Here's the word of the day: Yongmin
Yong-min [Yóngmeén] n. A keen, eager, good-natured young man with great talents and awesome powers that inspires progressive change and action from the people around him.
A nice, well defined definition of me. Now, I could get really creative and turn me into an adjective, verb, or even an adverb, but I'll leave that up to you. But, as I look over this concise, rather terse definition once more, I find myself shaking my head. Yes, the phrase above may be the way others perceive me. This may be the person that my parents want me to be. This may be the person that I want to be, nonetheless I can't help but to deny that I am not the person that the phrase describes. It is an idealized, unattainable image shrouded in a veil of fluffystuff.
So, here's a new definition.
Yong-min [Youngmín] n. 1. a seemingly keen, happy, satisfied lad who secretly belies a feeling of insecurity and vulnerability under the veil of sugarly goodness. His sense of insecurity emanates from his itinerant lifestyle, lack of self confidence, and inability to permanently belong to a place. 2. A pushover. 3. A shy, clumsy, and awkward walking talking piece of flesh and bone.
Now I feel satisfied. I feel less vulnerable. I feel like vindictively pointing my finger at my dad and going "Ha! This is the real me! In your face!" But at the same time I feel my shoulders loosen. This is not the person that I want to be and I know it. I hate that I'm so sheepishly timid and unconfident, I hate that I am so shaky on the inside but appear to be the opposite, I hate how others try to define me to be someone that I am not. So, let's do something about it.
Defining yourself is not as easy as looking up a word in a dictionary. As you can see, there is a clear discrepancy how you perceive yourself and how others perceive you. How do I deal with this? Destroy it. Eliminate the gap. Pull the 'how others define you' from the other side of the spectrum and drag it over to the side of 'how you define yourself.' I, like everyone else, have a vision of the kind of person I want to be. I want to be charismatic, confident, inspiring, intelligent, humorous, and sexy. But not everyone is born like that (at least not me). Nonetheless, I strive to reach that image, that definition, how idealized and unachievable it may be. Ignore what others say about you. If you want to be that person, then be it. In the end, only you have the power to shape yourself, as an artist mends his clay mold to perfection. Fortunately, that clay mold stays nice and moist throughout our lifes; we can always change.
Yongmin. It isn't just a word of the day. It's a word that will be with me my entire life, and time and time again, I will try to define it.
