Accepting Others: Attending The #1 LGBT-Friendly College

By Sami Sirsky on February 7, 2016

We spend our entire lives trying to figure out who we are and who we want to be. We’re asked over and over “what do you want to be when you grow up?” and we search endlessly for the perfect answer.

A doctor. A lawyer. A teacher. A police officer. We make friends and our interests mold and shape themselves to fit in with the people we surround ourselves with. We go to college and our undecided major goes from biology to English to neuroscience and back. We wait and we hope for the one moment where it clicks and we know what it means to “just be yourself.”

Hopefully one day it will click. Maybe someday soon we’ll all wake up and know with absolute certainty what makes us who we are, and we’ll know exactly where we want to go to become everything we could ever hope to be. But after 19 years and a lot of fruitless searching, I’ve come to realize that even if that eureka moment happens someday, it doesn’t do anyone any good to sit around and wait for it to happen.

We can’t wait around anymore for the world to change us. We have to change ourselves.

It isn’t unusual to feel like you have nothing in common with anyone around you and to be embarrassed about it. It isn’t unusual to feel ashamed about the way you dress or the things that make you happy or the people you choose to love. It isn’t unusual, but it should be.

It would be unfair to tell you just to embrace yourself or to be unapologetically you because those words mean nothing. We spend our whole lives building ourselves into the people we are. From someone who spent the better part of her life feeling ashamed for the things and people she liked, I know firsthand that being told to “be yourself” doesn’t help a thing.

What is fair is to tell you to embrace others. Love others for being who they are. Accept others even when you can’t understand them, even when you disagree with them, even when they’re wrong. Surround yourself with people who do the same for you. You’re young, and you’re just a college student right now, but you’re going to be so much more. And when you look at everyone around you in a few years, you’re going to want to like who you see.

I’m lucky to be able to attend a school where acceptance is second nature to everyone. People are passionate and weird and extraordinary. Everyone is completely different, and that makes everyone fit in. Sometimes when you put yourself into such an idealistic environment, you forget that there are other worlds outside of your own in the present time that aren’t as pristine.

I attend the #1 LGBT-friendly college in the country. I’ve surrounded myself with friends who accept me for who I am and who I choose to love. The concept of someone having a problem with my choices is sometimes so foreign and at the same time constantly so immediate outside of my little college bubble.

The messy and somewhat ineloquent lesson to be learned is that there will always be parts of ourselves that we are uncomfortable or unfamiliar with. There will always be people who don’t treat us the way we deserve to be treated. There will always be times we feel embarrassed about who we are, and there will be times we’re afraid of who we might become.

But every single second of every single day we make choices that create the people we are, and every day we have the opportunity to change ourselves if we don’t like where we’re going. We have that chance, and so does everyone else around us.

All you can do is create the “you” who you want to be and hope that, against all odds, everyone else will try to do the same. And maybe, hopefully, impossibly, when we’re no longer college students and we’re all grown, old, and wise, we’ll be able to look at ourselves past, present, and future, and accept and love who we see.

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