This year has been full of everything I didn’t expect. There have been friendships, opportunities, and bonds that I never thought would happen to me during my first year of college. I expected college to be pretty average and was worried about certain aspects of it. I didn’t expect much socially, or really anything beyond academics. However, my experience has felt like a big college movie.
As someone completely riddled with social anxiety to a point where it gets in the way of everyday life, I expected that it would be very difficult for me to build relationships with people here. That’s one thing I definitely didn’t expect: people came to me, to a point where I am now able to seek others out too. My attitude on life has always been based in love, I always want to push positivity as much as I can. I feel like when I do something to push positivity, it always finds a way to come back to me. Here, I’ve found so many groups of people and we all inspire each other. That’s what I didn’t expect, being told that I have a positive impact on others the way that I do.
I’ve tried not to talk about my identity too much, especially because it has the ability to complicate my relationships. I didn’t expect college to make me think so much about my identity, but for a while this year I felt a lot worse about it than usual. As a trans person, my relationships with everyone feel different. I don’t fully understand how to fit into either side of the gender spectrum, so I always feel like a fly on the wall. It took a while this year to teach myself that I can fit into conversations, especially while I was overthinking my own identity and where I fit. I didn’t expect to have real relationships because I was afraid I wouldn’t be taken seriously; however, I have had so many conversations recently where close friends have told me I have helped them understand their own identities. That’s all I want in my life, to make people realize that confidence comes from different places than we expect. I have recently realized that I have been shaping the people around me by not changing anything about how I hold myself just because of being in a different place. I have realized that I make the world a better place by being here as myself, and that’s what everyone should understand.
We all have our own ability to shape everyone around us, we inspire each other. This entire semester I have been going to therapy and learning that the only person who has ever been critical of my identity is myself, I will always be the first person to call myself a loser. I’ve been taking a step back and looking at my impact. Every time I make my friends smile or laugh I also remind myself that their laughter is a product of my doing and that I have a positive impact on the things around me. I always try to remind myself that I do make things better by being around, and it’s something that has taken me a very long time to do, like 18 years. My outlook on the world is so much more beautiful now because I am finally able to understand that all of my relationships are a product of my own outlook on myself and what I deserve.
This year I expected high pressure and playing-pretend and scary adulthood, but what I have gotten out is that adulthood isn’t actually too different. I’ve been able to build relationships I have never expected and taught people how to be themselves too. I never thought that I would even be able to have authentic relationships with people, I didn’t have enough trust that people would accept me. I have been beyond accepted, I feel like my life is finally my own, and it’s exactly how I want it to be.
