My whole life I have had trouble standing up for myself. If my order was wrong at the restaurant I would smile and just accept it, never making any attempt to get what I had actually ordered. I never questioned grades I was given even if the teacher had made a mistake. I was worried that doing these things would make me seem high maintenance or even b*tchy. So, no matter what happened I just accepted it as it was and moved on with my life.

That is how I lived for 20 years and it wasn't until recently that I realized that asking for things to be done a certain way does not make me b*tchy or high maintenance, it just makes me a person with expectations. The key experience that made me realize this was getting my laptop fixed last week. In a move that only I could pull off I managed to crack my laptop screen while my laptop was inside two cases. I took it to an apple store and luckily they were going to be able to get it fixed in just a few days. I was so happy! True to their word they called me three days later to say my laptop was fixed so I immediately went over to the store to pick it up. When they brought the laptop out to me though, I was devastated. All of the stickers I had meticulously picked out while studying abroad in Europe were gone. These stickers were some of my only souvenirs and I had managed to fit them all on the front in an almost perfect arrangement. But, when the lady who was helping me asked if everything looked OK, I just smiled and said it looked great.

I walked out of the apple store fighting back tears telling myself they were just stickers, they weren't that important. But to me they were more than that, they were memories and I felt like they had been unfairly taken from me. A little bit later I called the store and asked if there was any way that my old display was still in the back because my stickers were on there and I would really like them back. A few hours later, the manager called me to tell me that had found the display and that I could come in and get my stickers that night. When I got the store, the manager was completely understanding of why I would want them back. She didn't think I was being high maintenance or demanding or b*tchy. She knew I just wanted back what was mine.

It seems like such a small event in the bigger life picture but it finally taught me that it is OK to stand up for myself. No one would hate me or think I was a b*tch for standing up for myself. Sure, sometimes people may get annoyed but if something is important to me from now on I am going to be assertive and try my best to get it the way I want it to because my happiness is more important to me than wondering if I am annoying the person who I am talking to.