Here’s to who you will become: personal growth at MHCC is inevitable

 

“If you know me based on who I was a year ago, you don’t know me at all. My growth game is strong; allow me to reintroduce myself.”

Okay, I didn’t write that. It’s actually a post from tumblr that’s been floating around my head for a while. It’s a funny post, something I’ve definitely reblogged more than once, because it’s so true. Me an exact year ago? A completely different person, almost laughably so. It makes me think about what exactly I did over the past 365 days to make this revised version of myself.

I’ve always been an active self-educator. Something about learning, or specifically, experiencing, gets me excited. If you look back on me this time last year, I was at a completely different stage in my life. I had just moved into a one-bedroom apartment off Hawthorne with two of my best friends, and was starting a new job downtown that was supposed to be amazing (spoiler alert: it wasn’t). I was sharing a tiny living room with another girl, but it didn’t matter; my friends were like sisters and I happily learned to live without boundaries. We all kind of rolled with the punches.

I had just turned 19 that first month in the new apartment, and Michael Brown had just been shot. It was horrible. We all remember how Ferguson flooded our social media, news outlets, and conversations. My roommates and I felt the call to action. Suddenly, we were adults, and it felt like we could do something to help. It wasn’t even a question when we saw the event on Facebook; we were going to the solidarity protest in Portland, hands-down.

Just in that one experience, I learned what it meant to be a better person. I saw the gap between where I was and where the leaders of the march were and I began to question how I could close that gap. The protests were absolutely the spark that ignited my hunger for growth. Now, I’m constantly working on closing that gap and, ultimately, bettering myself.

It’s hard to compartmentalize the past year, even harder to put into words how it’s shaped me. Sometimes, how I knew myself to be didn’t fit into how I knew I had to be, and it was challenging. I guess what I’m trying to say is that growth is important. And yeah, I think we all know that’s a no-brainer, but it’s just – do we really? Because I still look back on this year in complete awe, like “I did that while working a crap job and living in a crap apartment!” Makes me wonder what completely different person I’ll be next fall.

It’s a new year. I’d like to think we’re all about to embark on another journey of growth here at Mt. Hood. From someone who’s constantly over-analyzing it, I’ll offer one piece of advice: Make a point to step out of your comfort zone, to challenge what you know. You owe it to your future self. Speaking as a current future self, it’s worth it.