I once caught my reflection in my college bathroom mirror and cried. She looked fine. I just had no idea who she was.
During the early years of my life, my inner circle told me a lot about myself. I was outgoing. I was fun. I was an old soul. These things resonated with me then. I just understood them to be true. If the grown-ups thought these things then it must be the way I am. I never took any of my labels as insults, just the kind of things that existed and floated around inside me. When you are nine you don’t think much about Identity, or what that even means.
In high school, people figure out on a random Tuesday that they are autonomous beings and have likes and dislikes. At the same time, we see people in the media or in our schools being praised for the things they liked, wore, and did. Thus we set sail on our journey of self-exploration. At first, most of my interests, when it came to individual identity, came from the Internet. I have always been a big YouTube girl. I watched mostly content having to do with lifestyle or fashion. I became obsessed with coffee and thrifting clothes, both of which I still adore and have only become more invested in over time. I discovered a music taste separate from whatever my sister had on her iPod Shuffle. I was into Conan Grey, Lana Del Rey, and Billie Eilish. This pushed me into my Bedroom Pop era that I am still in the thralls of to this day. When I crossed the stage at high school graduation, I felt like I knew every nook and cranny of my soul. I was untouchable.
When I came to college all of that immediately went out the window. All of the people who you have grown up with, who have placed you into a box in their head of who you are, are gone. You have no more boxes. In my case, I wasn’t on a sports team or immediately a member of a club. I was just a person that now attended UMass. I still had all of these interests but now they seemed so unimportant. What was my role here? Who did I want to be? It is a defining time in life and you have the chance to reinvent yourself completely. For some, this may be refreshing. I felt like I was freefalling with nothing to grab onto. There were so many ways to go and without the four walls of my hometown box, where was my guardrail? What if I strayed too far? These are the questions that flooded my mind during my first semester at UMass.
So, what do we do about this? Self-reflection seemed the only reasonable thing to do. I thought about the old soul. The outgoing nine-year-old. However, I was more reserved now. I wasn’t seen as a crazy emotionally intelligent child anymore, I was just a functioning adult. I like to cook, write, and enjoy window shopping and the beach. There is plenty that I like, but what am I? I am a woman, a daughter, a sister, a friend. All of these things can be true and I can still look at myself and not recognize her. Why?
At this point, I was grasping for anything to bring me back to myself. I wanted to look into my own eyes and find solace again; find a place I knew would be my lifeline. I thought about what identity meant to me. Identity was the part of myself that I resonated most with. The things that I felt defined me. To me, life is about the way that humans interact with each other, and the unique experience of emotions. The ways that I feel and make others feel. I am empathetic, I am resilient, and I am kind. These are truths of my character that cannot be shaken despite anybody’s box. To call me a student would be limiting. I am a student, of course, but not forever. Some people are doctors and lawyers and chefs, but they are also parents, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and volunteers — those same people are shy, loud, and hardworking. To label yourself as a title you hold takes your sense of identity out of your own hands. It is not even surface level, it is external. Identity is about what matters to you. What aspects of yourself bring you peace and familiarity? Find them and know them. They will find you in tears in the bathroom mirror and they will set you free.
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