When you are quite literally stuck at home, you do things you normally wouldn’t do. Which is why the other day I did the unthinkable: I voluntarily started organizing my closet. At some point I found a couple old laptops that my mom has tried multiple times to convince me to get rid of.
As the laptops came to life, so did a lot of old memories. I read through all of the Microsoft Word documents. After just a decade of life, I had written a full autobiography, (naturally titled, “The Otto-biography") as well as dozens of stories I started but never finished. One file was literally called, “BEST SELLER.” I found a list of my 5th grade class and our dream jobs. Next to my name was “author.”
I found a video I made for a middle school English project. The video concluded with bloopers, which I imagine I added to meet the required time limit. I could hear 11-year-old me in the background, practically screaming orders. “Say it AGAIN. Do it like THIS.” In front of the camera, I laughed at everything. I was bold and unapologetic.
I opened a letter I had written to myself on my twelfth birthday. I wrote about all the things I had accomplished that year: the hours I spent playing tennis, the school projects I cared way too much about, the 6th grade “hardships” I endured. I was shocked to see that a letter from so long ago concluded with words that have recently felt more true than ever: “I know I have a lot of love to give. But I need to remember to give it to myself sometimes, too.”
Going through the laptop felt like visiting an old friend: familiar, but distant. I may have been young, but I was confident in who I was and who I wanted to be. As I reflect on the girl in the laptop, I wonder: where did she go? Where did I go?
Thinking about how I’ve changed over the years, I realize that the source of these changes extends beyond just my own life experiences. Instead, I can't help but think I have become some sort of product of societal teachings. Slowly but surely, I learned what I was supposed to be.
I learned that girls shouldn’t be confident. A confident girl is bossy, arrogant, unattractive. So I adopted “insecure” as one of my defining personality traits.
I learned I was too skinny. Girls shouldn’t look like prepubescent boys. So I wore only sweatshirts at school to hide myself.
I learned that writing could never actually be a job. So I left my stories unfinished and applied to business school instead.
I learned that I needed someone else to be complete. So I stayed with people who made me feel like I wasn't enough, because feeling alone was far better than actually being alone.
I learned to replace laughing at everything with apologizing for everything. So “I’m sorry” became second nature. My sentences began with “I feel like,” instead of “I know.”
I learned who the world expected me to be. So I turned into her.
I consider the ultimate goal in life to be learning how to love yourself. But I’ve quickly realized that in order to love yourself, you must know yourself first. We cannot love what we do not know. Hence, we’re tasked with the glorified lifelong journey of “finding ourselves.”
We look everywhere: on college campuses, in other people, on Google. Who am I? We search the world before we take a second to search ourselves. But there is no real-life lost and found for our abandoned identities.
I assumed that as I got older, I would learn more and more about who I am. But somewhere along the way I’ve gotten lost in expectations, society, others. The girl in the laptop knows who she is, what she wants. But the girl in the mirror isn’t so sure. How was I so quick to trust everything else telling me what I should be, but so hesitant to trust myself?
If you lost your keys, you wouldn’t look for them in places you haven’t yet gone. You check where you’ve already been. So maybe finding ourselves doesn’t mean searching the whole wide world. What if finding ourselves starts with looking right at who we already were, before we got lost?
As I keep discovering who I am, I’m going to keep returning to the girl in the laptop. Maybe after all this time, I've been right here all along.
I learned who the world expected me to be. So I'll unlearn it and be my damn self anyway.
