MadameNoire Featured Video

 

Having a healthy view of yourself is always a good thing, and sometimes you need to be your own cheerleader.  Other times, you have to fake your greatness until you become great.  However, there are times when you’re rose-colored glasses can work against you, and here’s how they screwed me over once.

For some reason, the thing to do your freshman year of college was to visit your former high school while it was still in session, and visit some teachers.  So, like I fool, I did it.  I went to all of my favorite teachers before their classes.  They would ask me to tell the students a few things that I learned since being in college, and then I was on my merry way to impart my wisdom, and presence on all of the lowly high schoolers.

I saved the best for last as I went to a teacher who I felt really cemented my pursuit to go into writing.  I’ll call her Ms. Smith.

I had her my final semester of senior for Creative Writing.  In fact, I had the option to graduate a semester early, but I opted to stay that last semester so I could specifically have her as a teacher.  Everyone said how amazing she was, and no one was lying.  She was a great teacher.   But my shining moment came when a few times she pulled me over to the side and told me how impressed she was with my writing and stressed that I needed to really go into this field.  Gaining her approval was so important to me, and I wanted to remind her of that.

I walked in and I wasn’t given the normal ecstatic greeting, so I just assumed that she was stressed.  But I went over to her, hugged her, and assured her that I was on my way to my goal.  I was majoring in English and I had her to thank for it.  She nodded politely, and I left, leaving one of my best friends who was still in high school and taking the class to find her seat as I went back home.  Later, my friend called me and told me that after I left, Ms. Smith went over to her and said:  “Who was that girl?”

Crushed is an understatement.  Mortified seems like a pretty good assessment of my feelings at the time, and then shame when I tried to rationalize her lack of remembering me.  After I couldn’t come up with an explanation I decided to stop trying to figure out why and appreciate what was.

The thing that I learned through this horrible ordeal was:

Romanticizing relationships can happen easily, especially if the person had a big impact on your journey in life.  But sometimes you have to separate the person from the experience to be able to keep things in perspective.

A positive experience doesn’t necessarily mean a relationship that is everlasting.  Take the powerful words and feelings that have been bestowed on you to help encourage you to be a better person.  However, don’t take it as a means to lay a foundation for a relationship that was never there.

Also, see things for how they are, not for how you want them to be.  A great relationship is built on more than a few positive interactions, and built on a myriad of factors.  Once you’re able to see how limited a relationship is, it helps to allow you to not romanticize it in your head.

I know that seeing things in black and white can remove the fun from seeing things through your rose-colored glasses, but it’s not fun when you falsely elevate your position in someone else’s life.  Trust me.

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