And The Wall's Come Tumbling Down & Punishment

Hi, Aoife here.
Welcome to Saturday's post - Insecurities.

I would love to say that I don't have any and that I am strong enough to not care what others think of me but alas that is not the case. I am sure that plenty of people out there share some of my fears because after all beneath everything, we all have things that we are to afraid to show.


My biggest insecurity is that people won't accept me for who I am and that in being myself I lose the ones that I care about. I know that people would say that if someone can't accept you for who you are then they aren't real friends and I do accept that. But that does change the fact that it still hurts to lose someone who you consider a friend. I spent a lot of time when I was younger inside my own head and inside the worlds I found in books not because I was afraid of people but because I was afraid of what the thought of me. I have changed a lot since those days and gained confidence that wasn't there before. This change was mainly due to finding people who accepted me as I was and helping draw me out of myself.
School, I find tends to send me back into myself, not completely but enough to change how I view myself. Outside of school, I feel more free to be myself and act myself but in school I don't talk as much or act as impulsively.

Insecurity Number 2: Appearance
When I am talking about appearance, I don't just mean your weight, height and facial features. I mean how you conduct yourself and what you wear also. I mean we live in a consumer world where almost everything we see is influenced by the media, from the way we talk to the clothes we wear. I always feel like there is this invisible pressure to be like everyone else, to go with all the latest trends and buy branded clothes just because everyone else has. I think there is also a lot of emphasis on looking a certain way-skinny, gorgeous and more often than not, tall. I'm not very tall which doesn't bother me that much except when I am surrounded a group of much taller people, which does make me feel like they are looking down on me. I'm not very insecure but looking at rake thin models makes me so frustrated towards the influence that drove them to look like walking skeletons.

I know that I have plenty more to say about insecurities but unfortunately I am exhausted so I'm going to keep it short and sweet.
There are always things that we wish we could change, either in the world or in ourselves. However things don't just fix themselves because you want them to, you have to work for change or learn acceptance of how things are. But you should be proud of who you are because no one else in the 7 billion people on the planet in the same as you. So maybe it's in accepting ourselves as the crazy, misfits that we are that we find the strength to become something more then we were before.

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.” 
― Bernard M. Baruch
(Easy to say but hard to do)

See you next week,
Aoife

P.S: Happy Birthday to our wonderful Orla! :)

P.P.S: Punishment
My punishment for not posting last saturday was to eat a Blenderised Salad and post the pictures of my next post so here they are:

And voila: the Blenderised Salad.
Ingredients:
Half a head of lettuce,
4 tomatoes,
Sweet and Sour Sauce,
Milk (optional)
1 cooked egg

I used sweet and sour sauce because we didn't have any salad dressing and the milk is to tone down the saltiness of the sauce.

Overall Verdict:
Not terrible but I certainly don't want to drink it again.

Mission 006: For once in you life, be honest

Kate. Wednesday. Insecurities.

Danielle, I know I give you a hard time over your height sometimes but if I'm completely honest it has never felt like a big deal to me. When I think I you I don't think 'that small Asian girl'. I think of all the great things about you and of the fun we've had together. Obviously like you said, this is because I've had time to get to know you and your international-basketballer-sized personality. And I don't think I'm being overly optimistic about human kind when I say that I don't think anyone judges people based on their size. Sure, it counts for a first impression but they don't last very long, almost as soon as you learn something of the person's personality you forget their appearance. Or maybe that's just me?
Also I've totally felt the seriousness in classes this year and it's worries me a bit that I won't keep up too. It's so weird how much people have changed their views on school work.

Orla I don't know what to say to you because I can only imagine what that feels like. It think I speak for everyone here however when I say that if you ever need anything you only have to ask. Let Orla hear it guys. And then we all, in a monotone, said, "We're here for you Isaac *cough* I mean Orla."

At the moment I don't think I've ever been in a better place in my life. I have an amazing bunch of friends, I have academic goals that I can see myself achieving and I'm happier than I ever remember myself. I'm also feeling pretty confident in myself for a change, though I don't expect that will last. But this is how I've felt for most of my life:

I grew up living on the edge of things, never feeling a part of anything. I never fitted in with my 'friends' and we never had the real kind of connection that defines friendship. But never having an experience of anything else I didn't know that at the time. I didn't even realise I was unhappy with my situation until I got out of it and found something better. I tried so hard to fit in because I thought if I became like everyone else life would be much better. But it scared me. It scared me so much that I might never improve and never become 'better', that life would never become desirable and one day it would all be too much for me to bear.

This all arose from my biggest insecurity and it made me so strongly aware that there was something wrong with me that I needed to change. I've always had trouble speaking to people especially those I don't know. And yes no-one finds this easy but most people don't spend the best part of their life stressing over how they will end up alone because they are unable to talk to a single human being. Even now it terrifies me more than I can convey. I wish so badly I could find it easy to hold a conversation, even to get one sentence out with a stranger. It freaks me out so badly. It's as though there is a part of my brain that never developed and prevents me from living a normal life.

I'm not even a clingy person. I like being alone a good amount of the time and I don't need to be constantly surrounded by people. But at the mere idea of complete lonesomeness I feel sick in the pit of my stomach and my mind starts to stress out drastically.
It's more than basic shyness, it's a physical sick feeling whenever faced with social interaction of any kind. My palms get sweaty and my heart beats alarmingly. It has taken me years to gather together enough courage to even answer a teacher's question or ask my own. No matter how much I might want to talk to you sometimes my mind just can't function that way and all possible conversation freezes over in my brain.

I constantly worry that I will leave school and never make another friend. That I'll be forced to seclude myself from society to avoid a mental breakdown anytime someone speaks to me. It makes it worse when I try to understand how I made the friends I have today. You guys are the funniest, most interesting and intelligent group of people I know but I don't honestly know what I did to get you as friends. I don't suppose that there is a set method to making friends but it would be a help to at least know how it happened the first time round.

Even people in my year who I've known for the past four years of my life and seen them every school day of that time, it still takes an inhuman amount of effort to get a short conversation out. But I've lived my whole life like this so I've gotten ever so slightly better at it. I find that it's easier to talk to other people when I have friends around me and I don't know if this is because they give me more confidence which would suggest it's a psychological problem which was my opinion anyway. I don't know where it has stemmed from however because it has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. It's definitely improving though which gives me hope for the future. 

I surround myself with an air of indifference to try and convince myself that every moment of my life is not a struggle of anxiety behind my mask. To a certain extent it works, I've managed to successfully believe that I don't care about a lot of things but talking to people is not one of them. I'm constantly trying to analyse peoples actions, deciding what they think of me, do they like me, are they real or are they fake. I think I need to know how a person really sees me to feel comfortable talking to them. Which would be another factor to why it takes me a painfully long time before I can consider someone my friend. I have a lot of problems.

If the world was a wish granting factory the first and possibly only thing I would wish for myself would be to have the ability to talk freely to people. To have the liberty to decide who I want to talk to without the fear of looking like an imbecile who can't say more than two words.

MISSION...........................................................COMPLETED

Insecurities

Hello everyone it's Danielle Tuesday with your host Danielle frantic because it's 9pm and she hasn't done the rest of her homework yet because she got distracted by the internet once again. Thank feck for Study. *cheesy 90s opening sequence*

Housekeeping

Aoife and Orla, your punishments by the end of this week, yes? Failure to comply will result to another punishment. :D Try your best to document it! It should be super interesting.

I hope you're all doing okay in the first week of school. It has been quite draining for me but it totally pays off because I'm currently on top with both learning and homework and it feels good not to be panicking when there's a surpise test or when the teacher decides to ask questions around in class. Well, until tonight anyway. I gotta hurry up!

So I pretty much agree with everything that was said about last week's theme, but I totally resonated the most with Orla's post, but maybe in a different way than she inteneded? I get what you mean with worrying that you'll miss school and are going to have like 3835 years' worth of work to catch up to. I mentioned this in one of my posts in my personal blog but I really felt like something changed this year. Maybe it's just myself, that I'm more focused with my work because I have something that I want to achieve in the end of sixth year. But I also feel it in the atmosphere in the classes I'm in, and in the seriousness of people when they're inside the classroom. Is it just me? Maybe. But I think that's what's causing me to become anxious and worried in the mornings before I go to school. It's the thought of everyone upping their game and I feel like I will get left behind.

And that is a great segué for this week's theme.

Theme of the Week: Insecurities

I'm short. This isn't a secret. I've spent most of my life so far literally looking up to people to be able to hold a conversation with them. But the thing about being insecure about your height is that you can't do anything about it, which gives you equal amounts of frustration and acceptance in most days. In some days,which happens quite a lot recently I've noticed, you see and exagerrate the bad things about being short more.

So I've mentioned feeling anxious and worried because everyone is a lot more serious this year, and part of the reason why I feel sick in the mornings before I go to school is the fact that I worry that I will lose the immediate start-of-school adrenaline (the idealism stage) that I'm feeling in this first week and then totally screw everything up after like two months and then I'll have nothing to show for myself and no job and no education and a disappointment. This feeling I think gives me a taste of what college is going to be like, when everyone would probably be too smart for me too handle and no one would notice me because I'm short and insignificant and I would just, like, disappear.

It's not that I see my classmates as competition. It's not that at all. I've analysed myself and I've come to the conclusion that the reason why I have a "big" personality and I try and maintain good grades (apart from the fact that my parents would murder me if I don't) is because I'm trying to compensate for my height.

Hahahahahahaha. That sounds ridiculous, I know.

But it makes sense in my head. That maybe if I'm good at what I do no one would notice that I'm half a feet shorter than they are. It's a great motivation, actually. But it's also sad, especially when meeting people for the first time. You may have noticed that I'm a lot quieter around people I don't know and I think that's because I'm a lot more aware of how short I am and they don't know me yet so they can't look over the height and see the loud mouth yet. You know? Probably not.

And that's why I'm scared of college.

I guess all of this boils down to "not being good enough." I have a problem with wanting to be the good if not the best at everything and I guess that's what made me a Slytherin, but I have standards set for myself, and whenever I fail to reach those standards, I take the blow so hard that I feel a sick feeling in my stomach and I curl myself into a ball and cry because in my mind, without the things that I'm good at, I'm nothing. I realise that this is mentality is wrong. I know that. But that doesn't stop me from thinking it. Because when I'm in that hole of insecurity, no quotes or words from other people or compliments would get me out of it. I just gotta stay there until I'm not there anymore. 

You guys my father is now knocking at my there and I don't have time to proofread or change this anymore so some things may come across as not what I meant, but I'll try and correct it all next week.

-Danielle