What Happened When I Followed My Heart

I have spent a lot of my life doing what other people want me to do. I have spent so much time adhering to the expectations placed before me, the loose guidelines of what any number of things is supposed to look like: success, happiness, inner peace, a good role model, a worthy scholarship recipient... Without even realizing it, my life has been plagued with these ideas of what I am supposed to be and the things I am supposed to attain.

Now, I realize my life is much easier than that of a lot of people. I do not discount that fact, nor take it for granted. However, I am able to clearly notice the small, yet meaningful, differences in my own consciousness when I am doing something for someone else as opposed to when I am doing it for myself.

Some people -- okay, a lot of people -- would say I have a bad attitude. They would say I am negative, pessimistic, and always complaining about something. It's true. Other people -- fewer people -- would say that I have a positive attitude, compassion, wonderful insight, and plenty of big ideas to offer this world. For the longest time, I was conflicted by those two opposing opinions of who I am. How on earth can one person be perceived in such polarizing ways by others?

Then I paused for a moment to examine what it was these people saw in me. I stepped out of my shoes and into theirs and I tried to imagine myself through their eyes. If I were to ask these people what it is I am always so unhappy about, what would they say? I can create a list of my most common complaints from my own memory: being stared at by strangers, inconsiderate co-workers, lazy classmates, being talked down to, and having too much homework. All in all, not unreasonable irritations.

All right, but what about the other people who would say I am a hopeful beacon of light for the future? If they were asked what it is that makes me so great, what would they say? The compliments I receive most often include: being mature and professional for my age, being intelligent, giving solid advice, being inclusive, and being able to see things from another perspective.

Now, perhaps the most important question: who are these people? Who are the people in my life that seem to think I am nothing more than a Negative Nancy? Conversely, who are the people who see the raw material I'm working with and encourage me to mold it into something more? What positions do all of these people hold in my life and why do I even listen to them, anyway?

This is when I understood the reason why I was so disappointed by trying to live up to the expectations of others. Each individual person expects something entirely different from me. By worrying so much about having good relationships with so many different people in my life, I neglected to have a good relationship with myself.

The people who have made me feel badly for being "too negative" are greater in quantity, but noticeably less in quality. They are acquaintances, co-workers, classmates, and even strangers I encounter in passing, who know only the surface of my life. They comment on what little behavior they witness from me, and they honest-to-goodness believe they have me all figured out: I complain too much and I'm so unhappy and I am always angry or in a bad mood. (Do you know what actually makes me unhappy? Feeling the need to defend my happiness against people who barely took any time at all to know me before judging me.)

On the other hand, when I think of the times I have had awe-inspiring, hopeful, optimistic conversations about the future, I think of an entirely different caliber of human being. I think of teachers, mentors, parental figures, and even a few very close friends. These are the people with whom I have discussed my worries about today and my plans for tomorrow. They are the ones who have taken the time and interest to more closely observe some of the things that make me tick; they're people who have read what I wrote or heard what I said and understood with a single look into my heart and mind that I had it (whatever it is), and then pushed me to be more.

Because of all the ambivalence I felt from such opposing forces, I was unsure for a while even who I was. Was I this mean, hateful person that so many people painted a picture of? Was I an insightful, wise-beyond-her-years, eclectic individual with something deep within her soul that stirred the interest of kindred spirits? Or did I fall somewhere in the middle and fluctuate slightly between good and bad days? I didn't really know for sure, and it resulted in a miniature identity crisis for me, at the age of 21. (Which, granted, is a better age for a crisis than 45, when I'd probably have many more long-term commitments.) So many people wanted me to be so many different things. But what did I want myself to be? Through all this struggling, I was able to find some answers by myself.

You see, I was so preoccupied with worrying about these two very different perceptions of my personality, that I forgot to take into account one very important opinion on the matter: my own. I became so worried about why I might seem bitter and cold to a mere acquaintance, or if I were falling short of the exemplary mark set for me by a mentor, that I failed to leave enough time and energy for me to examine how my personality was measuring up to qualities that I valued.

I can't pinpoint an exact moment when it happened, and I can't even tell you the exact sequence of events that led up to it, but there was a moment in time when I just quit. I didn't quit listening, I didn't quit trying, and I didn't quit caring about the people in my life. What I did quit, was concerning myself so much with the validity of others' opinions. I quit caring more about how they perceived me than about how I perceived myself.

In that moment, I stood up for myself. I realized that what was in my heart was the only thing with any true consistency -- the only thing that really mattered -- and I decided I would give following that a chance, instead. It occurred to me that I was always going to let someone down if I kept trying to please so many different audiences, so I might as well try to please the one audience I knew best: me.

I didn't know where else to start, so I just asked myself, "what do you want, Alyssa?" My heart answered, and I made sure to listen closely. It spoke softly to me about all of the glorious, adventurous, beautiful things it wanted to see and feel. After it was finished whispering many splendored things to me, I started with the smallest, easiest item on the list: writing.

I had procrastinated accomplishing anything at all with my writing for months, and I had made excuses for myself about how busy I was with my life. I let other things (albeit credible things like class, work, and family) dictate my actions. I did not make time for what my heart really needed. I had not been listening to my own desires, and I had suffered because of it. But that was about to change.

I sat down one afternoon, and I wrote. I applied to publication after publication, and I sent several different samples of my work into numerous websites which I had previously scouted. And when I was finished, I felt so good about myself. I felt accomplished, like I had just crossed something very heavy off of my heart's to-do list... finally.

A few short days later, when I began to receive email responses with positive answers from those publications, I was absolutely elated. My heart was so happy and I felt so pleased with myself, because I knew that I had made this happen. I was the one who had done the hard work which earned me this reward. Because I chose to finally listen to myself and value my own opinion above others, I took action toward my dreams and I had now reaped the fruit of my labor. I did it all by myself and I was beyond proud.

This is what happens when you follow your heart. It applies to every area of your life: personal, professional, academic, and even athletic. When you act based on your own heart's wishes, you will be happy with the results. As soon as I stopped allowing the perceptions of others to set boundaries and expectations for me, I opened myself up to endless possibilities for joy with a horizon limited only by my own imagination. I reminded myself that I don't have to impress anyone else, fans or critics alike. I always took for granted that I knew this before, but society has a nasty way of creeping up on you and ingraining things into your mind before you are even aware it's taking place.

I think that's what happened to me. I spent so much time listening to so many mixed messages from everyone else, that I lost myself among the noise. The only thing louder than all that racket was the consistent, steady beating of my own heart. I chose to focus on it, and soon its reverberation rose above all the external static, until eventually it was the only sound I could hear.

Friend or foe, the opinions of others are irrelevant to your existence. You are the only one living your life; and ultimately, you are the only one affected by the decisions you make. So save yourself some stress and follow the instructions written on your heart. They are the words that will lead you exactly to the place where you are most happy. They have always been there, and that's where they will remain, for you to fall back on when the commotion of everyone else becomes too loud.

How I Learned To Remember What I Already Knew About The Opinions Of Others

I learned in my Consumer Behavior class last semester that the average consumer is hit with over 3,000 advertisements every single day, from television, radio, Internet, print, and even billboards. And only about 8% of each one of those ads registers on the conscious level of our brains. The other 92% access the subconscious recesses of our minds and stick with us much longer, without us even realizing it.

Sure, these messages influence our purchasing behaviors, but more than that, they reflect whatever values the advertisers imply are important to our society. Marketing starts to mold who we are as consumers, and it also begins to affect how we perceive the world, as well as ourselves. We can say we don't pay attention to commercials, and we can mute them during breaks from our favorite television shows; but they get to us, whether we like it or not.

So think about the power these ads have over the populous. Marketing is the fastest and most effective way to communicate a message to the masses. Many of these messages are good; they're positive, uplifting jingles for BBQ restaurants and serious PSAs for suicide prevention hotlines. However, can you imagine the potential damage a single advertisement with negative implications can have? Even if the negative message is only implied, can you fathom how bad a person could feel if they identified with any of the qualities perceived as negative by the ad? An ad, which is rerun several times, since repetition is key in marketing? What about if negative messages were implied from more than just one ad? Two, or twenty, or five hundred, or a thousand ads? What if the negativity surrounding certain qualities became so pervasive in our advertising, because the advertising is simply reflecting how pervasive the negativity surrounding those qualities is throughout our culture?

I'm talking about the omnipresent, pervasive, and normalized message from society, and in turn, advertisers, that women should be thin. Or at the very least, not to be fat.

Women, especially young women, are targeted by advertisers for products like shampoo, makeup, nail polish, and tampons. But they're also targeted for things like weight loss pills, plastic surgery, and even clothing products that are designed to make a person appear thinner. Young women are the market segment targeted by advertisers because advertisers mimic society. Society provides a cultural script that says young women need to be thin and beautiful, so advertisers come along and offer young women products to help them adhere to society's demands. How kind of them, hmm?

I am a twenty-one-year-old woman living in the Western hemisphere, in perhaps the most commercialized nation on the planet. I've never really had a problem with not caring about what anyone else thinks of me, least of all some advertising executives who don't even know me. But they do know me. They classify me together with other Caucasian heterosexual cisgender female people who make less than $20,000 annually and live in Wichita, Kansas and attend university and drive a car and wash their hair and drink alcohol and eat pizza and listen to Taylor Swift.

These marketers may not know me personally, but they've got a pretty good idea of how I'll behave based upon what society tells me to do. They can guess my hopes and fears and a multitude of other things, because it's feasible to believe that I'll behave in generally the same way as others in my demographic. The power of marketers derives from how closely I follow the cultural script I've been taught. If they can predict my behavior, they can sell me a product.





Now, I must say, that from a young age, I have always considered myself to be very accepting of my body, regardless of whatever flaws society may have perceived it as having. It is my body, after all. I've never really paid any attention to the demand that women be thin, because like most fads and trends, I couldn't be bothered to play along. I've never even really considered myself to be "fat" as society would like it, because, well, I just don't have time for it. It wasn't until this year that I really started thinking more about my body, and I became much more aware of its appearance. Though I certainly didn't intend for it to be, this became a problem.

It all began a little over ten months ago when I returned from studying abroad. I spent four weeks in France, going to school most days from 9 to 4, with little exercise beyond just walking through the streets and across campus. And I mean, I was in France. What do you do when you're in France? You eat bread and you drink wine! So basically, I spent four weeks doing nothing besides conjugating verbs and consuming complex carbohydrates. Don't get me wrong; I had the time of my life! In fact, I was so busy loving life that I didn't think very much about anything else.

I came home at the end of July. It's important to know a few things here in order to understand where my mind was at:
1. I was terribly heartbroken to leave France and my host family, and I went through some rough reverse culture shock.
2. I had missed my biological family while I was gone, but that didn't mean I necessarily wanted to be staying with my mother until school started.
3. Being home reminded me of the breakup I had just experienced prior to going to France, and I was no longer on the other side of the world from this reality.

So, I was generally irritable and unhappy to be back in Ark City. Furthermore, I realized upon stepping on my mother's bathroom scale, that all that wine and bread had caught up to me. So, one day, near the beginning of August, I decided I'd go for a run.

This wasn't unusual for me, as I'd gone for runs off and on many times at Mom's house. I knew my preferred running route well, and it didn't present itself as very dangerous. It was only about a mile and a half total, but I ran it so inconsistently that it always seemed to be a challenge.

I came home, stretched, did some abs, and that was it. Until two days later when I decided I'd do it again. And after that, I kept up with an every-other-day schedule pretty well, running in the evening as the sun set so as not to die from heat exhaustion. School started a few weeks later, and I kept my routine pretty consistently by running on campus in the evenings. I was proud of my diligence and commitment to something that was better for me than Netflix. Then I started to notice my weight loss.

I hadn't begun running back in July with any particular motivation or goal in mind. I guess I just felt like I'd gained a little weight in France, I wanted out of the house and away from my mother, and I felt like exercising regularly was a healthy outlet for dealing with my residual emotions from the breakup. I wasn't doing it because I had a man "to keep happy" or because I thought I was grossly overweight. Overall, running seemed like a healthy thing to do just for me. And that's why I liked it.

I've never felt like I'm very good at running, and in high school some of my rude track teammates made fun of me because I stomped when my feet hit the ground. I was not highly involved in sports, and to this day, I don't consider myself to be very athletic. So it was never about that, for me. It was always much more about having my own personal time to let my brain flat-line and forget my worries. Running was an escape. But when I started to see visible changes in my body, which were confirmed by the scale, I got excited. I was proud to see that something I'd chosen to do by myself, for myself had benefited me in this way. But "benefited"? Who says?

My pants started to get looser and looser. I had to go buy new jeans, this time in a size 5 instead of a 9. My legs were no longer sore from running like they were when I started, but the mornings after doing an ab workout, I'd feel the burn while trying to sit up in my bed. I noticed my shirts and dresses were now laying more flatly around my body, and this made me happy.

But as the over-analyzing feminist that I am, I began to wonder if perhaps my happiness as a result of a change in my physical appearance was actually a good thing. I've always been a firm believer that happiness comes from within, and if something as vain and external as physical appearance was making me happy, that couldn't be a good thing. Right?

I kept running, though my every-other-day schedule started to waver as the semester progressed and I became busier. The cold weather moved in and I started making visits to the Heskett Center to run on the treadmill, instead. I didn't really allow myself the time to mull over my thoughts about my weight loss, because I was busy with work and school, and finals were approaching. But all the while, doubt started to creep into my mind about whether or not I actually wanted to lose the weight in the first place.

Part of me wanted to keep eating salad before every meal and doing crunches after I ran. Part of me wanted to go to the nearest grocery store and buy all the candy with high fructose corn syrup and genetically modified junk food as I could afford, and eat it all in an hour as I binged on Netflix. The cantankerous feminist devil on my left shoulder was arguing with the self-loving feminist angel on my right. And I was caught in the middle.

Had I actually, perhaps subconsciously, wanted to lose the weight when I started? Did that mean admitting to myself and others that there were parts of my body with which I was dissatisfied? That, in fact, I wasn't this portrait of an all-accepting, self-loving überfeminist? And did all of this mean that I valued my twenty-pound-lighter body more than I did the body I had in August? Did any of this have any bearing on the way I thought, and had I become convinced by my experience with weight loss to value skinny people the most and fat-shame others? My brain extrapolated possible conclusions well past the point of rationality.

Of course my thinking hadn't changed. My values and convictions run deep. If intersectional feminism were a color, it would be the same pigment as the blood that pours out of my leg when I nick myself shaving. I know this, in the very fiber of my being. So why was my brain running amuck with extreme ideas about what a change in my weight meant? Were people really treating me differently because of a few less pounds, or was my feminist brain just imagining things, as it sometimes does? There was just so much to reconcile.

I began to think I liked it better when I was "fat and happy" because then at least I could dish out the "your opinion of my body doesn't matter" attitude and people accepted it. When a "fat girl" says that, she's just that: a fat girl, automatically silenced by her appearance, and invalidated by her nonconformity to societal demands. When a "skinny girl" says that, she's a stuck-up bitch who can't take a compliment. Before, I was familiar with defending my appearance to those who criticized it, and funnily enough, I never found myself being one of the critics. But accepting compliments based on my physical appearance -- some kind of "accomplishment" at making myself more attractive to society -- has never really sat well with me. It's a strange, convoluted, messy entanglement between my brain, my heart, feminism, and patriarchy; but, I know I'm pretty because I think I'm pretty, not because someone else does. I guess the problem came when I started to wonder if people were treating me nicely because of who I am and they genuinely wanted to treat me nicely, or if it was just because I had recently dropped the weight of a very small child.





It wasn't until very recently, like within the last two weeks, that I came to an epiphany about this mess of emotion and flawed logic that was brewing in my head. I wasn't unhappy because I had lost weight. That was never the change that caused any of these problems. I was unhappy because I started to worry about what other people thought about the weight I lost. Before I lost the weight, I had already accepted myself and my body the way it was. I already knew what I looked like and how to expect people to treat me based on it. (Not that it was ever nearly as bad as many millions of other people in the world, by any means.) But it was familiar. Then I lost the weight, and as a result, I expected people would treat me differently, because I know a woman's physical appearance is her most important quality in our world, for some godforsaken reason. Then I became so acutely aware of and militantly defensive to everyone's interactions with me, that I was thinking so much more about their opinions of me, than I was about my own opinions of me. And that's just it!

I realized that because I've been indoctrinated by society, via television ads and magazine covers for twenty-one years to believe "thin is in", that I was the one who actually internalized the message. Me, with the impenetrable wall of feminism specifically designed to detect and repel patriarchal garbage in every form! I had somehow unwittingly allowed the messages from advertisers to creep into my brain, and then I let the opinions of others overpower the importance of my own self-acceptance. I had handed my power right over to the patriarchy. Then I sat and wondered where it was I had gone so wrong and why I was in such a state of emotional unrest. It was because I started subconsciously comparing the state of myself to the unattainable standard which the advertisers set for me. Then I constantly wondered how closely I measured up, instead of simply not caring, as I'd always done before.

I never realized that I had actually changed two variables, not just one. Instead of blaming the real culprit, which was ever giving a damn about what others think, I blamed the most visible change I could think of, which was a change in my physical appearance. Because, once again, we've all been taught that a woman's physical appearance is what matters the most. It just goes to show that even the most passionate of know-it-all feminists can be taught to play right into the hands of a patriarchal society if they are exposed to its harmful values enough.

I never should've worried for a second what anyone else thought about my body. It is my body, after all. I never gave the opinions of others a second thought before I lost the weight. Because I already accepted myself as I was, and I was happy with that. Then my body changed, and as I had to begin accepting myself as I changed, I began to worry if perhaps the rate at which others were or were not accepting me had anything to do with it. Happiness does come from within. It comes from accepting yourself and loving yourself right now, today, right where you are. Consciously or not, no advertisement can ever sell you that.

So I look in the mirror today, and I see a woman whose body has indeed changed. I see a woman who knows she can run farther and longer than she ever even tried in high school. I see a woman who really, honestly did accept her body before she lost the weight, and who wouldn't hesitate to give a middle finger to anyone who disagreed. I also see a woman who worried herself entirely too much over the thoughts and opinions of others about her body for a time. I see a woman who got caught between two opposing sides in a false dichotomy of options for women in our world: unmotivated, lazy, fat girl, or healthy, vegetable-eating, athlete. I see a woman who is somedays both, lazy and healthy. I see a woman who painted herself into a corner with internalized patriarchy without even realizing it, because the message was ingrained so deeply into the subconscious of her brain. I see a woman, whom for a time, played right into the cultural script that society has laid out for women to always be concerned about the perception of their physical appearance. I see a woman who felt more pressure to remain skinny after she'd lost the weight, than she ever did to lose it in the first place. I see a woman who knows her happiness, along with her self-worth come from within herself, and nowhere else. And I see a woman who realized all of this, just now, as she wrote this, and who became very relieved as soon as she understood, once again, that the opinions of others -- advertisers, a patriarchal society, or anyone else -- have never actually mattered in the past, nor will they at any point in the future.