letter 4

The person I am becoming.

“I want to be defined not by the things that I loved, but by the things that I love.” For me, the hardest part of my 20th-year journey so far is figuring out how to piece together the new puzzle I call life. I had to learn how to accept the new things life had presented me with and let go of the old ones, I had to make the transition from mimicking the ways of my elders to figuring out what ways were made for me, individually different but perfect, I had to figure out what made Tife, Tife. One of the scariest things I have faced in recent years is imposter syndrome, I spent so many years being the person I believed the world would be happiest to see me as, and because of that I belittled and shrank the person I was always intended to be because I believed that I was too much for the world. And as I grew and evolved into the person that I have now become I felt like an imposter, who is this person and where did she come from. I had to slowly learn that just because I have loved something before does not mean that I must love it forever, some things are meant for you at a particular stage of life and when it’s time, you let it go, which is why I say, I want to be defined not by the things that I loved but by the things that I love. Sometimes growing into the person that you are is hard when it deviates from the person that you used to be but sometimes that is what is necessary because as kids we don’t always know who we truly are. All we know is what we want to be and sadly who you want to be is not always who you are destined to be. The rest of our lives are going to be filled with growth, change, and development and we never know when or what is going to change for us again but I know that now in my 20s Im ready to grow into the person that I was destined to be, and build my own person based on the new things that I will learn that I love and the new joys that will come into my life. I know that the person I am going to meet in my 20s is not the same person I learned to know in my past years and that I have come to accept and embrace, all I hope is that as I grow the world does not define me by the things that I loved, but by the things that I love.