“I fought with a stranger and I met myself
I opened my mouth and I heard myself
It can get pretty lonely when you show yourself
Guess I could have made it easier on myself
But I could never follow”
- Dixie Chicks “The Long Way Around”
I’ve never made decisions based on whether or not society approves, other people approve, my parents approve. My decisions are always based on whether I approve. Sometimes that led me down some not so fantastic roads and I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but that just how I have to live my life. I wasn’t happy at my old school, in fact you could saw I was absolutely miserable. And some would say that I should have stuck it out, that high-school just sucks and that I should get over it, that I should just make the best of it. I couldn’t live with that. With settling. So I came to Waterloo Oxford. I knew that I had to make a decision based on my happiness. At the end of the day I didn’t care that my parents didn’t want me to go to Waterloo Oxford, because at the end of the day their happiness isn’t the one that weighs on my shoulders before I go to bed and what makes me wake up in the morning, mine is.
You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do. -Eleanor Roosevelt
I’ve done a lot of things in my life that I was scared to do. Going to Europe sounds fun right? I was terrified. I was without my parents with 40 people I didn’t know for 40 days. I remember being on the plane and thinking “are you nuts? you can’t do this.” but I did it and it was the best experience of my life. Coming to a new school for the last year of highschool is not the ideal situation. It was hard and scary. For the first month I wasn’t happy at all, everyone had their own friends and at lunch I hid in the library trying to be invisible. But one day I said I am going to sit with someone at lunch, going into that cafeteria, I thought I was actually going to throw up, but I spotted Victoria (I knew her from elementary school) I walked up to her really nervous and really awkward and I stood there for a while looking really strange until I finally got the courage to sit down. It was then I met Johanna, we had a great conversation and things just kind of fell into place with everything else from there. Coming to W- O has been really scary, but its proving to be better than I could have ever imagined.
“Everybody is just a stranger but
That’s the danger in going my own way
I guess it’s the price I have to pay “
- John Mayer “Why Georgia Why”
You know for a while there everybody was just a stranger, but eventually those strangers become your friends.
Hey, I think that’s really awesome that you have the courage to actually do what you want even when other people don’t want you to or don’t think you should. I wish *I* had the courage to do that, because I don’t. I’m slowly learning to do things that I want to, and get over the fact that other people might think it’s stupid or it might not be what they thought I was going to do. But yeah, I think it’s great that you actually do what you enjoy no matter what.
And Europe does sound fun, wish I could go