Self-Reflection

Freshman year, as I walked back to my dorm, I pondered how my sense of humor had taken a shift over the course of the semester. My wit had sharpened, my sarcasm become more dry, and even my laugh had begun to sound like that of my roommate. She was rubbing off on me. Much earlier in my life, as I was struggling to figure out my adolescent identity, I asked my mom in a panic “is it bad to take bits and pieces of the things you like in other people and do those things too?” I was terrified of becoming an emotional version of Frankenstein’s monster, but she assured me that this was only natural. It’s really amazing to think about the people who have shaped me and inspired me to act better, think more critically, and embody their good qualities in myself. Learning the lesson that it’s okay to be a “copycat” when it comes to finding yourself also showed me that it’s okay to change. In early high school, everyone’s biggest fear was always that of change. Whenever a pair of friends would drift apart, the mutter of “she’s just so different now” was always cast as a sort of blame on the changed one. When I said that leggings weren’t pants and I’d never be caught dead in them, but a few months later found myself sporting them on a regular basis, I had changed. When I walked into my first course on women’s literature, I did not identify as a feminist; I have changed. The ides exchanged in that classroom and all of the things I loved about my professor changed my thoughts about myself and my own identity. This is not a bad thing. The fear of hypocrisy and the fear of becoming someone you weren’t a few months ago overwhelms our culture, but as someone who is learning all the time, I think I change every day. This change is just growth and I’m learning to embrace it.