An accomplished woman looks back at her lonely, pained self and wants to tell her that friends are few and approval comes from within

You are in college at a bucolic southern school with a grass filled quad and state of the art buildings designed by brand name architects. You sit alone in the less fashionable of two cafeterias, Cox Hall, with your books splayed open in front of you, an empty plate on a melamine tray is by your elbow. Later you will study in the stacks of the library where no one goes, forgoing the chance to appear in front of your peers at Woodruff Hall. You bury your nose in textbooks appearing to be busy and chose to dine by yourself to hide from other students with whom you feel disassociated. You do not want to be distracted by their frivolous pursuits; you have the mission of being a star academic and superior athlete to fulfill.
The other students, with their baggy sweat suits and aversion to early morning classes appear undisciplined and therefore aimless to you. The majority are enthralled with beer as if they have discovered a miraculous substance that deserves to be the focal point of their social plans and needs to be imbibed to make any occasion from going to class to hooking up with a guy an experience full of hilarity. The truth is you thought the same thing a few years ago as a teenager when you went to bars with a fake ID in Georgetown. But at nineteen, you are past the infatuation of being drunk and you want to be studious to make up for the time you spent being a rebellious teenager.
What you are really doing is punishing yourself, trying to gain the approval you feel you lost by being a wild child, one who stayed out past curfew, crashed the family car, and dated older men.
You are swinging from one extreme to another, attempting to erase a set of facts you wish did not exist, of which you are ashamed. It’s a pattern you have established even at this early point in your life and one you will continue: you travel in one direction, make a mistake or get condemned for your behavior, and reverse your course full speed to counteract the flaw. You know no middle ground. It’s as if you are a car that can only travel north or south with no capability to make a soft turn, back up, or slow down for a rest.
It started at twelve when as a chubby prepubescent you ate chocolate and cream cheese with abandon. You felt the nudges or not so subtle stabs from the ever present critics who selected themselves worthy of commenting on your conduct and deportment under the guise of concern, to be thin. Only you take their advice too far and become anorexic. Even now cured of anorexia, you force yourself to exercise daily and cannot ingest a potato chip. The fat content and empty calories feel like a sin.
Having come to place twenty years later where you have a master’s degree, a partner, professional success, and a decent figure, I want to tell you to relax. More than that, I want to tell you to not care. The pressure to be perfect or what others deem to be perfect will never cease. It’s an insatiable beast. Once you are thin, the onlookers will wonder out loud why you do not have a rich boyfriend. Once you have a boyfriend, they will follow your courtship like commentators of a playoff baseball game to see if you will get married. They will not bother to be subtle or sensitive. You are their entertainment, their outlet, the way they escape their own unsatisfactory lives.
You, an eager, young woman, in an effort to please those who appear like authority figures, will negate your own desires and pursue what others deem worthwhile. For a time. Then, you will learn to value your own judgment. You will stop caring what other people think of you and that is when you will find approval, peace, and escape from the stinging blows of misplaced expectations.
I want to tell you in this scene where you are so ardent in your attempts to impress, that the goals you pile on yourself or the increasingly strict standards you set for yourself, are accelerants. You are stoking energy of your fire without regard for temperature. Your comfort is secondary, even worse, it is disregarded and you will be burned.
What you will learn is that there are a few people in whose presence you do not feel pressured or inadequate. They will not impose their ways upon you but look for signs about how what you choose to do makes you feel. They will notice when you are happy or sad. These people, whether relatives or not, young or old, impressive or ordinary, are your friends. They will not regard your misfortunes as doomed fate but a chance to begin again. To help you recover, they will take you by the proverbial arm and lift you up, walking with you a way until you gain your strength and perspective. They will not exaggerate your stumble or advertise it to others with idle gossip. If they do, there are not your friends.
With the influence of these gentle, accepting people, you will acquire the ability to be kind to yourself in their absence. You will mimic their encouraging and forgiving words to yourself when you are criticized or obstacles befall you. The opinions of the constants critics will recede in volume and the voices you will hear will be melodious not shrill.
I wish there were same way I could save you from the pain you will experience when you fall short of people’s expectations as you inevitably will since they are a reflection of them and not of you. But you will take it very personally and let their opinions erode your confidence. A boss will find your work inadequate because really he wants you to be more like him in demeanor. A boyfriend will end your relationship by telling you that you don’t make him happy, a responsibility you can never fulfill for someone else. You will unfortunately feel darker and lonelier than you do on this day you sit in Cox Dining Hall.
The moment you land in a that pit you will be fed up with trying to please people. You will remember how warm you feel around your friends. You will tell yourself that these are the people about whose opinion you care and damn the rest of them whose advice has guided you to misery.
And that is when others will begin to admire you. They will remark, “Now there’s a woman that knows her own mind.” I only wish you could learn this sooner so you could enjoy these years that seem precious in retrospect. But learn it you will and perhaps only with age comes the maturity one needs to be oneself.