Is Independence Necessary?

In high school, I always used to take pride in the fact that I didn’t have self-esteem issues like most other teenage girls do. However, I guess I never knocked on wood after I said that, and so it came back to bite me in the butt because in the past year, I’ve experienced the lowest confidence levels ever. Currently, I am still recovering from the loss. I don’t know how the loss came about, but there could be numerous reasons. It could be reasons due to another person, it could be psychological imbalances, or maybe it is inevitable and everyone must experience a time of low self-esteem. Whatever, the case, I am currently experiencing my time of depression, and I am trying to work my way out. However, in order to know what actions to take to get out of the rut, one has to know what maintained the confidence level before. I think this certain aspect varies from person to person, but for me, I think that main thing was the feeling of independence.

In my high school years, especially in the last two years, I was extremely confident. I was not too confident, to the point where I was egotistical, but I was confident to the point where I never ever compared myself to others. The thought of comparing myself to others never even dawned in my head. I was happy being myself and did not feel the need to change anything about me. I never once looked at another girl and thought – “oh, I wish I could look or be more like her”. I guess in a superior/inferior sense, if I ever did look at others, I felt gladder that I was not like them. I was proud that I was different and wanted to be nothing at all like anyone else. However, somewhere in my time of college, I lost those feelings. I began comparing myself to everyone else, wanting to be something I was not, and feeling as though I was not special enough. It worked in reverse order for me, I guess, because in most scenarios people hear about insecure high school students going to college and gaining a sense of independence, but for me I went to college and lost that sense of confidence. Maybe it was because there were so many other kids like me, and so I lost that feeling of being different. I do think that played a huge part of it. I relied too much on “being different” in my last two years of high school for my sources of confidence. Perhaps my confidence then was false. Why do I have to feel different to feel confident and independent?

It is extremely hard for me to feel independent when I am engulfed by masses of people that are just like me. When people exhibit just as much passion, if not more, for the same things you possess a passion for, and when people are just as unique as or more unique than you, it really makes it hard to feel distinguished from others in any way. I suppose one could think that everyone in the world in unique, but a lot of times, I doubt and feel that everyone really is not unique. This world is so interconnected; everyone it seems goes through the same emotions and experience similar events. It is almost scary how universal feelings are. Judging from experience, to me the saying that almost every thought is unoriginal is so true. So how do you fight that, accept that maybe you are not unique, and still be confident?

The definition of confidence is: “freedom from doubt; belief in yourself and your abilities”. I used to possess so much of this before, but now I feel I always doubt myself. I do not feel I lost any abilities that I possessed before, but I feel as though what I had is not really enough anymore for what I want to be. In addition, as mentioned in previous essays, I feel that I have lost some of my passion. But I think a lot of my passion was fueled by the same theory: that I had this passion and no one else did as much as I. I really need to dispose of this false feeling of confidence gained from feeling different. I need to realize that you don’t have to be different to be independent. I think I am starting to gain back my confidence, but I think I am doing it in a similar manner as before: by banking on the fact that I am different than others. But now I am wondering if I need to change that, is it really that wrong to create a false feeling of difference to gain confidence? Maybe I am heading in the right direction and by writing about this; it just shows that I again doubt myself. I do not know. My roommate was the one who first brought this to my attention… asking me “why do you have to feel like your different”. But thinking about it more, I think she herself, prides on the fact that she is different and unique. She has that arrogance I used to have in high school, but I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing.