"Being You"

Dear whoever finds themselves reading this:

Wow, I forgot I had this again. What a fun little blog for a 6 year old to have set up, huh?

Anyway, I have another rant/essay with some thoughts on the human condition. If I haven't already bored you somehow, I congratulate you. Text me, let's be friends.
I had this thought earlier, I was thinking in a meme format almost, comparing myself and how I act in certain situations.
I had: "Me trying to be cute" vs. "Me being myself."
And I looked at the pictures I would have associated with those two things and for a second, I almost liked the ones where I was "trying" more. I almost felt really bad about myself. Who was I if I liked myself more when I was "trying?"
That's when it hit me.
I was still being me. Being myself isn't one hundred percent made up of big awkward smiles and eyes that squint a little when I laugh. It isn't just what you get when you add up my desire to wear bright colors, crazy hair habits and love of animals.
From the perspective of a writer, reading about a character who is perfect, is boring. Very boring. I noticed how some characters I read about are eccentric of "excessively unique" but that's their only real defining feature.
Perfect characters are made realistic and relatable by having flaws.

Being unique is not a flaw.
Being different is not a flaw.
Not fitting the mold is not a flaw.
In fact, characters who are like this but don't have any real character issues to overcome, are almost their own "Stereotype of perfection."

Forgive me, I use quotation marks a lot in this rant/essay.

Here is where this all ties together:
When looking at my pictures, my "being cute" with small smiles and wide eyes, was still just as me as wearing devil horns and unicorn socks. Not everybody defines "cute," "attractive," or "beautiful" in the same way. I was only doing what I thought made me look, at first glance, "cuter."
Those kinds of pictures are not the ones I share with others, which is why I didn't post them with this whole theory. But I realized, when I was trying to seem one way, I would first thing cover up my flaws. When I was trying to hard, I would overcompensate for them. As though being myself meant getting rid of those traits that forged me into the very thing that I was trying so hard to be.

The same way a good character in a story needs flaws and challenges to overcome, so do we.
Sometimes, who I am is obnoxious. Who I am is loud at the wrong moments. Who I am doesn't know what to say, as much as I'd like the opposite to be true. Sometimes who I am is being really unsure if I have felt any romantic inclinations in the last three years, or if I was making them up because I wanted to feel what I saw my friends feeling. Sometimes who I am is being tired, and having a panic attack when the procrastinating thanks to ADHD, and lack of motivation that comes with depression, spirals into a hyperventilating fit when my anxiety/panic disorder suddenly has to deal with it. I am afraid of the dark. I don't wake up on time because of how often I wake up at 2 AM from a completely empty sleep, just to go into a nightmare my brain is making up in real time.
I am witty and snarky and sometimes enough that I can accidentally really offend my friends, or they feel like I don't like them or are attacking them verbally. It is not something I mean to do, but it is something I have to learn not to do.
These are problems.
These are things about me that other people may find hard to deal with.
These are things I wish people knew and I wish I could talk about, but I don't at all the right times and sometimes I bring it up at the wrong times, when it's the last thing people want to hear is how I'm often underestimated and overlooked because people think that just because I show some mildly more intense symptoms of anxiety, I can't control or handle it.
These are things I have to overcome.
It is going to take LOTS of time to overcome them.

And they are every bit as much a part of who I am, as my car alarm laugh, the fact that I wear devil horns as a "screw you" to the rest of the world, as the fact that I love Build-A-Bear, underrated movies with strange plots, and books by Marissa Meyer.

This is me. And I am never going to be easy to deal with. But the most important people in your life, aren't always going to be easy for you to handle either. It's finding the ones who are willing to stick it out for you, and you are willing to stick it our for them in return, that is the most important.
It's finding the ones whose broken pieces fit with yours, like an obscure puzzle, that sometimes cuts and scratches people. Nobody is in the wrong, you just need to come at it from an angle that isn't so sharp, and you can smooth out the edges together.

This is me. This is us. Embrace yourself, knowing that who you are is enough and knowing where you need to work on your habits is the first step to improving, to becoming not just yourself,
but the best version of you you can be.

This has been advice from a teenager who is not a therapist, but who feels like sometimes it needs to be said.

Ever sincerely,

Emily Kate