I've been giving a lot of thought to something I had stopped thinking about for years.

I feel like a teenager again because recently I discovered I have no fucking idea who I am. And that feels pathetic because fuck, I'm more than 20 years old, I have just finished a university degree and I should have stuff like that figured out now. Or maybe not. I don't know, but sometimes I feel like I should.

For years I have worked in my self confidence, in the way I project to people. When I was a kid and was all weak and sentimental and gay and bullied, all I wanted to be was the cool kid that everyone admired and everyone thought of as hot and cool to be around.

I wanted to be the popular guy of course.

But my self confidence was shit and I really believed that everybody hated me, I was depressed and isolated and had to go to the psychiatrist and take anti depressants.

I had nervous breakdowns where all I did was scream and cry and hit myself against the walls.

I was a fucking messed up kid.

I hated myself and I felt that people hated me. And they did for many years. And it was not nice to be the looser in class.

I don't want to sound like the victim because I am grown up and it's pathetic to martyr yourself, and I know that there's millions of people in the world that have had it far worse than me, but the fact is that people were not nice to me at all when I was a kid.

Anyways, I put up with it and I really believe I was strong enough just to not run away from it but face it for years and try to fix it (because of course that I wanted to fix it). Then people grew up, or realized that I wasn't that bad and I think (or rather, I've been told) they stopped hating me, but I still felt like I was despised. I seriously believed that the world hated me.

That, of course, pissed people off and I kinda self-rejected my self and pushed away them from me. It was kinda my trademark... that "I know you hate me" bullshit. It was pathetic but of course I hadn't realized that yet.

Then one day, after years of psycho therapy and shit I decided to try to trust people again. I decided to give it a chance and make friends and force myself to believe that I was not hated. It kind of worked because I started making friends and building relationships and all that shit. People started saying to me "see? it wasn't that hard and now look, we all love you and you are with us and stuff... you have to keep building your confidence". It was working for me and I enjoyed it.

I started to realize how much I hated the people that were all "everyone hates me, I suck, I'm the worst". Then I understood why people would not come close to me and how I was the one that had been pushing them out for a while. Of course the fact was that I was also very hurt from all the shit that same bastards did to me when I was a kid. But I decided to forgive them and forgive myself and just try to make it right.

So my strategy was simply to shut myself up whenever any negative thoughts about myself came to my mind. I started to not let myself think I was not cool, or I was boring, or I was too nice and not cool... And those kind of thoughts came to my mind always, but I just simply started to shut them automatically. It was working.

I perfectly remember the time it started to change for me. It was my cousin's birthday, maybe seven years ago. I decided to dress "nicely" so I wore nice jeans with a jean jacket and a tshirt. I combed my hair and put a thin cut stocking in my neck (lol, that was in fashion in Colombia at the time because all the Argentinian soccer players did it). Then I went to her house and a friend of hers opened the door. The girl was gorgeous! She was probably one of the cutest and most popular girls in school. Anyways. She opened the door and said "wow, you look amazing". Haha. I will never forget that moment.

Anyways, so yeah. I turned slowly with the pass of years from the ugly duckling to a hot swan lol. As years passed I was able to relate much more easily with people, to look better. Heck, I made so many cool friends. I became friends with the cool people (that hot girl that opened the door is now one of my best friends), started to go to cool parties, getting drunk and dancing for days! Even when all my friends from engineering school were studying and being their usual nerds (I looove them and they know I think they're all nerds ♥), I was partying non stop on the weekends and then doing not bad at all in school either.

Suddenly I was modeling too. Lol. When I started I could not believe I was really being proposed to model. And I still can't believe it.

So yeah. My life changed in a good way, I was doing so many "cool" things I had never in my life dreamed of.

However, the strategy in all those years didn't change. I still was just shutting every negative thought off my mind. I was not letting myself put myself down (that sounds funny :S).

It was always there, though.

All the way I always felt like people were still acting. Like all the nice things they said were out of pity. That I wasn't really that cool at all and was still that nerdy pathetic crybaby that everyone hated. I was conscious I had changed. I had grown up and I had become a different (and better) person. Actually I lost many of my creative and sensitive talents in the process of becoming "cool" (I guess in a way my mind blamed that sensitivity of my awful social abilities) and after I really felt like I missed them. I always knew I was better now, that I had grown up to be a good and intelligent man. But still, I always thought that deep inside I was the same pathetic kid that deserved to be hated.

I mean, if you think about it, we all know that personality is a construction, right? Personality is the result of each of our lives, of our experiences. It's a program that is built from many lines of code input by our own experiences. So what guarantees that I'm not that kid I was 15 years ago? what guarantees that people don't see me still as that? What guarantees that all those behaviors and traits that people hated (and that I think I would hate now) are gone? What if I still act like that without noticing?

...Haha as I write this stuff I really find how nonsense my thought processes are, but I won't erase anything. Maybe this is healthy after all, just letting it out...

I know thinking that is ridiculous. It's ridiculous to think that people are nice and are my friends and treat me nicely just because they pity me! I know that the world doesn't work like that I hell, I wouldn't become friends with someone I hated.

Hahaha! Again I'm thinking of so much shit and I think my mind processes are going faster than how I'm able to write.

So I reached a conclusion, just now. I really am my own worst enemy. It is my fucking fault that I think of me like that and I just have to stop. The world and human beings are not good to other people out of pity and I really have to stop thinking about it. If I'm worthy of my good luck, if I'm hot enough to be a model, if I'm cool enough to have cool friends, if I act/dance stupid when I'm on drugs, if I am cool enough, if I'm still the same pathetic kid that even I would hate if I met him nowadays. Fuck that.

I really need to learn to not worry about it. If life has treated me the way it has, if I am in NYC going on castings and meeting really important people and trying to be a model, if I have friends in Colombia that love me and if I'm making friends that say they like me here in NYC it's because I fucking deserve it.

Because I am fucking cool.

I just said 'fucking' many times in a row.

Because the kid that resulted of all those good and bad experiences is an amazing person.

He might not be super aggressive and strong, he might be too nice for his own good sometimes, he might be shy and awkward when meeting people. He might have no game when hitting on people he likes (lol, I honestly have no idea of how to do it). But he is a good person. And he is damn smart. And he looks good and will only look better and better. And he trusts himself and knows that he's got it all and that his only limit is the one he imposes. I will stop limiting myself.

I can't be the own to screw myself. I can't be the one to stop myself from being how great I can be! As a model as of now, as an engineer, as a social person. I won't. I will fight myself.

The opportunities that life has given me... The opportunities I have constructed for myself. Oh my god, most people should be so lucky to have as many awesome things to happen in their lives as me. Right now I just have to let myself take the opportunities. Fuck, if I'm in NYC trying to be a model, if there's an agency that believes in me, if there's a girl somewhere in NYC that would have me in her fantasy agency, it is because I deserve it, right? Because I can do it. I have to be the one who believes the most in me.

And I will.

And I've heard that most of people go trough similar thought processes at points of their lives, which I hope is true because I feel a little embarrassed of posting this in a blog in the internet where I'm supposed to be talking about how cool is the experience of starting modeling in NYC and the parties and the hot hot people I meet everyday and all of that (that has happened, of course).

Well, truth be told, for me this experience has been more about confronting all my phantoms. I'm not in the safe zone of Colombia, my country and my people. I'm now in NYC, surrounded by gorgeous people that live off that. I am actually trying to make it at a business where the merchandise is my looks! Gosh, as if I ever trusted that.

It really is the perfect environment for all your insecurities to explode.

This is personal deep shit, bro.

hahahaHAHAHA.

But I'm not apologizing. That's me.

And I will win the fight.

Peace.