Edited By: Shivani Panigrahy
I’ve started to spend an unhealthy amount of my time staring at the ceiling. My grades are slipping, I haven’t talked to my parents in weeks, and my “friends” feel like I don’t have time for them anymore. But without a care in the world about any of that, I stare at the blank wall for hours with a chaotic marathon’s worth of thoughts racing in my head, without a finish line. It usually ends up with me thinking about how my mother always tells me what a happy and confident child I used to be and how, looking in the mirror today, I literally cannot imagine that to have been true.
Not to be dramatic, but I do make sure those marathons are accompanied with music. The one that brings me the most amount of comfort- surprise, surprise- is a Taylor Swift song. You’re On Your Own, Kid is about a young person who longs for love and acceptance but eventually realizes they’re on their own. Day after day, as my thoughts start to piece together, I realize how much I resonate with what Swift tries to say in her song; I’m scared of growing up and becoming my own person because I don’t know if people are going to accept me as who I am.
Being myself without severely policing everything I do feels like the worst idea in the world. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever even taken the time to figure myself out. One thing I know for sure is that I have ZERO self-confidence, to the point where I feel repulsive, and so I shut down and try to get lost in another universe, drowning myself in fiction, where nobody knows me. Not even myself. My hypersensitivity to whatever criticism I receive makes me want to hide and never open my laptop again. The most insignificant jokes make me overthink all my relationships. I’m boring if I don’t say anything, annoying if I do.
The all-consuming anxiety that everyone’s talking about how you walk, talk, who you’re friends with, who you’ve fucked, what your Instagram feed looks like, what you’re wearing, if you’re trying too hard- down to every detail- shuts you down. Or worse, it makes you want to be someone you’re not. Someone who fits their standards, but someone you can barely recognize. You feel ostracized all the time, so you find comfort in dressing yourself with personalities you see in movies and TV shows because they’re all people you wish you were. But when you shed that facade, you don’t even know who you are or what you want. The sad part is, it’s all entirely your fault. It’s my fault. It’s my fault I feel like this. It’s my fault I let them have any power over me, because in reality, none of them actually care.
There are so many people I want to apologize to, but my deepest regret is towards myself and how my lack of self-esteem makes me miss out on important things I know life is incomplete without. I’m scared of the rejection I’ll face if I try to be friends with someone. I’m trapped with an unceasing imposter syndrome, intimidated by the idea of trying something new because of the possibility that I might fail at it. I’m absolutely terrified of a guy’s disappointment after I take my clothes off in front of him.
It’s a vicious cycle; being afraid of friendships, relationships, work, all because of the rejection you think you’ll face because you don’t think you’re good enough, when in fact, you most probably are. It feels like the hardest thing in the world to try to get over. Or at least to learn how to not care. No matter how many times I’ve tried to tell myself that external validation does not matter to me, it somehow finds its way back and ends up pulling me down deeper than before. All that’s left for me to figure out is why my self-confidence relies on other people.
I’m writing this because I’ve found myself in a spot where I don’t think I can say this out loud. There’s no one else who can go through these struggles for me, I just have to learn to not be so afraid of being myself. I’m not lonely, I’m just on my own. I always have been.