Thoughts of an Introvert ✎

Insecure

It's easy to feel insecure. To feel hopeless amongst everyone and everything. To feel as though nothing you do is ever right, no matter how hard you try.

You can spend your entire life trying to be what you think you should be that sometimes you miss how great you actually are, all on your own.

I should know. I have spent the better part of my life so far, trying to be as perfect as I can be.

It's funny, no one ever told me that in the midst of trying to be perfect, I showed the entire world just how imperfect I truly am.

I remember once, I was at the mall with my friend. We were walking around aimlessly, not really looking at anything in particular, when I saw this amazing dress on a manikin.

I actually envied a manikin. I envied plastic.

I wanted to be that plastic.

I showed my friend the dress, and her response was, "that would look perfect on you!"

On me? No way. It would look stupid – at least that's what I told myself.

I actually laughed because I was jealous of a materialist object. I was jealous of nothing real. I was jealous of an image that I thought I should be, in order to feel accepted and worth looking at.

Why should I be jealous of a simple piece of plastic? That plastic was made in some factory somewhere, where its sole purpose was to be perfect. To perfectly wear the piece of clothing.

But me? I was made to form and change, and to look good in clothes that I felt comfortable in. Clothes that looked good for my own personal body type.

That's when I realized that no single human, is made to be perfect. We're all made according to genetics and luck. Some people are tall and some are short. Some people are pudgy, while others are lean. There is no good or bad, only different.

We have to stop believing that different means bad. That different means imperfect. That different means less than.

Different is just, different.

You can't keep pressuring yourself to be what others think you should be. They have their own lives to worry about, and if they are so concerned with yours, that speaks volumes on who they are as a person.

For me, however, I felt insecure emotionally, rather than just physically.

As an introvert, it's easy to bottle your emotions up and pretend they don't matter. To pretend that everything is fine, until chaos breaks out and you realize you were never fine to begin with.

It's easy to keep your emotions and your thoughts to yourself, because why should anyone else care if I woke up sad today? Why should they care if I woke up and wasn't hungry all day?

They have their own lives to live, why burden them with my problems?

My entire life, I've mastered the art of keeping to yourself. Of pretending you're perfectly okay, (there's that word perfect again), when in reality, you're struggling to get through the day. We place this foreign smile on our faces and wave when needed or speak when needed, but that's as far as it goes.

Once we're alone though, that's when our emotions come out to play. That's when we can spend hours locked in our bedroom crying or contemplating everything that happened that day, and wondering what we could have done differently to achieve a better outcome.

We over analyze every aspect of our day, down to the last word we spoke, just wondering how things could be different if we said this instead of that, or how things might have ended up if we did this and didn't do that.

Our minds are in constant battles with themselves.

So while we feel insecure about everything we do, other people only see us as normal. As a normal person who smiles throughout the day and speaks when we're spoken too. They don't see what lies beneath the surface. They don't see the battles we have internally.

I'd like to think that at least one person notices something. That one person notices when our smile doesn't reach our eyes, or that when we answer we only give vague replies, even though it's clear we want to say so much more.

Those people, the people who notice... they become our friends.

I have a friend like that. A friend that notices. And it's the best feeling in the world.

It's easy to feel insecure, but it's so much more rewarding to feel secure when you have the right people around you.

Because trying to feel secure in such an insecure world, is the toughest battle yet.