What I Learned in High School
The gazing eyes of truth and reality has beat me with a stick all of my life. I am about to graduate high school and in recent days my mind is traveling backwards into my past, into the depths of my soul. A normal and easy childhood, tattered with the pain of bullying and high expectations, along with mental disorder labels smacking me in the face. Feelings of lonesome often followed me down a dark road, but through out my past I went in and out of the light.
I had dreams of being the center of attention, awing a crowd, spreading a message. I suppose that is why I was attracted to the performing arts. I had always loved to sing and acting was a little up there with it. So I tried musicals, voice lessons, and most of all tried so hard to force my voice to sound good enough for people to like it that I lost my natural voice and keen emotional connection in whichever song I was singing.
My natural voice hid behind the walls of my own skin and the only time my real emotions in a song would come out was when I wasn’t trying to perform for anybody, when I was just connecting with the song, and having my own moment. For me, and me only. And maybe that’s why I never got the solos in choir, because I never felt it or maybe I just was no good. It wasn’t for me anymore. I tried too hard.
Then, I realized that writing had always been my outlet, I never had to change it for anybody, people always seemed to like it, and I still love to sing and act goofy and be all crazy. I do it for me now, but don’t get me wrong, somedays I fallback into the trap of trying too hard to impress and get people’s approval.
But that’s okay, because times when I have tried the least hard to impress anybody, were my most successful periods in my life. I made amazing friends after I stopped trying to pretend to be somebody I wasn’t. My grades got higher when I stopped trying to dumb myself down. I became prettier when I stopped giving a crap about how I looked.
So as you go on with you life, in whichever stage you are in, with whatever struggle or identity crisis you are facing, remember that you don’t have to perform for anybody, but yourself.