Over the summer, I was at Disneyland with a group of friends whom I love, but don't know very well. They live far away so I've only gotten to spend a matter of a few days with them over the course of our relationships. I put a lot of myself on the internet, from the good to the bad, to the mundane. My internet friends definitely know a lot about who I am. Still, I am a person who can be very reserved around people I don't spend a lot of time with. It's a lot easier to be yourself and say what's on your mind when you don't have to see the judgement in people's eyes as they watch you fall apart or be a goober.
As I got onto the Little Mermaid ride (the Little Mermaid has been my favorite Disney movie since childhood), I found myself feeling uncomfortable about wanting to sing along with the ride. I was next to a person I had only ever been around on two other occasions. Then I realized something: The things I'm self-conscious about are the things that make me "me", probably the things that friends love about me. Loudly singing Disney songs is one of my favorite activities. What was I afraid of? Looking stupid? Looking childish? Sounding bad? I don't know. The crazy thing is, a huge chunk of my internet friends have heard me drunk cry about boys. If they can love me through that, they can love me through most anything. The group of people I was with that day are some of the most encouraging, non-judgmental people out there. There was no impending judgement for me to fear.
I am kind of a girl of revelations. I have a lot of epiphanies about myself and how I interact with the world, mainly because I am constantly introspecting. I've shared a lot of them with you guys. But internalizing this kind of stuff is so difficult. As I talked about a couple of posts ago, teaching yourself to be a whole new person is incredibly difficult. I've never felt that I could trust people to see all of me and still like me. I'm trying to be very conscious of this revelation. It's physically painful in some situations, but I do think I've made some progress. I've made a new friend recently and I've really been pushing myself to show aspects of me that my brain tells me to omit on account of the fact that I'm a huge dork. Okay, brain, so what if I'm a huge dork? I like being a dork. If other people don't like dorks, they're eventually not going to like me anyway, and if they do like dorks, they're going to like me better for nerding out in front of them. Being myself is really the best option for everyone involved. Consciously, willingly being myself is insanely difficult, but it has yielded good results so far, and I'm optimistic that it will someday turn into a natural way of engaging with the people around me that will produce a very special form of freedom.
You may remember a portion of this post from a Snapchat story I posted awhile back. I was hoping to one day turn this into a vlog, but as I still don't have a way to make videos, I'm going to be turning my video ideas into blog posts.
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