I believe in taking time to discover myself. Instead of wasting my life pursuing someone else’s idea of happiness, what I really need to do – what I’m really here to do – is to know myself. Because in knowing myself, I find the freedom to pursue my own dreams, not the dreams shaped for me by others.

As a teenager and young adult, I had a very definite idea of who I was “supposed to be.” This “someone” was partly influenced by the media; my definitions of beauty (size zero), love (passion), and success (money) conformed to what I saw in magazines and movies. This “someone” was also influenced by personal agents, like parents who insisted on my best efforts and teachers who recognized my potential. Still, even these well-meaning individuals contributed to my unwillingness to discover who I really was or what I really wanted to do with my life, because my desire to “make good” on the promise they claimed to see in me made me terrified of disappointing anyone. I expended all my energy on being the perfect student, the perfect daughter, the perfect everything.

We now have a catch-phrase to describe girls like this: supergirls. Girls who play every sport, serve on every committee, hold every office; girls with 4.0 GPAs; girls whose beauty, wit, intelligence and creativity are supposed to land them in top colleges and high-paying careers. And we’re finding that eating disorders, depression, self-mutilation and suicide are often the price of being a supergirl.

When I graduated from high school in 1997, the term “supergirl” hadn’t yet come into vogue, although plenty of us existed. Like today’s supergirls, although on the outside I seemed to have everything together, I eventually had to fight the demons that result from trying to be “perfect.” It took a life-threatening illness, an infinitely patient family, a wonderful husband, and a spiritual reawakening for me to finally accept that I didn’t need to be a supergirl to be happy. Only then was I free to start figuring out what my purpose in life really is.

Today, I’m not the gorgeous glamazon career girl my seventeen-year-old self imagined; I’m not the world-renowned scholar I pictured when I entered my PhD program at twenty-four. I live in a small town, teach at a small university, lead a quiet – and by Hollywood’s standards, a boring – life. But I’m healthy, even though I’ve traded in my size zero jeans for a curvier size six; I’m fulfilled by what I do for a living, even though it’ll never make me rich or famous; I’m in love with a terrific man, even though he doesn’t fit the leading man archetype.

A few weeks ago, I sat down with a group of first-year students at USI’s Bonding Through Books Brunch to discuss how personal beliefs shape our lives. I was seated at a table with six young women whom, though certainly unique individuals, was each her own type of supergirl. I told them what I wished someone had told me at eighteen: We can live life blindly buffeted by the pressures from society, family, media and friends, being pushed in directions we aren’t sure we want to go, or we can take the opportunity to figure out who we are and who we want to become. I believe college offers just that opportunity if we’ll take it, if we’ll allow the people we encounter and the lessons we learn (in the classroom and out) to make us examine our beliefs, to understand how those beliefs shape our worldviews, to use that understanding to shape ourselves into who we want to be. Then we can define for ourselves what will make us happy, even if that turns out not to be what everyone told us was a perfect life.

POST CONTRIBUTED BY: Dr. R. EVON HAWKINS, assistant professor of English.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.