A Journey of Your Self-Confidence Rising: Take Notes
I wonder if high school me would have been able to calculate the future. Would she have known that all those nights staying up past her curfew were a long journey into the woman she would inevitably become?
Would she still shake at her head at any imperfection, at every curve and bloat that refused to press down neatly? Tucked down, sucked in, and thin. The way she talked to herself. How devasting and overwhelming it felt at 16.
How that version of me. That timid, rounded cheek, awkwardly postured girl would find her fitting at 19 and then again at 22.
She would know nothing but know everything. How she was just waiting at the edge, to fully sink into her skin. That envelope of insecurity slowly scrubbed away with the rise of two semesters of confidence and a few wandering eyes.
How the opposite sex can completely validate and destroy you all in a glance.
If only she knew the eye of the beholder wasn’t what she needed to feel seen. To be really, truly seen. No, that would that another 5–6 years and as the smell of mid-twenties finally faded, a shiner more rounded version of her would unfold.
Even 31 can sometimes feel like 21. When your insecurities get the best of you.
Not unlike Venus rising from her shell, reborn into some eternal light only she would recognize as confidence, this adult would know more than she ever knew confined. She would slowly unwind and realize everything she learned would become unlearned.
Remember how his brother said commented you weren’t ‘good enough’ for him? Remember how that internally destroyed you at 17. And yet you stayed in it because he was cute and kind of nice, and made you feel seen in those crowded high school halls.
That comment feels like 100 years ago in this new light.
Sometimes I wish I had been kinder to myself those years. The pale skin I barely slathered with sunscreen. How I wish she saw that skin for what it could be in the years to come. The hair that was pressed and ironed for weeks to look exactly like everyone else. How those waves were their own reality, a distinct separation from the common norm.
She isn’t good enough for you, she’s below our standards. Those standards created by an insecure, uncomfortable 17-year-old boy who didn’t like the idea of his brother being in a relationship.
It will never be about you. It will always be about them and their shell of insecurity. Wish them well in their self-discovery and let them go.
She was just waiting to skin in, I remind myself. Her time was yet to be.
