mattering

During my senior year of high school, my AP Literature teacher assigned us the "This I Believe.." assignment (link to the website: http://thisibelieve.org/). I was immediately excited about it, because it was one of the first "creative" assignments we had all year. This was the outcome.

Mattering

This I believe is true: “What matters to you defines your mattering.”

It is the belief that someone or something has the power to change you, the power to move you, and the power to define you. I have spent the last 18 years of my life trying to define my mattering. Who am I? What makes me me? I’m still not sure who I am, and that’s okay. It’s okay to not know where I’m going, or what I’m going to do, because I know what matters to me and I know that I matter. I used to struggle with the idea of being “average”. I struggled with the idea that I didn’t have a right to struggle. I thought my life was too “good” to have a right to complain about anything.

“There are kids in Africa dying, you know?”

“Be grateful.”

“You’re lucky.”

“Your family is perfect, I’m so jealous.”

This is what I defined my mattering as. I believed I didn’t have the right to be sad, angry, or feel like life isn’t fair. I let these things define me, I let them tell me who I could and could not be. I let them dull my feelings and deemed them less important. I let them lessen my mattering.

This was wrong.

I can move mountains with my words; my words can start revolutions, move people, and make someone feel something. One day I will see my name on the cover of a Bestseller. One day I will change at least one person’s life. This matters to me.

Words, music, and the people I surround myself with; these define my mattering. It is the way a pencil felt against the thick journal pages when I first started writing when I was 9 and the stories I’ve carried with me to this day. It is the books I read when I was 10 and it is the books I read now. It is the songs that make me cry and the songs I can’t help singing in the car (no matter how much I hate them). It is the friends I had in second grade, and it is the friends I have now. It is the best friends I don’t talk to anymore, the ones I still love, even if I avoid them in the halls. It is the boy I’ve grown up with for the last 3 years, and it is the boy who I will spend the rest of my life with one day. It is the image I have of myself; that I can do what I love and love who I am.

These are the things that define me. These are the things that matter. It is not their opinions of me; it is not my struggles or my successes or how others define these struggles and successes. I define myself.

And this I believe

 is me.