Every person’s childhood differs. It shapes us into who we are today. One of the major influencers of my childhood was music. While growing up, I was introduced to a wide variety of music, with differences in their language or their genre. This has led me to highly respect every single genre of music. It doesn’t matter if I like the genre or the style, I respect it because there is someone in the world who enjoys it and I feel like I shouldn’t think wrongly about that. I strongly believe that everyone should have this mindset of respecting every genre of music.

Recently, I have started to enjoy a new genre of music: the genre of musical theater. To me, it is amazing with the catchy songs and storylines. However, to others, it is just a nerdy and sad genre of music. This has led me to keep my likes for genres personal, because of the hard judgment about something I love. Throughout this school year, I learned to embrace my likes and not allow judgment to get in my way.

I feel like everyone who I know has been judged for their enjoyments of music. Before I was ever introduced to musical theater, I highly judged it. I thought it was dull and uninteresting. Then my best friend introduced me to a musical, called Hamilton, and before I even listened to it I was very judgmental about it, criticizing every single thing about it. One day he praised it so highly that I thought that I should actually listen to it to see all this big commotion. I started to listen to it and fell in love with it. It has changed my interests and who I am today. It has led me to be very interested in theatre and the genre of theatre music. This experience has shaped my judgment and my beliefs about the respectfulness of the variety of genres of music enjoyed.

Currently, being in high school has helped me realize that there is a lot of judgment throughout life. This doesn’t mean that it should happen. Music tastes people have should never be judged, especially if you’ve never actually heard it. Every person has their own tastes that shouldn’t necessarily give them a bad connotation. Your interests in music should be embraced.