Accepting every piece of me

“It’s just a presentation.”  “You’re too quiet.” These are the phrases that have burdened me throughout my life. I’ve come to terms with the fact that it’s very unlikely that I will just wake up one day and be this loud, outgoing kid who’s not afraid of her peers. I, however, wish that people would accept this small part of me as well. There’s much more to me than just my inability to talk in front of a group of people. It’s emotionally exhausting to be living outside of your comfort zone at all times and it’s difficult to get people to understand that sometimes I simply can’t do anything productive due to my crippling anxiety.

I have always been, and perhaps always will be, that incredibly awkward and shy girl that is too afraid to even make an attempt at raising her hand to answer a teacher’s question. But that’s subject to change. I’ve accepted the fact that I will always have anxious thoughts in the back of my head and that I need to start turning them into positive things. The first step of this journey of self-discovery happened on New Year’s Day when I scribbled one simple sentence that guised as a resolution on a half-torn-out journal page. I wrote down my favorite quote, “We accept the love we think we deserve”  from the book The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

The quote has helped me get through countless scary situations that I was nervous about in recent years so I decided to make it a bigger part of my life. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what the quote means to me. When it comes down to it, to me it simply means that I must accept the fact that it’s okay if I need to take a break or sit out on something that’s giving me negative thoughts before I can get people to understand and accept that part of me as well. If I continue to be hard on myself when I fail at something and shut everybody out of my life when I do, nobody will get to know the part of me that I wished people did.