Even in high school, I'm still asked to fill out acrostic poems, like I used to in second grade. They are the fun ones where you would take your name and come up with an individual adjective to describe myself for each letter in your name. While everyone else looked forward to these poems because they were easy, they weren't blessed with the rather difficult name "Zachary".
There is a limit of 500 words, which I went over. Please critique and please be honest. THANK YOU!
Of course there are a laundry list of adjectives for the letters "A, C, H, R" so I would usually just quickly throw a word down and then get back to work on "Z" and "Y". Eventually with the letter "Y" I would just have to opt for a word like "young" and focus on the "Z". I wanted the "Z" to be the one letter that described me more than any other, the only problem was that there aren't a whole lot of adjectives out there that start with "Z". In fact, the only two words I could ever come up with "zealous" and "zany". Considering I never thought of myself as crazy or the screwball type, I would opt for zealous. I suppose this word fit, I always thought of myself as a passionate individual after all. However, upon repeating this assignment in high school it occurred to me: How exactly do I go about describing myself and what is the value in my own self-description?
This question came to me as I debated between putting down the words "zealous" and "zany". It seemed easy enough, I had always done "zealous" with these assignments over the years, but as I was preparing to use that word for what seemed like the one hundredth time, I wondered: Why do I consider myself zealous? In my eyes, I see myself as a passionate individual with a love of golf, history, and laughing, but for anyone else they could just as easily say I come off as "zany". This small conflict led me to question not only my perception of myself, but also how others perceive me.
I had always held the belief that the way I thought of myself was how others viewed me. I always thought of myself as "Zealous, Athletic, Cool, Happy, Academic, Reasonable, and Young". However, is this really what others thought of me? The coach that cut me from the baseball team in eighth grade certainly wouldn't agree with the term athletic, and surely the girl I broke up with sophomore year wouldn't describe me as reasonable. Maybe I wasn't who I thought I was after all.
Initially, I wasn't sure of how to understand the observations others made of me. I wasn't sure how to value them, recognize, and whether or not I should make an effort to change them. I had always considered myself pretty humorous, but I began to wonder whether I should change my sense of humor to appeal to more people. At one point I even questioned the set of friends I had surrounded myself with and whether or not they influenced how others judge me. I was debating all of these possibilities when one day, when with my friends, I began to laugh uncontrollably at one of their jokes. I can't remember what the joke was, but that moment made me realize what the opinion of others meant. The people I was surrounded by, my friends, liked me for what I am and they saw me as the "Zealous, Athletic, Cool..." person I thought I was. I understood that there were always going to people out there that didn't think of me the way I hoped, and while I will always respect their opinions, I must appreciate myself for who I am and represent what I believe myself to be.
