Past, Present, and PrecedentsIt’s currently 2:26 A.M. I think, that after 19 years of denial, I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that I’m just more productive at night. Probably between the hours of 10 P.M and 2:00 AM, to be exact. So, theoretically, its past my prime time. But the juices are really flowing right now, so what better way to spend the Sunday before finals week than racking up sleep debt while furiously filling up this blank word document? This post actually has nothing to do with sleep, productivity, or writing, which is probably reflective of the fact that it’s past my 4-hour golden time. Or maybe I’m just slipping into justificational disclaimers at this point?
So, around 1:30 A.M, as I was finishing up an assignment for my communications class where we had to analyze a persuasive speech, I fell into the black hole that is TED.com. I started out watching the one persuasive speaker I was analyzing, but it’s hard to stop when there are so many click bait-esque Ted talks waiting for you. It was much like a downward YouTube spiral but much more intellectually stimulating, thankfully. So, between 1:32 A.M. and now, I stumbled across a lot of really inspiring people, which led to a bunch of intriguing thoughts about persuasive speaking, apathy, and advice. And this one talk about what adults can learn from children brought back a lot memories of what I was like in elementary and middle school, and how much I’ve changed throughout the years. Throughout elementary/middle school, I was shameless. Well, mostly. I still had the basic decency to be a put-together human being, but in terms of my personality, I think I’d be justified in saying that I was unapologetically and authentically myself. Middle school is rough for a lot of people, but I literally had the time of my life. Looking back, I didn’t really sweat the little things, and I was open about my thoughts and feelings. I was outspoken, and honestly kind of extra. If I wanted to answer a question in class, I would go for it. If I felt like laughing really loud, I didn’t hesitate. And if I felt like breaking down because someone had just hurt my feelings, I did just that. But as time went on, I started getting a little muted. I was at the point in my life where I was just becoming more aware of things. Like, the fact that sometimes I was the loudest one in the room, or maybe the quietest one in the room. The fact that I was a minority, specifically an Asian girl in a predominantly white school. The fact that I raised my hand too often, or maybe not enough. I started asking myself questions that weren’t even concerns before. They ranged from simple things like, “Am I being annoying in this situation right now?” “Should I be wearing makeup?” to “Was opening up about personal stuff okay?” ‘How do other people view me?” and sometimes to “Was my race a hindrance in getting to know my actual personality?”. Fast forward to high school. I developed this habit of looking for precedents in order to personally justify my actions. If I saw someone that I could relate to doing something, I felt more comfortable doing it myself. For example, if I saw a girl my age/race/gender giving a speech on a YouTube video, I felt like I could follow what she did simply because she had set a realistically re-creatable precedent for me. The negative aspect of this mindset is that I couldn’t set my own precedents and always looked to others to do it first. Fast forward to now. In college, I’ve begun to strike a healthy balance between middle school me and high school me. Part of it stems from the fact that I came into college with a very different attitude. I still remember the first day of 6th grade—the excitement, confidence, and vicarious optimism as I walked into the brown-brick building that would be my home away from home. In high school, I started day 1 already super focused on the end goal of college, GPA, career, success, etc. And for some reason, I thought that in order to achieve that, I needed to sacrifice personality traits and interests that were fundamental to my character. Coming into college was an interesting life-shift for me. I was done trying to be someone I wasn’t (as cliché that sounds) and figured that if some people didn’t like me, I was bound to find my niche somewhere on a campus of 40,000 people. So far, that mentality has worked out well for me, and I genuinely believe that people who do unprecedented things, have unprecedented personalities, and are authentically themselves, draw people to them easily, are more interesting, and have more fulfilling lives. And I guess that’s sort the end goal, because I want to gain back the voice of that outspoken, unabashedly confident 13 year old girl who wasn’t afraid that she would sound too loud, too stereotypical, too female, too smart, too…unprecedented.
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About MeThanks for visiting my blog! My name is Megan, I work in Marketing and I graduated as part of Minerva's class of 2021. Enjoy a collage of reflections, poetry, and late-night thoughts. Archives
October 2023
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