In a Vacuum

Happy Monday! My Mondays in college are weird, because I only have one class and its a 9 am, so the remainder of my day is wide open, which is the perfect setting for me to be productive, get ahead on work, and get my week started on a good note. Of course, this doesn't always happen.

Mondays are open spaces for me. I have a lot of time to think and ponder, (surprise surprise; this is basically the reason why I started this blog). Today, I am sitting in a starbucks on my college campus, looking at all of the other girls around me that are clearly older and just seem like they have it all together. I notice this about myself- when I don't know a person, I fill in the gaps of what their life might be like, instead of just accepting that I will never know their story from first-impressions. I feel like a lot of us do this without noticing, and I feel like we do this because we don't know how to exist without our identity being relative to the people and situations that surround us. I know nothing about the people around me, but because I am stressed with school work, because I am worried about declaring a major, and because I am slightly home sick, I automatically assume that everyone around me is staying afloat while I am deep in the trenches. The state of our minds determines the assumptions we make about others.

I am a firm believer in not judging a book by its cover, and not falling into the traps of assuming everything is as it seems. However, when you attend an amazing university, it is hard not to compare. College feels, so far, like an ongoing journey of discovering who I was, who I am, and who I am becomming, but it's hard to find out who you are "in a vacuum" when there are so many different points of reference that you are not used to. All of high school was spent with the same people, with relatively repettive drama, and in the same environment. Your points of reference for comparison are slim, and you exist in this confined bubble. It is easy to categorize yourself.

I am trying so hard to not only exist, but to live without putting myself in categories. My identity as a person is not relative to the person next to me, and neither is yours. I want the person that I am in my pajamas at 10 am in a Starbucks, intimidated by the several older and seemingly "put together" girls around me, to be the same person that I am when I have straight As, an established career, or truly do feel like I have everything figured out. I want my concept of self to be unconditional. When you change your mindset, let go of the ongoing internal battle, and recognize that we are all just humans, you free the other people around you from your judgements and you free yourself from a constant battle of comparison.

This freedom is totally a process, but as someone who is naturally very impacted by external factors (as we all are), I want to free myself a little bit more every day. I probably won't have straight As here at UVA, but I will have a sucessful career one day, and I will reach points in my life where I feel like I have it all figured out. Both of these factors will enhance my life. Regardless, I want to exist as purerly and authenticslly as I can, in a vacuum. I want to be concious and experience peace and joy without the high you get from feeling successful.