I’ve been writing a lot lately, but my thoughts have been messy. I guess that’s what being a teenager is. I always think that everyone around me has everything figured out. Their interests, their career paths, etc. Obviously this isn’t true. However this feeling comes from my own insecurities. My interests and hobbies have changed vastly over time, and not always knowing what I enjoy doing most makes me feel as though I have a low sense of self. I’ve always wanted to find my “thing”. I wanted to be known for being good at a sport or a specific hobby. I now realize that it is important to have interests, but what your interests are don’t define who you. If I defined myself by a sport I played, for example, but then I got injured and couldn’t play the sport anymore, would I be “worth” anything? It would feel like the end of the world, but this example shows how one’s worth comes from within.
Finding my self worth has been a major theme of this school year so far. I’ve been trying to cease the notion of basing my self worth on factors outside of who I am. I’ve grown a lot in this area, but I’m still a 16-year-old girl, and even if I know I shouldn’t base my worth on external validation, I struggle to live by this belief. I started to realize that my potential far exceeded what can be detected on the surface when the external factors I used to define myself weren’t up to my expectations. It’s easy to look at a letter or a number and associate that with the quality of human you are because it’s a concrete measurement. Who we are, however, is not concrete. Ever since elementary school, I drove myself crazy over my grades because I directly correlated my report card with how good of a person I was or how successful I’d be in the future. With this mindset, I never felt enough.
At the end of my sophomore year, my grades had not reached the standards I made for myself to feel like a worthy human. When my report card wasn’t perfect, I realized that I was still me and nothing had changed. As much as my dependence on grades stressed me out, it was also a safety net. As long as my grades were perfect, I felt no need to learn about myself beyond the letters on my report card. Realizing that my grades aren’t who I am was relieving, yet frightening, because I was reminded that there was so much left for me to learn. Life is much more complex than a number, letter, or any label. Even though I have a lot to discover regarding my passions and interests in life, I have learned a lot about who I am and plan on continuing to do so. The question is not if we have worth, it is what we do with our worth. We all have inherent unconditional worth because we are human. The next step is learning how to utilize the worth we are given in the most meaningful way possible, and that is what life’s about.
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