About Me

    I have spent the past several months asking myself a question over and over again: who am I? And it has only become clear to me very recently that there isn't a straight answer to that question. I think I somewhat expected myself to fit into a box, or a specific category, because I tend to expect other people to thrive under the titles I give them: The Smart One, The Sweet One, The Funny One. You get the picture. But since my expectations for other people were very high, I tended to get let down or upset every time someone did not fit in their box, or stepped outside of it. I spent so much time trying to figure out what my box was, looking for myself and where I belonged. In the end I got extremely frustrated and depressed, on the point of giving up because I felt that I didn't have a place anywhere, that my personality was too inconsistent for anyone to tolerate.
    But then I realized something- something that most people understand from a very young age, or are inundated with by their parents: people are, in reality, too complicated to be just one thing at a time. We are a startling mess of creatures from day one, and though we may try to generalize and dismiss someone with a laugh and a simple "oh, you're such a (fill in the blank)" it does not honestly work like that. I stumbled upon a quote that sums up this fascinating predicament:

  “To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.”--Anthony Doerr

I like to speak in quotes on occasion. I also make up some sayings of my own. I can be really sweet and endearing one moment, and completely sarcastic and cynical the next. I have days where I am extremely self motivated, and days where getting out of bed takes an act of God. I am both an optimist and a pessimist, depending on what day of the week it is. In conclusion, I am an utterly inconsistent human being. I do not fit in a box, and that is okay! A lot of the time I am a totally different person depending on who I'm around. It's not that I'm two-faced, it's that different people leave different impressions on me, and make me comfortable or uncomfortable. And it has taken me seventeen years to understand that this conundrum of Self, the one I battle with on a daily basis, is normal. I love that- thinking something you do is unspeakably weird, only to find out that everyone else does it, to your immense relief.
    But I'm not always different. Certain things about me will probably always stay the same- things that not many people know about. Like my unquenchable desire to travel the world, and my deep love of Harry Potter (I kid you not, my Hogwarts allegiance runs deeper than anyone may know). I think a lot, which is not always a good thing, but I am learning to channel my thoughts towards something besides self-hatred and what other people think of me (like this blog. I find writing about my emotions to be very cathartic). I have a really small attention span, and -although it hurts my sarcastic pride to admit this- I am somewhat of a hopeless romantic.
    So, this is me. I'm a mess of different feelings and traits, all jumbled up inside a small and unlikely-looking person. But I kind of like that I can be like this- that everyone is full of different emotions that may not make sense, but are what make them who they are. And I love how different people can bring out different qualities in a person, sometimes good and sometimes bad. It's the tragic mystery of the human soul that makes me want to stick around for a long, long time, because maybe someday, I just might figure it out.
--Laura :)