My personal experience is my transition through college my freshman year. During the first semester I started to change as a person. My personality was changing, my beliefs, thoughts, opinions, and I started to express myself in different ways. Initially, I didn’t think much of it. When I went home after a few months of being in college, I felt quite strange. I knew I was different from when I left my hometown, but when I went back, I slipped back into my “old-self”. Soon after I came back to college I once again slipped into my “present self”. I felt internally confused and conflicted. I didn’t want to lose the person I was before, but at the same time, people change, especially when going to college. Resisting the change only made the stress worse. I felt like I had no option but to switch between the two inorder to stay connected with my friends from back home because my past self is how they see me; my college friends saw me as something else. I was ashamed to associate with my past self and life while at college. It was a battle between my past and present self, pushing away one another depending on where I was.
Keywords:
- Conflicted
- Confused
- Lost
- Fight
- Clash
- Transformation
- Identity
- Embarrassed
- Isolated
- Authentic