Growing up is one of the hardest things we will do in our lifetime. We spend our days trying to figure out who we are and where we are going. Who we are not only as a person but as a person in society. What kind of friend am I? What kind of daughter am I? We meet ourselves somewhere along the way.

I met myself somewhere between the summer before high school and now. I’m getting to know myself currently. Society these days would probably call this “talking.” The process of getting to know someone in order to build a relationship. I call it “I’m not done.”

This time-now-is my construction zone. I’ll trip and fall and make mistakes and tear things up. I’m going to build things up, only to knock it down. But then the finished product will just happen. Each and every decision or experience I make or take, I’m drawing out my blueprint.

When I look at my very first blueprint, I see so much more than I did the first time. Instead of being a roughed up little shack, it is a staircase. These choices and experience will build up to make me the person I’m meant to be.

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   The brown haired, green eyed girl, had a big white smiled spread across her face. She is wearing her favorite pink dress at her new desk towards the front of the room, excited to take on her first day of public school. She is coloring a sky and landscape with a happy little family using a fresh pack of Crayola crayons.
  

“If I stabbed you right now, you would bleed to death.”
    

“Wwwhat?” Her bright eyes dimmed and locked on the sharp face of a classmate that was looming above her. His deep mud brown eyes bore into her emerald eyes that were now blurring with tears of fear.

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  The little girl, giggling in the back of a different room, down the hall stood among three other girls around her age. The blonde girl has a concrete look on her face and whispers something to the red headed girl. The dark haired girl’s cheerful face takes a gloomy twist and she shrugs off to her seat on the other side of the room.

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   Next, she is crying in the hall while boys and girl rush past her, just staring. Not a single one of them stop to ask if she was okay or if they could help. She gets up and now she is getting in a white Lexus. She is now wearing a green dress. She is walking into a red brick church. She is holding a woman’s hand with a crumpled up piece of notebook paper in the other hand. She sits beside the woman across from a pristine woman in an office. The plaque perched on the front of the wooden desk reads headmistress.

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   The dark haired girl finally seemed to be at ease for once. Only then she is on the playground and she is speaking with a crestfallen look on her face. Several girls with rather hateful looks stand before her. The dark haired girl runs and plops down under an isolated tree away from the girls and hugs her knees as fresh tears stream down her pale cheeks.
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   She’s surrounded by a blonde and a girl with black hair. They are pulling at her hair and stretching her clothes in an aqua bedroom. The tall girl with black hair takes a sparkly pink top and throws it on a high shelf and laughs as the girl squirms and jumps for it, begging for her to retrieve it and give it to her.

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   The girl seemed to be overly happy in the art room. She’s laughing at something a girl was saying to a little group of boys and girls at their table. She gets up to grab some markers and a boy approaches her with a big smirk on his face and looks her up and down. He whispers something in her ear and her face turns bright red and she shakes her head no and gives him an offended glance before she returns to her friends.

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   A little bit later, she is with the same people. Her back is hunched and she barely moves to breathe. She looks pretty in a tight red shirt with a gray scarf, dark skinny jeans and UGG boots. Apparently the boys thought she was too because they all surrounded her like vultures to a dead deer. When they left, she ran her hands through her hair only to find yellow chewing gum in it.
  

She sits upon the back of a couch sobbing, clutching a box of tissues. She keeps shouting the word “Please” over and over to a middle aged man and woman. They have forlorn looks and it seems that it is painful for them to look at the girl. She runs to the kitchen and takes papers out of her backpack. She shreds up multiple packets that were tattooed with numbers and letters and hours worth of school work. She lets her rain trickle down her face and it splatters on the fragments on paper in her hands before she tosses them into the trashcan.
  

She didn’t get dressed or go outside for a full week. The only people around her were her mother and brother and he father when he came home from work. She didn’t seem happy, but she wasn’t sobbing like she was when she was around her peers.
  

The dark haired girl eventually enters the double doors of a brick middle school. She takes a seat in a brand new room with brand new people and she smiles at the girl beside her as if she had never shed a tear. The advisor greets her and shows her what to click on the computer before her.

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She is now holding hands with a boy on the field outside of the brick school. She has a grin on her face and without saying a word he gives her “that look” and she can see it. She knows. With that, she smiled even brighter and giggled with a group that had come up beside her. A whistle is blown and the mob disappears. She flips her hair and the boy is gone.

I see that dark-haired, green-eyed girl with a bright smile each time I look in the mirror. Who I once saw as a social outcast, nerdy, unflattering girl, I now see as a warrior. I see a girl who is beautiful just the way she is. I won’t deny, I’m still not quite as self-confident as I would like to be, but I’m making progress. I’m still growing. I am beginning to realize that caterpillars don’t look at or compare themselves to all of the other caterpillars in their cocoons. They simply just transform into magnificent butterflies. Flowers never stop to see which one smells sweeter in comparing themselves to the others. They just blossom into their very own, unique self. There are days that I find myself glaring at the other butterflies or the other flowers because of a color or scent or size that I wanted. But then I remind myself that I am me and that is so much better than any deep magenta or 3 inch wing or a lilac scent. I was born to be a pale rose with small delicate petals.
  

You will never truly meet yourself until you have to decide who that person is gonna be.