the person i used to be

(Break from the fiction - next section is still in the works.)

A few days ago, I was looking through my old notes on Facebook, and I happened to just sift through a couple random profiles of people from my high school who commented on them. It made me think of my very first BTAS entries, and how I had only a select group of people have access to them at first (because of my privacy setting OCD-ness). The people who read my blog then versus the people who read my blog now are very different - my writing, or perhaps, my person, caters to a different audience nowadays.

One thing that is simultaneously liberating and constraining about college is that (in most cases) people don't know who you were in the past - more specifically, in high school. The person that most people know now is comprised of only what they know from college memories. Depending on how you feel about college, that can be something wonderful, because you're starting with a clean slate, or it can be something terrible, because you feel like no one understands who you really are. And until you adjust to the change, it will always seem like a regretful fact.

So, why bring this up is probably your question. How much could I have changed in the course of one year? To be frank, I have no idea. The exact details are fuzzy. But one thing struck me so hard that I had to blog about it, although I didn't know how to explain it until now.

I think, the biggest change in me was that in high school, I was cool. And to clarify, this isn't like an ego trip or anything - I don't know how else to describe it, but I feel like despite my nerdom as a verbose valedictorian violinist, I was relatively cool. In a secular sense, that is. There was this one Asian girl who had lived in Georgia nearly all her life, and I had always thought she was super cool compared to me because everybody loved her, from the nerds to the preps to the cheerleaders to the bums, indicating that she must have had this universal appeal of "cool." But looking back, considering I had moved there when I was in 7th grade, I had never played a team sport, and I took all honors and AP classes throughout (making the pool of people I interact with much smaller)...I had done all right for myself by the time I graduated. The question is: how? And why don't I feel that way anymore about myself?

1. Speech: I talked like a normal human being. And by normal, I mean laced with curse words and derogatory statements and plenty of "that's what she said's." I've cursed pretty regularly in my speech since the 6th grade (with the exception of 9th grade when I tried to reform myself...but then my resolve died down over the years). By the end of my senior year, I regularly called my guy friends b__hes and a__holes as endearing terms. There was something powerful or refreshing about inserting a curse word every now and then to express strong feelings about something, be it anger or happiness or surprise. And I think these days, when the strongest thing I say out loud at the DP while editing late at night is, "What the HECK was this writer thinking when she wrote this article?!" I can tell that they are not impressed by my choice of words. I can hear it from other people (though it can be slightly grating) but the words just taste funny in my mouth now, and I can't bring myself to say them.

2. Academic Dexterity/Rebellion: I did it all - from toughing out Calc BC to analyzing every sentence in AP Lit to getting one step closer to fluent in AP Spanish to aspiring to become a doctor through AP Bio and Chem to devoting my life to AP World History sophomore year. I had a knowledge of just about everything (now all fuzzy and forgotten, sadly), which made me available for any academic discussion if need be. This appealed to the "nerds" in any sector - the fact that I could love analyzing The Heart of Darkness and still get good grades in AP Chem was something not only "impressive" but also rebellious, because I wasn't conforming to the "Asian standard." Now, not only do I not know what I like best, but I'm also not that great at everything anymore.

3. Attitude: They say misery loves company, and this is very true. The amount of sarcasm and slight cynicism I have right now is nothing compared to the amount I had in high school. With my daily sharpened tongue and a penchant for wittily putting down people (all in the name of fun, of course), I was supremely pessimistic and whine-y and cynical about life and myself and people and cheese and football and what have you. Naturally, this appealed to people because I didn't go overboard (those people were just emo and mean-spirited and wholly unappealing.) Because of course, deep deep down, I was simply just a nice and economically stable person - I just had quite the sardonic character on top. And that was supposedly "cool." Why do you think nearly all the best-selling books ever written are either super depressing or super sarcastic? If you are too happy and satisfied with life, no one can relate to you! We're all mucks waiting around for someone to love us, dots on the mural of time that no one will notice anyway. GOSH. Just kidding. But really, that's sometimes how I felt every single day of my life, and would frequently complain about it during one of my regular lunchtime tirades. (I was also super politically correct, but that's another story.)

But you know, looking at the hundreds of Facebook high school friends that I currently have that I will probably never see or speak to again, I realize that the person that I was in high school, no matter how "cool" she was, she's not who I want to be now. To my old friends, I might seem like I've turned into some happy-go-lucky Jesus freak, but it's not just that I'm happy-go-lucky now (though I admit I am totally all for Jesus, ha.) I still struggle with a lot of issues - maybe even more legit issues than back then - but the only difference is I know how to cope. And I think, to many people, me being happier about life and myself as a human being is actually more appealing than the cynical me because they no longer have to listen to my complaints and pretend that they actually care.

It's funny - 16-year-old emo me looking at 19-year-old joyful me would probably be like, what the f__ happened to you? (Yes, with that word too.) But at the end of the day, I'm happy with where I am right now, or rather, who I am right now. For the most part. I'm still a work-in-progress, but I'm still light years ahead towards who I should be.

But I will still discuss phototropism and Kafka and the self-centeredness of mankind with you in the coolest way I still can :)