Bowes and Bubble Skirts: Maintaining Personal Identity While Being in College
Hey y’all! Wowwww, everytime I take a little break it feels like forever. I missed y’all! It’s been a lot going on lately with moving my sister into her dorm for her second year of college and with me just getting on campus for my senior year at Morgan State. Whenever I am going through a lot of transitions, it’s hard for me to be creative and be inspired to write because I’m so focused on the process. Plus, I feel like it is slightly harder to hear from God when I am at school because there are so many distractions. And then, when I finally got ready and inspired to write, I realized I left my laptop charger back home in Virginia and of course my laptop died. A lot has been working against me, so clearly I got something to say lol.
Originally, I was going to talk about everything I learned this summer (I still might), but every time I went to write about it, I wasn’t feeling it. To be honest, I am still learning the personal difference between going beyond your feelings to build discipline, and also making sure authenticity and creativity is at the forefront of my focus when it comes to my blog. I’m still finding the balance as I don’t want to just put stuff out for the sake of being on a schedule or building a platform, I only want to speak (or write) when God wants me to. However, once I got on campus for the first day of classes, I knew exactly what I was going to talk about.
On a campus full of bows, bubble skirts and sambas I'm reminded that the best thing you can be is yourself. As I walked around, I noticed the majority of the young ladies incorporated one of the aforementioned items into their first day fits. I don’t even want to get into the surplus of white tees the guys had on (Partially, because it really does look good lol). Now I would like to preface this by saying this post really has nothing to do with what y’all chose to wear back to school. I could care less, how you choose to express yourself is your business. This post is more about how easy it is to subconsciously put yourself into a box without realizing it and how hard it is to really maintain your personal identity in college.
Before you even step foot onto campus, you are placed into a box. You are immediately categorized based on what you have to offer and what you plan to offer. Your GPA categorizes you initially with many deciding to be a part of the Honors program and the separation that comes from the uneven distribution of grants/scholarships. Then you are divided even further once you decide your major and that follows you your entire matriculation. Once we finally get to the school we divide ourselves even further into groups with the student organizations we choose to join and other factors like income, appearance and more, a lot of this can happen subconsciously. Everyone is so eager to find someone that they relate to that they often hide parts of themselves to be accepted. A lot of us are so eager to seem cool or be accepted that we wear things we know other people like, to feel like we belong. Your college experience is kind-of based on your ability to function well in a group. You have to live with people, You have to take classes in your major, you “have” to be involved. All these things you “have” to do put you in a group and all the organizational tactics we use, to make the process of attending college easier, actually work against your personal identity and can be extremely detrimental to maintaining authenticity.
I know once I initially got to school as a freshman, I tried to fit in how I could. Of course, I am a little different than most with how I grew up, so I knew prematurely that I would have to be intentional about my originality in my journey, but I didn’t know to what extent. I thought that I was going to be fighting against regular peer pressure, I didn’t realize that the extent of the internal structuring of school would weigh so heavily on my individuality. Though college is typically the first time we get to decide what we want for ourselves it is a breeding ground for forgetting everything you knew and adapting to what you think will make your experience better.
Allow this to serve as your reminder that your path is yours to craft. Your success is solely based on what is inside of you. It doesn’t matter what organization you join, what friends you make, what grades you get, only what you believe about yourself will come to pass. Being a student leader won’t transform you or elevate you into anything beyond your being. You already are who you will be and that truth should free you, but it could very easily hinder you as well. It is easy to get intimidated by the fact that there is no shortcut to success and no internship can force that success to you. The work is yours to do and whatever you do with that knowledge will determine the life that you live.
The one thing that will remain constant throughout your matriculation is that you will always be changing. I am not the same person I was yesterday, let alone freshman year. Every class, every party, every event, every experience is cultivating you whether you know it or not. You have to be intentional about every experience you participate in in school. It’s not only shaping your future, but it’s shaping the way you will think about the things you experience. You will see everything through the lens of what you have gone through and this will frame every decision you make going forward.
Honestly, every day you should make an effort to do things that remind you of who you are. In a perfect world, every decision you make would be based on how you identify yourself, but that’s not always the case. Ensuring that you prioritize your wholeness will allow you to show up in every atmosphere as your best self. If you are just like everyone else, you will have nothing special to offer the spaces you enter. You will pollute every atmosphere with your spurious nature.
Anxiety comes when your heart conflicts with your mind. I realized I was dealing with so much anxiety because I wasn’t allowing myself to be content with following my heart (God lives in my heart, so really following God). I didn’t give my heart permission to lead my mind and decision-making and instead I was led by how I felt others would perceive me. That is so exhausting. I wish somebody would’ve told me that people will perceive you regardless of what you do. People will judge you based on what they’re doing, what they think you should be doing, what others are doing and a million other things that have nothing to do with you. Your only job is to remain true to yourself and who you are called to be. You’re going to have a terrible time making friends if you don’t know who you are because you will always be trying to do what you think would have others accept you. Or you will be introducing a version of yourself to others that doesn’t align with who you really are and you will still feel stuck and lonely. You will be in a room full of people and still feel alone. You’ll look up and realize you’re surrounded by a bunch of people who don’t even know you.
These are all things I learned with time and even though my parents tried to teach me this I didn’t really understand it until I lived it. And I didn’t realize the lengths I would suffer and the depths of depression I would go through trying to fight against who I was made to be. Save yourself and choose yourself first, then you can show up for others.
