I opened my present from my friend Isabelle Adrid weeks before Christmas morning. Like a few hours after she gave it to me. Literally the second I got home last Thursday. It was a mug with a floral wreath surrounding the words believe in yourself. How fitting. “Believe in yourself” is something a lot of people have been telling me to do for years now. My family. My boyfriend. My friends. My writing group. My therapist. It sounds so simple, but it really isn’t. I’ve always had this problem with believing in myself and I think it goes all the way back to the first grade. I’d transferred to an all-girls school from co-ed, and I didn’t realize it then, but everything was so different from the world I grew up in. I suddenly had a school uniform, textbooks, homework–things I absolutely didn’t have to deal with in kindergarten. The realization actually struck me just a few months ago when my 3-year-old niece Isla started going to pre-school, and she had textbooks. And homework. I didn’t have any of that in my day (for one thing, she doesn’t go to the same school I did). I’d just hop into the school […]
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