The Impact of a Single Tear

Allison Kalemba
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

My childhood has been one mainly filled with joy and happiness stemming from my incredible family and few friends. It would be a lie to say that I was miserable throughout my life. However, since the day of my own birth, I had always lacked a large amount of esteem and self-confidence. Ridden with anxiety and internal stress, I never believed in my ability to do anything substantial. I pushed myself hard in every aspect and built up a hatred for myself when I wasn’t the best. In sports, I cried when I messed up even the smallest amount; in my eyes, any mistake was equal to a failure and meant I was letting people down. Salty tears filled my young eyes so often that I earned myself the nickname ‘boo-hoo’ from a softball coach one year, the specific event being one I never fail to remember. While I cried, the others moved on. While I cried, everyone around me appeared unbothered. While I cried, the world kept spinning. It didn’t seem this way to my young self.

The internal and external conflicts I found myself stuck in during Junior High created a change within me. After years of being called a ‘cry baby’ and feeling self-hatred, I began to learn to accept myself. The experiences I went through allowed me to gain thicker skin, to see reality in a new light. I no longer would cry every time something went wrong or mentally punish myself for my so-called failure. Loving myself did not come easy; it was a difficult uphill march like attempting to climb a large, green hill with only a water bottle filled with dirt and no shoes on your feet. Time was what it really took for me to become who I am today: a girl who is happy to be herself. There are many things I would change about myself and I have many flaws, but I truly love the person I am. I like being me which was not something I could say a few years ago. My confidence has grown so much thanks to the support of the people around me and the growth I went through. I am not afraid to speak my mind and be unapologetically myself. Today I am myself, nothing more and nothing less.

I would imagine that my future holds a steady growth for all parts of myself, including physical and emotional. Based on the way I have changed in the past and how I am changing even now in the present, it would be absurd to expect any different to come next. After all, I am nothing but a bundle of constant change. I am a different woman than I was in Junior High, than I was two years ago, than I was yesterday, and I will be a different woman tomorrow. It is predictable that there will be many hardships throughout my lifetime and drops in my self-confidence, though my overall course is unpredictable. I am no fortune teller, of course, so I know that there is truly no way for me to have any idea of what my future holds. All that I can say with complete confidence is that I plan on living a life where I am able to love and accept myself. I plan to live a life where I can say with complete honesty that I am happy to be myself and would rather not be anyone else.

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