The Importance of Approval by Sydney

The Importance of Approval by Sydney - March 2017 Scholarship Essay

Is nonexistent. That’s right. The importance of the approval of others is absolutely nonexistent to you as a person, to your life, to your growth and development and character. If I had the means and ways and time, I would scream this to a school-wide audience, and more, if I could – this message is something that I paid such a large price to learn and I desperately wish that it could be taught through some other form than suffering.

The truth is that the biggest lesson that you will learn in school is not the quadratic formula or the process of cellular division, but that your worth depends on how many nods you get, how many friends you have, how much control you have over others and how good you are at not letting others have control over you. You see, in elementary school you have as much worth as you have people in your playground cluster. In middle school, you have as much worth as the skin you are starting to get the courage to reveal, the number of contacts in your phone, and this blurs into high school, where your worth is determined by how thin, or how muscular, how conventionally attractive you are.

Attractive to others, of course, because apparently being attractive to yourself doesn’t matter, and that’s what I want to help my audience, whoever they are, to unlearn as soon and as fast as possible.

I will address this right off the bat: for a good portion of your life, you will be at the mercy of others. You will have to bend your actions to the will of others, whether it’s your style of writing so that your English teacher will pass you, whether it’s your clothing choice so your school won’t suspend you, whether it’s the way you act or talk or walk, even, so that you can keep your job. Sometimes it’s fair, but an equal amount of times, it’s absolutely not, and if you aren’t steadfastly sure of who you are, of your values and your virtues and your weaknesses – everything that makes up you – then it is very easy to become lost in the endless race that is the will to please others.

Ultimately, others, although they can hold advantages over you, cannot define who you are – not unless you let them. This holds true for all aspects, and I will cover as many as I can possibly think of, the first of them being physical image. There is no such thing as the “perfect body” because it does not have just one form, it has many. If you have a body, it is perfect. You look perfect. How much you weigh does not make you any better or worse of a person. Whether your abdomen sports defined muscles or stretch marks does not determine how you will impact those around you and how they will remember you, when they look back at the years gone by. If you want to change anything about your appearance, it is your right to do so, but I urge you, I beseech you – do so for, and ONLY for yourself. Not so that you’ll look a little more similar to those pictures on the magazine covers you always see at the checkout lines of department stores.

There is also the rather problematic notion that your grades, your standardized test scores, and your GPA are quantified values of your intelligence and capability as a human being. I am quite sure that they were not intended to be so – grades are an indicator of your level of mastery of the subject. Yet, with the importance that college admissions programs place on them, with the amount of parental and many other forms of pressure that revolves around getting all A’s, graduating top of the class, that metaphorical star on the corner of every paper, grades have effectively been made out as a measure of mental capacity. We are human beings – more intricate than any machine, despite what some school systems might think, and our potential is not something that can be expressed by a number. Sometimes, lower grades can be a result of the student simply not being able to learn well with the methods the teacher is employing, or because they are discouraged in the classroom from asking questions. There is also a huge stigma about getting tutoring help, and I have known many people who have steered clear of it to avoid “looking stupid.”

Ultimately, the approval of others does not matter. How you look to teachers, to your parents on that slip of paper with a single vertical column of letters does not matter. What does matter is how you, you as an individual, distinguish yourself from the crowd, and whose hearts and souls you touch in the process.