My Auto-Biography (Final Draft)

My Auto-Biography by: Deylah McCarty

Ah, the teenage years. It's true what they say, that those years are the most important of your life, but that doesn't mean it's always going to be a fun ride. Many times we don't even realize how much impact the choices we make during our younger years have on our entire life, and then by the time we do, it can be much harder to right what was wronged. For some of us we cannot even see what we’ve been doing to ourselves until we are much older, and much less able to fix what we see that’s not right in ourselves, nor as fast. Finding inner peace and happiness can be one of the toughest things along the road of life.
For me, middle school was one of the toughest experiences I ever went through. Although I tried to be quiet and blend in with the backdrop, I was considered weird and an easy target to succumb to being picked on. For someone like me, blending in and being hidden is nearly impossible whether I want to hide or not, most likely because of my very blue eyes and sometimes weird choice of clothing. Unfortunately, I was ridiculed often and annoyed even more so, which really made me question myself. When I think about it now, people might have acted the way they did around me to get my attention because they liked my weird personality. On the down side, I was very sensitive, easily flustered, and the drama of middle school was way beyond my control. Being as mature as I was then, the kids around me were idiotic in my eyes, always making stupid choices and acting completely ridiculous, but being only 13, I couldn’t have really been expected to do much about it.
One thing I hated the most about middle school, and about myself, was that I used to be extremely shy, meaning I was frequently embarrassed, which led to my cheeks turning very pink, and inevitably ended with people bothering me about it. It was horribly upsetting, and I had the mindset that it was never going to end. After all, how could I make my cheeks stop filling with blood? Or how could I possibly keep people off my back? I had fallen in to what I like to call ‘a rut.’ Rather than calling it depression, I would say that I’ve fallen into a rut and couldn’t get out because I just kept digging deeper rather than try to climb out. It is much easier to dig deeper and hide ourselves rather than use all of our strength to climb out. I was stuck in a pretty deep rut, and I had dug myself one hell of a hole.
Getting out of this rut was the next hardest thing in my entire life. When I explain how I did it here, there is no way to help you understand exactly how it was for me, but in a nutshell: hard work, self-encouragement, self-love, my mother’s support, and a therapist were what got me through. I went through years of struggle and determination, with blood, sweat, and tears, only for me there no blood was involved. I fought myself in a fierce battle, trying to invoke my deepest, most painful memories and stretch them out, examining every tiny bit of them until I understood everything. After a long road of fighting, I slowly came to peace with my inner fires and I changed, which changed the way I looked at the world around me. Therefore, I became my dream-self. The self that could walk into school without a second thought of my presence, the self that could say and do what I pleased without a care in the world.
Happy, outgoing, enormously confident, positive, hard-working, and popular—this is what I am now, and it’s a hard and well worth it job to manage. Keeping your head clear and your goals set is like keeping your room clean. Slack off, and it can get to how it used to be: littered, unorganized, stuffy, uncomfortable, and even embarrassing. Piles of clothing like giant, mental road blocks. Old, smelly food that constantly reminds you that you’re slacking. However, keep yourself on your toes, while picking up after yourself, and you can easily maintain a clean, nice room. As for bad days, you know they’re always going to be there, days where you just can’t keep your room tidy, but those kinds of days can be triumphed too. So just do the best you can, like I did, and try to keep your ‘room’ clean.