I still have this very distinct memory sitting in my thesis advisor’s office one afternoon for a meeting. Sure, we spoke about the progress of my Master’s thesis that was to be submitted in the upcoming months, as those meetings were meant for that. But, my thesis advisor was more than just my former professor working on a project with me; she was also my mentor. She was the first person that I casually spoke to that was older than me; 9 years to be exact. When I was 24, she was 33, which is crazy to think considering I am now the age she was when she first taught me in her Teaching of Writing class my first semester of grad school.
I spoke about some difficulties of life I was experiencing, and had asked her if it gets easier. She asked me “well, in what sense are you referring to?” and I told her, “not caring about what other people think of you or how they perceive you.” She smiled and let out a laugh and said, “Liz, you’re still going to experience such a wave of emotions with the life experience you’re yet to have. You’re going to feel like you’re going to need to get everything together in your 20s, when in reality you just aren’t going to. It’s when you get into your 30s you finally start to have this sense of ‘I honestly and truly do not care about what people think about me’ because you get a better understanding of yourself. It’s like you finally feel like a person when you finally let that go. That’s when you’ll feel things get easier.”
Hi, my name is Liz, I’m in my 30s, and I finally don’t give a sh—
Lemme explain.
I spent most of my 20s thinking I needed to have my life together. I went straight from college to grad school without taking a break, and spent most of it still as a student with no real life experience behind them. I was grateful to have a family that pushed the importance of education, wanting to give me the opportunity to pursue things that they were not able to do at my age. I was a first generation college and post-grad graduate all at the age of 24, and truly that’s when life started for me. It was hard to step out of my comfort zone of being a student to now being a young adult trying to find her place in a world that seemed to get smaller and smaller when it came to finding a good paying job with absolutely no work experience.
On top of that, my poor mental health was now creeping on me, affecting my daily functioning and coming out in ways that seemed extremely uncharacteristic of me. I was antisocial and never went out to social gatherings, I had a hard time keeping friendships after leaving college, and I lacked an identity so much to the point that I latched onto my partner being my identity. All the trauma that had been built up in the previous years came out in my 20s, and then poof. I became 30 years old in 2024 and things began to rapidly change with my psyche. I swear, it’s like a chemical reaction thing happens as soon as you hit 30.
Sure, I’m only technically 2 years in my 30s, but this last year and a half of being in them has taught me so much, and has helped me become aware of the things I was not able to see in myself when I was younger. Half of that was because not only did I want people to see me in a specific light, but I also wanted to see myself in that same light. It was ironic how for the majority of my 20s, I advocated immensely on self-acceptance and to always be your authentic self no matter what, yet I couldn’t seem to follow my own advice because I was afraid to come off as anything else besides the image I was portraying.
Tiny. Naive. Perfect. For the love of God, I wanted to be portrayed as perfect so bad.
As I mentioned in the last Overexposed post, I was diagnosed with OCD this past summer, and began taking medication to help manage it better. It was extremely out-of-the-blue hearing that, not understanding completely how I was now a person that was considered to have obsessions and compulsions. It felt like a foreign concept for me because it didn’t fit with the knowledge I had regarding OCD. But, the more I had my therapy sessions and the more I sat with the research and thought, it began to open a ton of doors or me mentally. It was like I had finally found the key to all of the locked doors in my brain that I was helpless to.
I learned my OCD was moral related. It was an obsession to be the perfect version of Liz I could possibly be, and the compulsions acted out in ways to enforce that obsession. I would over analyze situations in order to prepare myself how to go about acting them out. I rehearsed my personality for different people, depending on who the person was. I tried to prevent any negative thoughts about me that people may have had. I subconciously hid parts of myself in order to fit the character role I created for the different people in my life.
Maybe I stopped trying one day. Maybe I forgot to rehearse my lines in a situation that was high in anxiety and just believed in my problem solving skills. Maybe it’s the medication. Maybe it’s just my age now not giving a sh—
Maybe it was just me finally accepting who I am as a person.
I feel it in the way I interact with people these days. I don’t feel myself valuing the opinions of others by constantly referring to the past to take a mental note on how I should behave. As a matter of fact, I find myself not using the past as a guideline to how I should react and behave because I simply don’t see it as an asset to my present being. Sure, I still very much believe that the experiences I had as a teenager and young adult helped mold me into the person I am today, but I finally feel like I don’t allow them to influence my decision making, or define my entire being as I once did. It’s weird; it feels like the last time I truly saw how colorful the world was when I was a kid; back when I was unapologetically myself and now… I am beginning to see more of that color come through.
For once, I don’t feel so afraid of the future, and maybe that’s because I’m not living for it anymore. The future is great to look forward to, but it’s only going to be great if I make the most out of the present day, y’know? It’s hard when you’ve always been stuck in your head, mental checking every single detail in your life and labeling it as being observant when really it was an obsession.
So yeah. Maybe it was my age finally telling me to stop caring what people think o me and how they perceive me. You can’t please everybody, so why don’t you try pleasing the one person that actually matters? That person being you.
Or maybe it was my medication. Maybe it has helped me ease some of the subconscious anxiety I never knew I had until it acted out in behaviors that were out of my own character. Maybe of the side effects to this medicine is to finally stop caring about other’s thoughts and start caring about bettering mine to live a healthier life.
Or maybe, simply maybe, I just finally stopped giving a shit.
Letters From Liz. 