This I Believe Essay

My "This I Believe" essay is about being able to speak your mind and expressing your feelings without feeling like you are wrong. Writing this assignment was hard for me, but it was a fun process. It got me to figure out something I feel strongly about and Im glad I finally got it done. 

Speak Your Mind

I believe you should never apologize for the way you feel.

Everyone has a right to their own feelings and being able to express them is such a blessing. Everyone has a voice and it should be heard.

Stand up for yourself and everyone around you. In my life, I was told that if someone offended me, I should tell them. This way, the person knew how I felt and wouldn’t say or do it again. That seemed simple enough. It worked perfectly until one conversation I had with a friend. He was a great friend and had completely understood me before. During this conversation, we had come up on the topic of racecar drivers.  I told him that if I could have any job I wanted, a racecar driver would be something on my list. He told me that that was the stupidest thing he had ever heard and laughed. “That is a man’s job, no girl could ever do that, or do it well.” It hurt my feelings that just because I am a woman, it would mean I couldn’t do something, even something that I could just dream about. I told him that he couldn’t tell me what I could and couldn’t do; I could do anything I set my mind to. He told me I was wrong for feeling that way and for picking that kind of “dream job”.  “You should apologize for getting upset, because I am the one who is right.”

That response was not the one I thought I was going to get and it made me mad. I thought, “How can the way I am feeling, be wrong? How can a feeling in general be ‘wrong’?” Is it wrong because I do not feel the same way he does about a topic? Is the way I feel below his feelings? Absolutely not.

People cannot be right or wrong because of the way they feel. Opinions and feelings go hand in hand with each other. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and express them every day. Sometimes I do not particularly agree with what they are saying to me and that’s fine. It just means we do not believe in the same things. I would never make someone apologize for the way they feel about a topic, even if it is different from mine. It’s good for others to have different opinions and feelings towards issues and it doesn’t make them wrong for expressing them. We should learn to respect others’ opinions.

I am my own person and I am allowed to feel however I want. It is great that my friend and I have different opinions on things, but trying to make someone apologize for it is wrong. I will never again let others hurt me because of the way I feel. I will never again be defined by what others make me. And I will never apologize for the way I feel.