Summer 2011
I went through a lot this summer, in addition I was impacted by a lot of different little things. Just thought id share.
Confidence:
I think I have struggled with self esteem issues my entire life. Despite the number of times that I have been told that I am beautiful, I have never actually felt beautiful inside. Im guessing that these issues stem from the fact that I am an only child who literally watched my parents’ marriage fall apart or maybe it is just a part of my character. Its hard to explain where this feeling of low self esteem comes from but sometimes it feels like a battle that I fight everyday, and my last few semesters of college were the very peak of it. This summer I overcame a good amount of this issue, and what I am about to say next may seem really corny but it is true in every aspect. I was influenced by a certain TV show actually, called Glee. When I first heard about this show I deemed it to be like any other stupid cliche drama filled show for teenagers. And then one day I came across an article about it and what the show aims to do for young people dealing with low self confidence. So I watched an episode online and was hooked from there. I spent my first few summer nights (before summer school started) watching episode after episode of the show until I caught up with the season finale. The show stirred up so many emotions inside of me and literally brought tears to my eyes because of how much I related to it. The shows entire anthem is about loving yourself despite your flaws or how different you are from others. The characters in the show do an amazing job of displaying how god created us as unique individuals with beauty inside of us all. It basically just told me to shut up and love myself no matter what. I have heard that cliche so many times and it never affected me but this show somehow illustrated it so well that I immediately started to feel good about who I was after I started watching it. My favorite character on the show is a girl named Quinn. She is supposed to play the pretty girl on the show who loses everything including her popularity after she gets pregnant. Of course she is not the character that I relate to most on the show, thats another girl. But Quinn is my favorite character on the show because I admire her a lot. She is known to be the pretty girl on the show, so a lot of people envy/stereotype/are just plain rude to her a lot. What I love about her though is her amazing self confidence. She never lets the taunting get to her. She carries her beauty extremely gracefully and is never conceited about it, just very confident in who she is as a person and not her looks alone. I admire this character because she has this quality and I absolutely do not. I hope that one day I can carry both my outer appearance and personality the same way she does, confidently and gracefully. So to sum things up, this summer I learned that there is a really big difference between looking beautiful and feeling beautiful, and the latter is so much more difficult yet so much more important to accomplish than the first.
Physics:
I took it at a community college and I honestly dont know if the reason I did well in it was because it was really that much easier, I worked extremely hard, or if I just had that much more confidence in myself after watching Glee. Honestly it felt like a little bit of everything. It was still torturous because I had to wake up early every morning to be at class by 8 and then learn physics for 4 hours Monday through Friday. And of course physics is physics no matter where you take it so it was still a lot of studying and I would come home and do nothing but eat, study, and sleep (and watch some TV I guess.) also because I took summer sessions 1 and 2 and summer classes go ridiculously fast with a test every week. This class was kind of life changing for me because I went into it really motivated and believing that I could do well and actually trying harder and came out with an A. Also this class was ALL math, something that I have always feared, so I feel like overcame a huge fear of mine. For the first time in college I felt like I was worth something. It reminded me of high school when I used to make all these amazing grades and be at the top of my class, I had missed that feeling so much, I loved being able to do that. In addition, physics gave me this confidence to go on and achieve my goals. I know its just one subject taken at a community college but to me it was like hey if you work hard AND work with confidence like you did in this class why not apply that attitude to your remaining incredibly difficult science classes? And I literally still have that feeling inside of me. Of course ill have to apply it next semester because im not taking any science classes this fall but I have the confidence that I can. InshaAllah (god willing). Anyway what I definitely learned from this class was that the minute you start to doubt what you can do, is when you set yourself up for failure.
Marriage?
I realized that I am secretly ready to get married and start a family. Oh if only life were that simple. No matter how much I try to avoid the topic, no matter how much I fear marriage because of my parents’ divorce, no matter how much I tell everyone that I need to finish school and make myself financially independent before I get married, I am definitely ready for a committed relationship and also, I love kids soo0 much. Unfortunately the field that I have chosen to go into probably wont give me this option at the age that I am right now and I also want to utilize my time with my parents and enjoy my life as a child (as long as I am under their roof) as much as possible. I know that I am still a child in many ways and that I have so much to learn when it comes to marriage but there was something about this summer that made me realize that I am ready for god to send who ever he has chosen for me into my life. It started when I had to attend the wedding of my Dads best friends son. I was kind of down because the guy who was getting married had wanted to marry me not to0 long ago. My mom had talked to me about it but I wasnt interested in him in that way and my parents both felt that he was probably not the right guy for me. I trust and respect my parents’ decisions and was also going with my heart on this one too. We were friends, I thought he was a great guy, but I wasnt ready to get married and didnt want to rush into anything. Now that I think about it though, he is a real catch for his new wife, smart, extremely good looking, loving, and god fearing. I wish them both so much happiness in their marraige. I couldnt help but feel lonely when his marraige was happening though, I felt like I had no one significant in my life. The couple looked so beautiful and happy and they were playing a slide show of the their wedding ceremony on the wall with this really pretty song playing in the background and I felt my eyes suddenly fill with tears. Tears of despair for myself not tears of happiness for the couple. Of course I couldnt let anyone see me so I started texting my friend so that the tears would fall away without anyone noticing. I dont know what it was, maybe I just got really into the moment, but I remember that I had never felt that lonley in my life while being surrounded by so many people. I was not at all regretting my decision to not marry him, I knew that was a decision that had come from god and that he was meant to be with someone else but everything at that moment seemed so perfect that I imagined myself in place of the bride for just a few minutes and drifted away from reality at that moment.
Death.
I was going to go into this long discussion about death because I experienced two deaths in my family back to back, plus the death of a neighbor, plus the death of a former teacher. But since I am finishing up this post so late (like months later) I dont wish to go to0 deep into this topic because it took me a very long time to come out of it. The time period when these deaths kept hitting me back to back to back was extremely difficult for me because I have never experienced deaths this close to me in my entire youth and young adult life. The first death was the death of a neighbor and almost immediatly was the death of my grandmother which was basically my first real death experience. Just because she was such a big part of my life. My fathers mother. The women whos arms I played in as a child, the fragile old lady who wrapped her arms around me as I became an adult. When she was gone, it was hard to accept because she was still so alive to me. Everything hit me so hard, that death was all I could think about. Not so much the other deaths as much as my own. I went through a lot of different feelings this summer but this was definitley the the final slap in the face. The summer changed me a lot, it made me a little bit stronger in its own unique ways.
