approved?
Tuesday,March 4, 2008 at 12:15 am (Barnard & New York Year 2 Semester 2)
It makes sense you know. The reason I always search for validation in others opinions? Nobody hesitates to contribute their thoughts to your successes when you are eight and grieving and moving all the time and disconnected from your brother and fighting with your mom. Any evidence of success– a good grade in school, a new, nice friend, a good party dress—were all suitable accomplishments for a compliment. My family, family friends, friends, everyone just wanted to give me a reason to think that life wasn’t so bad and I was worth something. But there was an assumption that somehow I was struggling with that idea. And I wasn’t. I was confused, I was lonely sometimes, I didn’t like moving and yes, there was a lot of yelling. But I was a happy-go-lucky kid who, like all other kids, got over their crying tantrums within a few hours and went merrily on their short-term memory way. So, now I’m twenty and looking around and hearing silence where praise used to be. People have stopped feeling motivated to craft support for my every move, and now I have no measure of how I’m doing. How AM I doing? I mean, I’m enrolled in this fancy college, and I’m getting pretty good grades, and I have this awesome musician boyfriend, and some days I even manage to put an outfit together which resembles stylish. I can navigate New York City streets and I know how to kick a soccer ball pretty well. I’ve got some good close friends, and a network of loose affiliations that some might call friendships and I prefer to call a walking rolodex. I’ve held down a few jobs, and although I have no idea what I’m going to do with my life, I do know it’s going to be okay because I’ll have the letter B.A. after my name and I’m pretty good in the interview chair. But with all these societal standards to live up to, all these qualities to measure myself against, I can’t quite place where I really stand. In a sea of women who can rattle off these same traits, who can tell me what they’ve eaten for the last six days (very little), what their goals for the next six years are (very ambitious) and what they want to name their kids (very weird) , I have no voices patting my shoulder with a friendly Australian “good on ya”. I have nobody sitting around just waiting for me to screw up either, and for that, I’m pretty damn thankful. But it’s weird to be left to my own devices, to have to dig into myself for the kind of self-worth and validation I should have learned to identify much, much earlier.
