Hegel's "Phenomenology of the Spirit"

When I first read the article about the Phenomenology of the Spirit, I was so confused because I couldn't really understand what Hegel was saying. The first three chapters are about distinct "shapes of consciousness." It is defined at "jointly epistemologiccal and ontological attitudes articulated by criteria which are, regarded from one direction, criteria for certain knowledge, and from the other criteria for indepedent objecthood. What is meant by independent objecthood?
I took the different shapes of consciousness to mean each person's own view on a certain person or topic. Our conscious is shaped in different ways according to what we have been taught and told to believe. Our consciousness takes shape when we recognize the subject or object and decide what our reaction to it will be.
Another aspect of Hegel's philosophy that was hard to understand was his notion of self-consciousness. One must recognize another person to be able to recognize himself or herself. However, why do we need to recognize that there are other people around us to self-recognize our own beings? That is just something that I was really confused on and it was a hard idea to grasp. What if I'm always the girl in the back who doesn't talk, does that mean that I'm not actually there because no one recognizes me? How is that possible? I know that I am real and I know that I am sitting in that class with all my other classmates, even if we do not directly communicate. Pretty much all of Hegel's philosophy surrounds the ideas of "consciousness" and "self-consciousness."
We discussed the two in class and I got a better understand of it, but it's hard to fully understand because it makes one doubt of one's existence to an extent. I don't think that I need someone else to recognize my existence to first know that I exist and second, that that person exists as well. Hegel's philosophy is a very interesting one, and it definitely has helped me open up to new things.