MISS INDEPENDENT
(No this isn't about Kelly Clarkson, smarty pants!)

There is an age-old piece of advice that has proven its legitimacy to me time and again. I've heard it phrased a number of ways, in a number of moments in my life, but I haven't heeded its call until recently: DON'T LOOK TO OTHERS TO FIND HAPPINESS. LIVE FOR YOURSELF. At first thought it seemed an absurd idea, and I asked myself why anyone would base his/her happiness on other people and why anyone would live a life other than theirs. Is making oneself happy THAT difficult of a task? But after another inundating session with my thoughts, I realized that I was a living, breathing oxymoron of a person. It’s true that I can find no greater satisfaction than that which I feel upon aiding a loved one find joy, no matter how little my contribution. But oh how I depended on that feeling like a drug! I NEEDED others to need ME because it made ME feel good inside. IT GAVE ME PURPOSE.

There is a big part of me that knows how much I depend on others' joy and pride in order to feel my own. To look to other people's approval 90% of the time or requiring others to need me in their quest for a simple moment of joy, and assuring myself that this was the source of my happiness has made me a mere spectator on the outside looking in. It was someone else's happiness I was feeling a lot of the time, not my own.

In the last couple of years I've observed the people who surround me. I'm in chronic awe of their drive and determination (especially evidenced with all the graduations occurring this year), but most of all I revel in their passion; this passion that turns rejection into redemption, sacrifice into success, adversity into accomplishment. I felt like I’d lost all that somewhere and I wanted it back so badly for myself but had been so afraid…terrified actually, of failing horribly and having no one to blame but myself.

But about 3 weeks ago I did something I haven’t done before. I spent a Friday evening at Barnes & Noble (aaaah the life of the single gal – free as a bird!). First I sat in the coffee area sipping on my iced café latte with soy, scribbling furiously in my journal, paying mind to nothing but the thoughts in my head and the pen in my hand. And then having had to work on a Shakespearean sonnet for class, I was caught in a trance, attempting to compose a 14-line piece of poetry in iambic pentameter whilst concocting a clever rhyme scheme. By the time I look at my watch, I realize I’d been sitting there for almost 2 hours. Experiencing a slight case of writer’s block, I decide to take on the poetry section to call on the masters for help. I soon found myself sitting there in the middle of the aisle, hunched over a myriad of inspiration: The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson, Poetry by Robert Frost, and before I knew it, it was 10:45 pm. That was, by far, the most peaceful and most selfish 4 hours I’ve ever had. I think I’ve re-created a monster.