About Me — Maggie Kelly
I sing. I dance. I make pop culture references. Creator of my own destiny.
Who are you?
That’s the question my English teacher posed to us my sophomore year in college. She asked us to take a few minutes to reflect. I had a few thoughts about this, then carefully penned my response. When the time was up, some students elected to share.
Ms. Stone looked at me with curiosity. She picked me out and asked what I wrote down.
I glanced down at my scribbled words and spoke.
“I am not a label.”
Ms. Stone smiled and laughed. “Maggie’s not playing my game.”
I’ve never been one to prescribe labels or allow myself to be put in a box.
For a long time, I gave myself the moniker Miss Nonconformist. Funny how that, in itself, was a label.
I was signaling to the world that I wasn’t going to play by the rules.
I’ve always gotten high off of proving people wrong and doing the unexpected.
In my high school drama class, we were doing charades. Everyone wrote something to say to go in the jar we would pull out of.
The teacher pulled out the scraps to see what was in there and happened to pull out mine.
Needless to say, it was inappropriate. My teacher was done. “Jessica.” He reprimanded my best friend. Jessica guffawed. She couldn’t believe he thought it was her.
I thought it was hilarious that nobody thought it was me.
People always underestimate the quiet ones.
We’re made up of moments in time. Moments that transformed us from our past self to a new self. If I were picking out a highlight reel of moments, a few would make it.
The first being when I moved from Louisiana to South Carolina. It was a hard move for everyone, but I took it especially hard.
I lost my home and everything that came with it. I was lost, alone, and angry. I turned to music for solace.
In high school, my best friend of four years dumped me out of the blue. She called me up one night and said, “I don’t think we can be friends anymore.”
I was crushed. Hurting, I turned inwards. My depression spiraled into self-hatred.
The long-winded, never-ending spiral
My depression hit me in the recesses of teenagedom. I was young when it pulled me into its’ clutches, fooling me into a mental illness that plagued me for a decade and a half.
Through mostly downs, I struggled. There wasn’t a lot of light in my life apart from music and entertainment.
I escaped into pop culture, binge-watching shows before it was a thing. I spent all night reading Harry Potter fanfiction.
I devoured food like it was nobody’s business.
My mental illnesses had me by the hooks.
Depression caused horrible moments in my life, that I would never repeat.
But everything changed when I lost my mind.
The end of an era
After two long months, I was released from the mental hospital. Multiple in-patient stays sparked a change in my mind. Literally.
I underwent 24 sessions of electroconvulsive therapy.
Once I went through ECT, my life would never be the same.
Depression became a thing of the past. I transitioned into a new phase of life.
So, who am I?
I am many things — a writer, musician, daughter, animal lover, and more — but a label is not one of them. My being can’t be defined by limits.
I am different things to different people. Everyone in my life would say something different about me. They’re all accurate, but at the same time, they’re not.
Humans are malleable beings. They are ever-changing. Your life can change in a split second, forever changing you.
We adapt. We do it without even noticing. We put on different masks around different people, shielding and opening parts of our being.
One person may see your strong side, another may see you weak.
But who are you when nobody is watching?
When nobody is watching, I can embrace my full being. I can be anything.
Above anything else, I’m a creator. There is nothing better than making something out of nothing.
I tell stories in whatever medium comes to me.
I want to share my story and I want to tell others because they deserve to be told.
We’re all only here for a finite amount of time. We all want to leave an impact on the world.
I’ve been given a second chance at life. A new and different perspective.
For a long time, I felt like I was wasting my life away. Depression took my life away from me. It made me a hollow shell of a person.
I thought I was doing nothing. I felt like I was going nowhere.
But all signs point to here.
Every moment in your life has built up to this precise moment.
What makes you ‘you’?
It’s a question for the ages, that we’ll all answer for a long time.
Who says we are the same people we were when we were young?
I’m not the same girl I was when I was young. I share the same DNA, but other than that I’ve continued to evolve throughout my life.
There is no ‘one’, right version of you. You get to choose who that is. And if you don’t like it, change it.
As for me? I’m Maggie. Sharing my life with you in real-time. This is who I am right now.
Join and change with me. Hopefully, we can all learn from each other and find the version of ourselves we like the best.
