Six months ago I was a completely different person. I was someone who pushed my anxiety to the side just thinking it would dissolve. I believed everything anyone said about me, whether it was good or bad. I cared way too much about what people thought about me and it influenced a lot of my decisions. Six months later, and I'm starting to barely recognize who I was just months ago.

Here I am six months later with pink hair, a septum piercing, a new tattoo, and nearly forty pounds lighter. You could say that this was quite a drastic physical change, but it's helped me in more ways than one. I've obviously become 100 times more confident than I was half a year ago, and I've slowly stopped caring about what people think. Dying my hair was terrifying. I bleached it until it was pretty close to platinum and decided to go pastel pink. Turns out, it's my favorite thing about my appearance. You wouldn't think that a septum piercing would do anything for confidence, but it's so cool looking and I can hide it whenever my heart desires. As for the weight loss, I still have moments where I feel like I don't look any different until I look at pictures from that long ago.

I slowly learned that people's opinions are never going to be what I want them to be, but sometimes it's still hard to just shrug off judgment like it's nothing. I still think about what other people will think about certain decisions I make, but I also don't really care because it's what makes me happy. I took the step to learn more about what causes my anxiety and how I can slow it down if it becomes too much, and that was one of the best decisions I've made in so long. My anxiety is still bad, but I've learned when it gets closer to an anxiety attack and I've been able to stop it a lot of the time.

You never know how much can change within six months, but once you take a minute and remember where you were half a year ago, you'll realize just how much you and your life have changed.