Versions of You
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I was laying in bed trying to sleep a few days ago - which if you know me I have no problem falling asleep. It’ll literally be 8 pm and I will lay my head down and not pick it back up until 8 am lol. Some may say that is extreme but I just like to rest, ya know?
But on this particular evening though, I couldn’t fall asleep. It was 1 am and my mind was up running a marathon. I was thinking about life, pretty typical, and how you go through life and meet so many people who get different versions of you. Sometimes the version that someone meets isn’t necessarily your best version and then that is all they get. They are only in your life for a certain amount of time and then they don’t know the following versions after the version they met - THIS is the thought that kept me up. I don’t like that someone who met me at whatever point in life doesn’t know how much I have grown from that potentially low point. Let me provide a few negative examples from periods of my life. This is going to potentially going to paint a negative picture of me but bare with me.
Example A:
While in high school from my perspective I was fairly reserved - took honors/AP classes, played sports until I couldn’t anymore but was still always involved in them, and had friends in a variety of different social groups. BUT one thing that keeps me up at night was to this day is that I would occasionally get into it with people on Twitter LOL like whyyyyy was I subtweeting other people at my school and then engaging in back-and-forth tweets with them when they saw it - who knows, maybe because I was 15-17 years old. And I will be clear, I wasn’t attacking people on Twitter it was always centered around whatever that week’s drama was at school and it wasn’t all the time. So it was juvenile of me and sitting here at 25 I am embarrassed by my Twitter fights with girls in high school - if we had beef please know I hold no ill in my heart towards you lol
Example B:
In undergrad, I was really busy with multiple jobs and 18 credit-hour class schedule each semester but I still made time to have a social life. CSU was pretty small, I would say the vibe was you knew of a lot of people but you didn’t know a lot of people. One situation I can think of specifically was my during sophomore year. My boyfriend of a few years hadn’t been answering his phone and we had plans to be at a birthday party that evening - so I drove over to the dorms, got let into the building/hallway, and was banging on his door for so freaking long. Eventually got in and a girl was in there with him looking up to no good. It’s safe to say my reaction was not my most exemplary moment. I was not happy but after that incident, I had been known as the psycho gf - well ex-girlfriend cause he and I were done after that. But that stayed with me like I was told that I was black-listed from her sorority’s events. Which I don’t blame her, and while I didn’t harm anyone and didn’t plan to it was chaotic. So if you were to ask anyone about me in that social circle that is what they would bring up which might I add is a bit messed up because it was a reactive response to what was happening - but I get it, that’s all they knew of me because that is what they were told from her! I was faced with a similar situation in Fort Lauderdale with the guy I was dating after my sophomore year, he had come out of the hotel after not responding for hours with two girls and I calmly went up to him and asked him what was going on - when he told me “Baylee, I am sorry” I just walked away - THAT IS GROWTH.
Example C:
This one is a bit more recent, I was living in Miami and I had gone out one afternoon. Well, three glasses of prosecco, four green tea shots, and a kale salad later I was VIP at Ultra Music Festival then went out at Bottled Blonde. Now you may be saying “Baylee that sounds so fun and spontaneous” and don’t get me wrong, it was but I went out to get a salad, at Moxies, on a Sunday… that turn of events was not what I had in mind. Unfortunately, this was not the first time this had happened in Miami. There were numerous times during my span of living there that I left the house with the idea of having a chill day out alone and ended up in a club - flip flops, leggings, no makeup, and all. And pretty much every time after I did this I felt like absolute shit about myself because to my core - that’s not who I am. *To be clear it’s not like I was a wild club rat on top of tables doing all that nonsense I was still chill but I shouldn’t have been there - I knew I should’ve been in bed and participated in a more planned-out evening. But all that to say if you were to ask someone who knew me at a surface level in Miami, like maybe one of the bartenders at one of my regular dining spots, they would say I am spontaneous and down to take tequila shots with fun strangers and go to the strip club until 5 am. Currently, this is not the case. I can take myself out to lunch or dinner and make friends respectively because now I have different priorities to be mindful of than I did before.
Now, in these examples, I am very aware that I am giving myself major real estate in other people’s minds but if there is something I have learned it is that the world is so incredibly small. Someone from high school could be talking to someone that knows me present day and if that person from high school only knows me as the girl who got into beef on Twitter then that is what they could potentially say! How embarrassing because I wouldn’t do that now whether it is on Twitter or IRL.
During those different periods of life, I was a different version of myself - not my best version either.
There are a couple of things I want to say before we continue about the mindset I have toward my past self.
Who cares what people who don’t know you think
We can’t shape everyone’s perspective of us no matter how hard we try. Sometimes things happen and that is just what that person is going to view of you unless they take the time to stick around and really get to know you, who cares.
It is okay to do things that aren’t necessarily you and experience growth - to a certain extent
We have our core values. Mine are integrity, transparency, responsibility, loyalty, kindness, and ambition. Through those examples of different versions of me, my core values of responsibility and kindness were a little shaken. This is why I feel like a bad person to this day for arguing on Twitter over petty drama and why after I went off the rails of my day’s plans in Miami I felt terrible.
I say to a certain extent because we can only shake our core values so many times before they are no longer core values, right? For example, if I would’ve repeatedly kept up the lifestyle of being out and about in Miami my responsibility value more than likely would’ve been shaken so much so that it would’ve collapsed.
Alright, now into the second part of this aside from your everyday people; besties, partner, family - what people experience with you is a very small percentage of who you are. I am constantly reminding myself of this whether it is for me in reassuring myself OR when I am interacting with others. In addition to us only being able to see a very small percentage of another person we are, or should be, constantly evolving or/and growing.
I say this with the most kindness - if you think you know me and we haven’t had a solid chat in over four months- you don’t know me, hehe. I grow every day, I can’t say I am a completely different person than what I was in let’s say 2020 but I can assure you I have grown. I can pinpoint three areas of growth in the past three months.
I try to remember the growth as often as I can to provide grace to myself and to others. I thought of this heavily when I saw someone who was a complete menace on CSU’s campus, they had a child. I was shocked, then had to remind myself they are not the same person they were in 2019 BUT ALSO who knows they might be LOL (let’s hope not and give them the benefit of the doubt though).
I hope that in me exposing moments of my past versions that I am not the proudest of helps you reflect on past versions of yourself, assess your own growth, evaluate your core values, and encourage you in extending grace to others.
xoxx,
B
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