Let me ask you this: Are you better off than you were four years ago? I’m finally able to say that I am. As we turn the pages back to fall 1994, I was a sophomore in high school.

There wasn’t anything excellent about me that made me stand out from the crowd, which meant that anyone who wanted to had free reign to dissect my imperfections, which many took advantage of on a daily basis.

I had just come back to school from a horrible summer where I had learned a lot about myself, my family and my friends. One of my greatest disappointments of that summer was that where I thought I was being supported, I wasn’t.

All I was sure about at that time was that I couldn’t trust anyone around me, and I had to create some serious distance between myself, my high school and my hometown. But I firmly believed that the next three years of my life were just going to be spent existing and not living. What on earth was I going to do in the meantime?

Enter the band Hole and its album “Live Through This,” purchased at the local discount store. Corny as it is to say about a shiny metal disc, it changed my life. The album let me know that what had happened to me in the past was not my fault, but I couldn’t let it affect me for the rest of my life. It told me that it was OK to be angry at my tormentors, and that they were the weak ones, not me. I had something to offer this world.

The most important thing that I gleaned the first time I listened to “Live Through This” was that I was not alone, as so many people had made me believe for the first 15 years of my life.

I wanted to go out and find Courtney Love and thank her for saving my life, in a way. Along with millions of others, she became a fascinating individual who was alternately reviled and adored. She became my heroine.

Over my remaining years in high school, I did start to live. With the help of Ms. Newton, my sophomore English teacher, I realized that I loved words, and that writing was my calling, in fact. (Since I never got around to thanking her for her help in high school, thank you for all your help, Newt.)

I joined my high school newspaper. I slowly became more assertive with my friends and family. I wrote and performed a play to some acclaim. I look back on my time at secondary school with fondness, but I would never go back, so in retrospect, I made the system work for me.

I followed Courtney through the news with interest. I took particular joy in the fact that she came from the same kind of background that I did and was able to achieve some power in society. We were kind of alike, in a way … well, without all that nasty drug usage on my part.

When I arrived at college, I brought “Live Through This” along with me, but I found that I didn’t need it to get me through the rough times that first semester gives to every college freshman. A biography about her was released by Poppy Z. Brite last fall, and I pursued it to find that it didn’t have as much bite as I had hoped.

Through that whole “Look Mom! Versace Gave Me Some Free Clothes!” phase, I was happy that everyone finally made her feel pretty — but when that long-awaited follow-up album to “Live Through This” kept being pushed back, I started to wonder. Especially in all those interviews where she kept expressing her love for bad ’80s music and saying things like, “Yeah, I may love to rock, but that pretty pop song still gets me every time.”

Upon last Tuesday’s release of “Celebrity Skin,” my fears of Moog synthesizers and chords so tight you could bounce a quarter off of them were realized. The album is one long, mournful Loverboy song from 1982. It’s so saccharin, it made my teeth hurt. To put it more succinctly, it sucked, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone except for use as a coaster.

I was disappointed upon hearing the album, but then I came to another in a series of these realizations. I had outgrown Courtney Love, her antics and her posturing. Sure, during high school, my idolization of her had helped me become the woman I am today, but it was up to me to create the life that I want. I am my own heroine.

And you can be, too. Don’t get so wrapped up in another person that you lose your identity. Listen to your conscience. Live for yourself.

Tori Rosin is a sophomore in journalism and mass communication from Portage, Wis.