LOVE, Kloudiia

Certain things grow naturally.

You grow taller from the day you were born until a stage when your height is stabilised.

Your knowledge increases as you celebrate one more birthday.

By right, you should get wealthier due to the number of years you have worked and amassed your savings. By right, you also should be better in most aspects of your life, learnt more things, made more new friends while developing deeper friendships and relationships with existing ones.

Is this happening to you? If it is, then we should congratulate ourselves that we are growing healthily, and evolving naturally in whichever sense.

I began to think of confidence. Do we get more confident with age too?

Have you realised that when you were much younger, especially during our teenage years, the basis of popularity seemed to bind around how attractive, or how wealthy, or how academically smart you were.

I can’t deny this argument. For a very long time, I found myself comparing with others over my looks, my facial features, my dressing, my height, my bag, my shoes, my results. Even my handwriting and my voice! Yes, whenever I spotted someone who is good-looking, my envy cells would go on an auto-activation.

Mind you. I wasn’t even comparing to how she looked versus how I looked. The mere fact that that girl was a headturner was enough to make me start comparing and wished I were here instead.

Never for a moment did I stopped to appreciate my own assets.

Was that healthy? I don’t think so. In fact, these meaningless comparison slowly eroded my self-confidence and made me felt much smaller than I actually was. I termed them as “meaningless” now because I have far outgrown that stage, and now on hindsight, they seemed so trivial and, for that matter, laughable.

But now, the situation is quite different. Have I grown taller? Not that significant enough for me to measure. Rather, I appreciate I’m tall enough to take the item off the tallest rack in the supermarket, even if I have to tip-toe to the very max while risking an overstretched ligament.

Has my handwriting turned more beautiful? I’d only wish it can become more legible and neater. Beautiful or not no longer matters anymore. In fact, I found it to contain “character”!

Has my facial features changed over time? My eyes are still “small” according to the others. But I found the roundness rather, lovable.

Has my voice become sweeter, or richer? It still kind of “croaks” in the morning and sounded generally low, except for certain times when they tend to be higher-pitched. But hey, that’s my voice! And it sure has it’s own quality that resonates with whomever I speak to.

Am I still comparing myself with others? Can’t say I’m not, but it has become more of a “healthy competition” and a form of self-challenge for myself. To see how much better I can do, to see how much more I can stretch, to see how much faster I can go.

I can say that confidence does grow with age. And when that happens, you are no longer depressed over that scar left over on your face when you had chicken-pox, or that slight bulge in your thigh when you see pencil thin models adourning magazine covers.

Because, you knew very well that inside you, you had something that made you different from the rest. You knew that you are unique, and you stand out from among the rest.

What is that something you own? Why don’t you figure out what’s yours?