Logan+F’s+2017+OpEd+Article

Self confidence and Individualism

If there’s something that teenagers struggle with nowadays, this would be it. And I’m speaking from experience here, believe me. Self confidence. My own personal worst enemy, and I’m sure I’m not alone. Individualism. The thing that I personally strive for and wish other people did too. Without self confidence though, how can there be individualism? How can you as a teenager growing up in the 21st century be more self confident? In my opinion, we got fucked by being born into the technology age or whatever it should be called, and that could have something to do with the amount of under-confident adolescents in our generation, and why depression numbers are climbing every year. I’m willing to bet money on the fact that you can go up to any teenager, especially one in APUSH writing their own muckraker right now, and they would say that they have had an issue with self confidence over the past three months. Now I realize that this is a normal human emotion, and it will happen, but it seems to be a central problem for our generation as a whole. Whether it be social media showing us the unrealistic “perfect” person, or technology exposing us too much to celebrities and other better off individuals, including those around us, it is a very serious issue. I can give plenty of examples from my own life, for example just last week, my volleyball coach pulled me aside from my team during a practice and we had a talk. She told me that my lack of confidence on the court is bringing my play down, and during our last game, she even said I looked like I was dying because I was so nervous. And then in school, I’ll be honest, it’s quite possible that in every class this year I have gotten the worst test score out of every student in my class. I’m nowhere close to being the brightest student in any of my classes this year especially, and that’s no secret to me, or anybody else. In Fitz’s class, whenever he calls on me to ask me a question, the majority of the class will start laughing because they know that I have no idea what is going on, and I was probably half-asleep anyways. In physio, Mrs. Anderson has stopped calling on me on hard questions, and saves all of the easy ones for me, and I still find ways to fuck the answer up. But hey, I’m not failing so what can ya do.

If you aren’t looked at as normal, then you are looked at as almost an outsider, and people don’t seem to like you as much. That to me, is totally fucked up. If everyone in the world was the same, what would our world be? We would all just be robots conforming to society and how others want us to be while following all the “new hip trends”. Most of them are pretty stupid anyways. That’s why something that I value so much is individualism, and unique people. If you saw my friends, you would know what I mean. Yes, I sit at one of the tables that Fitz says he tries to avoid because it is where the kids who smoke weed sit. And yes my table and I were a part of the “organized gang violence” that occurred after the fight a couple weeks ago. But that makes our table one of the most exciting, diverse, and interesting at school by far. In my opinion, individualism is lacking in our generation, with everyone attempting to be like Drake, or like The Kardashians, it makes a fake society conforming to social norms, and that’s pretty boring. I do my best to be my own individual person. People like to poke fun of how I dress, saying I dress like a stoner. With my Nirvana and Sublime shirts covered with a flannel and then rounded out with jeans, I guess I can kinda see why another APUSH student said to me one day, “Why do your outfits always make you look like you have a bag of weed in your back pocket?” But I don’t see anybody else dressing like that, so I like it, and it expresses the things that I like and how I like to convey myself. And I have some very individualistic friends. I have my friends who wear trench coats and sunglasses to school (reasons for this may vary), I have friends who play ukuleles on the weekend while partying with other CP students, people who are clearly showing of their looks in inappropriate for school ways, and people more like me, who wear comfy clothes, hoodies or whatever, and couldn’t give less fucks about what people thought of them. Another way that I personally show individualism is through the music I listen to. As a different APUSH student calls it, “The White Person School Shooter Music” In other words, I listen to alternative, punk, and grunge music. This music speaks to a “troubled” teenager such as myself and helps me realize that I’m not the only person going through these struggles, and not to mention it sounds amazing too. From Green Day, to Nirvana, Sublime, The Foo Fighters, Weezer, or whoever, if it’s a band from the 90’s from Seattle or California, I probably like them. In the image below, is something that I made for the front of my binder with my favorite song lyrics that remind me of my life in some way. The artists on it are Green Day, The Foo Fighters, Nirvana, and The Beatles.



And I also try be individualistic with my writing style. It may not be all eloquent or fantastic, but I try to write how I talk so that a reader would know that it is my writing. That is also why I bring up so much personal information in my writing, because I feel that it sets me apart from the other 100 or so APUSH students. I could be wrong. But all in all, I believe that as a generation, we should be striving for ways to have more self confidence. Especially in a world with two AP classes and 4 other classes plus a sport. And along with that, I know I'm not the only person going through this, and that leads to striving to be more individualistic, and I feel that other people should too.