Not Everyone is Looking: Advice to My Teenage Self

Not everyone is looking at you or judging you or thinking that you are anything other than what you actually are. People have their own lives. They are not spending their time dwelling on your shortcomings.

Or wondering why your tennis shoes are cheap and your socks off-brand. They aren’t keeping track that you wear your favorite matching teal skirt and sweater once every week or that your rotation of what you consider to be outfits fit for school looks like the discount rack at Arlen’s. They shop there, too. They just don’t tell you.

You really need to stop thinking everybody else is rich. They’re not. And if they were, it wouldn’t matter.

The things that make you so indescribably uncomfortable aren’t things that anyone else notices. You are making these things up in your head and then using them as excuses to hang back.

You could’ve been a cheerleader. You just lost your nerve.

I’m really sorry to heap humiliation on you but, seriously, you need to confront your role in making yourself feel like an outsider in high school. Nobody put that on you. You put it on yourself.

That’s pretty rough, I know. Uncharitable.

But nothing’s gained by deciding that the other kids in high school make you feel self-conscious or any other kind of way. They bustle their way down the hall, carrying too much, and dropping books just like you. They wear the wrong socks and forget their locker combinations. Their best friends ditch them for hipper people, and they can’t climb the rope in gym class.

Lucky you have one teacher who thinks you’re super smart and weird that it would be your typing teacher. After all, what kind of person goes to college to teach typing? And what kind of serious student goes to typing class unless that’s what they’ve planned for themselves – lifetime of typing. It was right of your father to insist that you learn to type, after all, like he said, if you can type you can always earn a living. It turned out to be true.

This is my advice, young Jan. You are the definer of yourself, not other people. You aren’t a reflection of other people’s opinions.

You shine on your own.

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Originally published in 2022