I feel frustrated with who I am. I know I only focus on all the ugly shadows and the unflattering angles, but I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know how to stop being so critical of myself. Not without letting myself go to waste because I excuse everything with “that’s just who I am.” I am one extreme or the other. I don’t want to settle for this. I want to be better. Except my “better” is a girl who confidently makes eye contact with people when talking to them, a girl who knows how to make conversation and nods at the right times and can entrance a person into entrusting their secrets to me. My better is a girl who will stride up to a person and introduce themself, who will exchange playful dialogue with a boy she’d just met. My better is a girl who knows what she wants and has a clear path for it, who knows exactly what gives her goosebumps and pursues it like her life depends on it. She is a girl who never tires of being around people, and people never tire of being around her. An avid reader, a hard-worker, a busy bee. She knows her talents and uses them well. Someone who is unbelievably kind but has firm loyalties and hard-set values. I don’t see myself as any of those attributes. I see myself as lazy, unmotivated, shy, bitchy, introverted, average, timid, irritable. And what drives me absolutely insane is that everyone else seems to see the same, too.
Originally written on July 26, 2018
Not-So-Short Thoughts 