Article July 11, 1977 Issue

Who Likes Me?

Sally Lou Lind

It's a common thing for young people to struggle with the challenge of how to be more popular and attract friends. It happened to me some years ago.

I guess most everyone wants to be loved and thought attractive and interesting. To achieve this I tried assuming a personality that was blase, daring, and totally unlike me. This seemed to work for a while. I shocked the people I had been admiring into noticing me. I wanted so much to attract their attention, but it often meant saying or doing something that made me feel uneasy. It was as though I betrayed some better part of myself.

But, I reasoned, if I were to keep on being popular I would have to constantly work at the daring image I was projecting. If people liked this image I found such an effort to maintain, would they dislike the other me, the one I lapsed into when they weren't around? About this time I began to find that my new friends were a disappointment to me. Their ideas of fun didn't agree with mine.

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