Finding my voice

I’m going through a metamorphosis in my first few months from exiting the gates of undergrad.

Fellow good-grades grads, you feel me?

No longer do I have the thrill or the challenge of finishing my specialized studies degree. No longer do I have another set of classes to alter to my heart’s content.

No longer am I a naive freshman, or a pessimistic senior: I am a college graduate, who’s gained a considerable amount of perspective, it seems, from when I exited the halls of high school, four years ago.

It’s beginning to feel like the weight of my full-time course load, and my eager ambition to succeed, distracted me from achieving the very best of me, for me, over these four years.

I got so caught up in the fervor of like-minds, and the fast-paced life that my academic-trained self abused, that I lost my voice and got confused along the way.

And now, I’m struggling to define who I am, and who I still want to become.

This summer, I have finally exhaled, after four, long years of punishing and relentless pursuit. In an attempt to ‘clear the room,’ so-to-speak, I have begun to drain the myriad, varied voices in my head.

I decorated my laptop with a sticker-less case. I cancelled my plans for yet another planned tattoo. I redirected my energy away from all of “the struggles” and started to look inwards at how I define my very self. Who I say I am at my very core.

And what I found, beneath all of the Athens-infused mania and the silencing from similar minds surprised me, challenged me — just like my travels in Singapore did to my perspective on globalization this June.

No longer do I crave the need to buy a bunch of ‘outdoorsy’ gear to prove that I could rug it with the off-roaders. No longer do I fantasize about tens of tattoo iterations scattered all over my body, each one straining to become more awesome than the last. No longer do I hunger for rivaled ambition or to save the world by myself, either.

It’s just not “me” anymore, I think: She’s all selves I was merely pretending to be.

My Athens persona has deflated without the energy and stimuli of my collegiate peers and mentors, which makes me curious: What, then, is the tone of my true voice?

What will the mirror reveal, once I sift through all the faces and facades of years and grade-schools past?

Here’s to further discovery and transparency. This time, I’m finding my voice.

-bnb