Ah, identity -- the most befuddling thing I have ever met, especially my own. Too often, the question of "Who am I?" has crossed our minds as a collective human race. We constantly try to figure ourselves out to find our place in this vast world; we want to know who we are so we can figure out where we fit.
It's a bit tricky, though, to try and do that; identity stems from everything, and it's pretty uncertain as to which part of the everything is the dominating force of one's identity. Am I a sum of others’ views of me, or am I entirely my own? Is it my experiences and the environment in which I reside in that define who I am, or is it my genetic makeup? Is it my astrological sign or the Myers-Briggs result that's more indicative of my unique nature? Is my identity what I believe myself to be, or what others see?
I have grappled heavily with this concept for a good portion of my life, and still have not reached an entirely coherent idea of who I really am. Growing up, I was incredibly different from most people in my hometown. Being a person of multiple races and ethnicities was something new for them, something to...adjust to, I suppose. And of course, being as awkward and geeky as I was am didn't quite help either. That, I can imagine, was also something to adjust to...
For the longest time, I would try to combine all these facets of identity -- location, race(s), others’ opinions, my own thoughts -- and always came into conflict, especially between what others thought and my own views of who I am. Reconciling those two views was nearly impossible, so I tried to deny various aspects of who I was; I was so ashamed of being unable to conform to others’ preconceived notions of what my individual components should be. It was horrible, the fact that who I really was could never be good enough for others. It got to a point where I had to radically change myself in order to be more acceptable in their eyes, losing crucial components of who I was by trying to live up to their expectations.
Now, I feel that it doesn’t matter anymore. I've learned from many hard years that it shouldn't matter what others think of me or what they think I should be. I am not a race or ethnicity. I am not a nationality and I am not my nation or state or hometown. I am not a mental condition. I am not a statistic or demographic or something that can be so easily quantified. I am a human -- a complex web of cells and impulses and emotion and memories that cannot be categorized or put into a box for easy storage, but are entirely unique to me. My identity -- and everyone else’s -- is complex, conflicting, and above all else, my own.
Inspiration for this article: 'Phenomenal Woman' by Maya Angelou; "I Am What I Am" from Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman's La Cage Aux Folles; 'We Think We Know You' from Bo Burnham's what.
