badass and I'm here for it. So far, I'm not even close to finishing but so far, something has really stuck with me.
Amoruso talks about how people have called her a role model to young girls who want to do the same sort of work that she does. Her response to this is, "Just be your own role model." This really resonated with me. I don't particularly believe in the idea of role models. Of course, there are people who really inspire me in my life, and people who have taught me excellent and important things, but no one has lived exactly the life I want to live.
It's important to live according to your own rules, rather than trying to follow in the footsteps of other people. I'm still young and in college, so there's very much I've yet to experience but that's what makes it exciting! This is all corny and very Disney Channel Original Movie advice, but I guess I'm just a corny person.
If you're your own role model, you're setting your own limits. You're living life according to you, not whatever your role model did. I'd consider myself a pretty independent person, and I really believe that it's allowed me to grow into at least a rough draft of who I want to be. But what I've done isn't what's going to work for everyone and that's the point.
What I'm trying to get at here is that you should do what feels right for you and know that your experiences are going to be different from other people, which makes having a role model kind of impractical. If you spend your whole life wanting to be like a specific person, at some point you're going to have to face that maybe that person isn't truly who you want to be. Maybe you have to make sacrifices of what you really want to do just to be more like someone you're not.
Be your own role model. Make your own decisions; do what makes you happy. I'm Maggie Sciortino and you're watching Disney Channel.
