Transcriber: Ying Wei Reviewer: Anna Sobota
Peer pressure.
Two small words and yet they mean so much.
We hear a lot about them in school, on social media
just while talking about our friends.
And they mean different things to everyone.
I, for one, remember being 12
and nervous about admitting what I thought was a poor maths exam result.
It wasn’t up to scratch or so I thought anyway.
For some people, they’re not sure about what to post on social media.
But it can also end up being bad and dangerous situations,
a place that you’re just not quite comfortable.
But, I’m not so sure that peer pressure really exists.
Let’s take a short trip back to the past where I spent a year abroad.
And yes, there are certain preconnotations about an Irish person.
Alcoholics is probably the first one that comes to mind.
And for some reason, quite unknown to myself,
I thought it would be a great idea to live up to the “true Irish tale”.
Well, that wasn't quite right.
And one Friday night, I was definitely the drunkest one at the party.
And this might not seem like the end of the world to most people,
almost a rite of passage, but that wasn’t the problem.
The problem wasn’t the hangover, the bad memories or, well, lack thereof.
It was the fact that people knew me for a bad reason.
People knew me as the silly girl, someone I’m not.
People knew me for not who I was.
So to be myself, I had to take a step back and ask myself,
why had I wanted to be someone else?
And it took a lot of thinking.
But one day I realized no one had told me to go out and be the drunkest,
the most fun, the first one to do something.
I had thought it was expected of me.
It had come from myself. It was self-pressure.
Now, from there came another question, why had I thought this?
Well, again, I went to think,
and I realized
that I wasn’t comfortable with who I was in the environment I was in
which is completely understandable -
I was in new country, a new school, a completely new language.
So then I had a new lens to look through my life in - the lens of self-pressure.
And when I looked, I realized I had never experienced peer pressure before.
I had thought my exam result wasn't good enough.
No one else had said that to me.
I had never experienced peer pressure.
But then, if our peers don’t support us,
what do they do?
And it was when I became myself in my friend group that I realized:
we were all holding hands and supporting each other, lifting each other up.
It was really just peer support.
So let's change that narrative.
Peer pressure, at least for me, existed when I wasn’t comfortable in my own self,
and what was really there was peer support.
Thank you.
(Applause)