A Value That Has Had A Large Impact On My Life
Values are something that we are taught and learn as we grow up through experiences, and whether you realize it, they play a big role in your everyday life. Everyone’s values are different, there are multiple reasons for this such as cultural background, religion, education, environment, but mostly because of experience. Regardless of what your values are, they shape behavior and perspective, as well as they reflect a person’s morals.
A value that has had a large impact on my life and I find the most important is self-worth. Self-worth is the confidence to be able to be yourself without worrying about what others will say, and this is something I struggled with in middle school and high school. I had a hard time being myself because I didn’t want to come off as “weird” and so I let others influence me. Growing up, I never really had any problems with worrying about what other people thought about me, and maybe that was because I was too young to realize that everyone has an opinion about everyone. I started to notice myself changing my behavior because of this in the 8th grade. It wasn’t too bad because I had already made my friends and didn’t have to worry too much about trying to make them like me. This idea really started to affect me in high school and this is when I started to develop social anxiety.
High school was completely different from middle school, because this is the period in life where you’re supposed to find yourself. The people I knew from middle school all slowly became strangers once again, as they found their groups. In my freshman year of high school, I really struggled trying to find what group I belonged to. I didn’t know what I could do to try and make friends, so this led me to doing nothing. In my mind if I didn’t talk to anyone then I couldn’t be perceived as weird but of course it did the opposite. Throughout my freshman year I didn’t do well educationally or socially, and I became depressed.
By the end of the year I had no friends and terrible grades, I knew I needed to change something, so I could enjoy being school and maybe start doing better in school. I thought about all my options on how to make friends. I narrowed it down to two options, join a club, or play a sport. I decided that joining a club would probably be the best options. Summer break was finally over, it was my sophomore year and I was ready to look for a club. There were so many options, but I eventually settled for the gaming club because I felt that I could relate to people the most there.
