For the past six years, I’ve been told I was in the formative years of my life. This period is constructed as the time you must find your identity and create the best years of your life, the ones you will eventually be nostalgic for. Now, I’ve gotten to a point where I spend each chapter of my life romanticizing the next chapter, using it as an escape to distort the reality I don’t want to face.
The problem with the way we talk about identity is how clear and normal it sounds. We say during these years of your life you will figure out who you are and what you want and suddenly you’ll be happy. But what does the word identity even mean? Is it who someone surrounds themselves with? Their values? Their personality? Attaching an identity to the places that formed us seems reflective of our upbringing and development. However, if identity is supposed to be as clear and important as society positions it, associating it with such temporary things as people and places seems counterintuitive.
It gets even more complicated when you think about how convoluted some forms of identity are. I’m a girl, and what a girl is has been shaped by misogynistic views of femininity. So what does that identity even mean, when it’s really just a system of organization? How can our identities be limited to the groups we’re part of? In my mind, identity is individualized, but I don’t think that it’s always represented accordingly on a social level.
In my mind, a fulfilling, interesting life worth living is one with an open mindset. If I’m truly open-minded, won’t I constantly be changing? The more I learn, the more I see, and the more people I meet, my understanding will naturally change in response or at least broaden if I’m really absorbing everything I’m experiencing. So why do I have to clearly understand exactly who I am, what I believe, and what I want if it’s not a constant?
The weird thing about changing is the obscure sense of obligation towards the past. I know my high school self was insecure and in many ways miserable, so why do I feel guilty deterring from my identity then? I feel the need to adhere to the perceptions others formed of me in the past. I feel I need to be the girl I was when I knew them or somehow I’m not authentic. I want to be everything the little girl I was I wanted to become, even if it’s no longer consistent with my beliefs and aspirations.
What I’m beginning to realize is that if I’m actually going to figure out who I am and have a clear identity, the only perception that can matter is my perception of myself. Even then, I need to be ok with contradicting my former self. In reality, I’m still that same person, but my experiences since then have shaped me into the person I am today. When I was eight, I didn’t know what being eighteen was like, yet I still had an image of who I wanted to be.
Who I am, who I was, and who I’m becoming might be really similar. Or, they could be entirely different. The important thing is that they’re still me. The track of life I choose is in my power and that autonomy is something I should value, not resent.