“…no one has any idea what it means to be yourself. Like whose self would I otherwise be being?” – John Green
(Look, I know it’s tacky to use a John Green quote in really any context nowadays, but this one was important to me, so we’re all gonna just agree to let it slide. Also, maybe let’s let people enjoy things. Anyways…)
I always felt like other people knew themselves so well. Like impossibly well. People had labels for what seemed like every single aspect of their being, and I didn’t understand how they did it. I never felt like I knew enough about myself to pick the right label. I felt like the only person in the world who was born without a complete sense of self.
Most of my adolescence was spent gathering as many labels as I could, based mostly upon some idea of who I was “supposed to” be- Christian, vegetarian, straight, smart, normal. Anytime some part of me strayed from one of my labels, that part was cut off, burned, and buried. In this way, I convinced myself that the labels were more “me” than I was. If something didn’t match up, it was me who was wrong for not fitting the label.
When I started college, it became abundantly clear that I didn’t really fit into the labels I had given myself. Being around so many new kinds of people was both discouraging and eye-opening. On the one hand, for everything that I thought I was, there was someone else being that thing better and more confidently. On the other hand, I was being exposed to so many different ways to be a person that I had not even begun to scratch the surface of. This led to the liberating, yet terrifying realization that everything I thought I knew about myself was completely arbitrary. The problem was, I couldn’t find anything else that didn’t feel just as arbitrary.
It felt like I wouldn’t count as a real person if I didn’t coat myself in words defining my identity. Did I even have a personality if I didn’t know how to describe it? Probably not, or so I told myself. This kind of thinking left me feeling stressed and sad and alone. So I talked to people. And I kept talking to people. And the more people I talked to, the more I found that no one else really knew anything either.
As it turns out, it’s okay not to know. It’s okay to never know. In fact, the moment that I admitted that I didn’t know was the moment I felt like I could start to figure out how to be myself. Even if there aren’t words for who that is.