I’m the type of person who knows a lot of people and likes making new friends. I’m loud and enthusiastic; I’m very much of an extrovert. I spend most of my Friday and Saturday nights out with my friends and I’m not ashamed of it. I like the way I live. Because of this, people have not only gotten to know me as “the life of the party,” but also as someone who lives to party.
Countless times, I have heard people say to me, “oh, I didn’t know you were that girl.” This is their reaction to the 100 books in my room and the pile of stacked video games beside my TV.
But why do we have to be one thing or another? Why can’t the girl that has a busy social life also be excellent at her work? Why can’t the guy that gets straight A’s also go to raves? Why can’t the quiet girl dance as if that was the only thing that mattered in the world?
If you asked me to describe myself in one sentence, my answer would be “I am an artist.” That is the gist of who I am. If you wanted to go deeper, I would say I’m also a bookworm, a feminist, a believer, and a vegetarian. I am a lot of things – a lot more than I can even think of…and so are you.
Sometimes people, like you and me, are fond of classifying everyone into a category: either this person is this one thing or that other thing. But humans are far more complicated than that. We absorb so many things from different places and experiences throughout the years of our lives; we never truly understand our own complexity.
Inside each and everyone of us, there are oceans of memories and continents of knowledge. The places we’ve been to, the people we’ve met, the things we’ve seen…they have all molded us in numerous ways that make us who we truly are.
Luckily, humans often feel the necessity to explore new places. The great advantage of traveling is that you are also simultaneously discovering yourself – and this is just as important as exploring the world and its people.
After all, we have all been misjudged and classified into something we are not – or maybe, into something that isn’t the totality of our being. We are everything within ourselves and we should be treated like it.
