The things that tie to who we are
A deeper dive into our identity
From a young age, it feels as though we are on this quest to find out who we are.
There’s a lot of things that tie to our identity. But I think that there is nothing that directly makes up who we are, but rather, we choose what to make of them. And I do believe that it all comes down to who we make ourselves out to be.
There are two ways to look at identity:
- The approach that comes from within.
- The philosophical questioning of what makes up who we are in general.
On Childhood
I like to tie our identity to who we were as kids. I feel like the way we acted as kids is necessary to consider when thinking about identity, that it might even be more important than thinking of things like our nationality and beliefs.
This might not apply to everyone, but the years of our childhood are some of the best years of our lives simply because we did not know about the burden weight of responsibility. Or not as much as we do as adults, at least. Our responsibilities as kids are so little. Those like remembering to tie our shoelaces in a double knot, keeping both feet on the pedals as we bike, not running too fast on the downhills, and doing our homework. In some ways, for our responsibilities being as simple as those, we are more free.
Free in the sense that we had more time to do what we wanted. And, for our worlds being so small, we always knew what we wanted. It was either to play outside, eating ice cream, or watching a movie. Our simple pleasures, that always sounded like a fun thing to do. We weren’t aware of the pressure of the ‘things we had to do’, but rather, we truly enjoyed the nature of things, because they weren’t a ‘waste’ of time; and we didn’t feel guilty doing them.
One day, if you haven’t already, you will burn out; You will reminisce on the good old days when there was no such thing as ‘waste of time’ because you didn’t need to be at any place at a certain time. When your only responsibilities were remembering to eat and drink, and not running too fast on the downhills. When everyone felt so tall, and old, and that you were still a kid. You imagined what your life would look like, ten years from now. You even drew a picture in your head, and wanted it nothing but that. When you sat down for hours, writing down exactly where you’d be and what you’d have achieved. You thought of your dreams, and how one day, you wanted to be an astronaut, or a famous soccer player.
We didn’t even think about how we were being perceived by others. Often times I believe that that’s the main factor behind how we act and everything we decide to do (or not do) — our fear of judgement and essentially our assumptions on how we’ll be perceived.
Perceptions and other people
But where do these assumptions come from? What are the things that initiate the thoughts of what other people will say?
It is simply the people we’ve met, the people we’ve talked to, the people we surround ourselves with in our day to day life. Without realizing it, we slowly start to act like them. This may come natural, and is bound to happen, especially with people who we spend a lot of our time with. What these people accept us for. We fear losing them. We fear that they might stop liking us, or think differently of us. For that, we choose to act based of off what they think is acceptable. I think the thoughts of what they accept us to be come naturally, but what we do with these thoughts is unnatural, but rather, out of our own control and decision making.
It might be the simple things, like what we post on instagram or the way we dress. It might be something related to how we talk, and the things we hold back from saying.
But it might also be bigger things. Like our greatest passions and hobbies. Once we are told that those are not socially accepted, or not encouraged by whoever it is we care about, we tend to stray away from it. Similar to that scene from Stand By Me, when Gordie presumably hates on writing because his father doesn’t encourage it. But Chris tells him “that’s your father speaking”.
On the things we love
Are we all born with something, something that we are rather good at? Or maybe, better than the majority that we know? Something, a form of obsession towards a certain field of work, a passion per se. Or a hobby, we feel the constant calling towards, merely because we enjoy it.
And do we discover it, or do we just know of it? And how much of our identity does it take up?
I think those things are deeply rooted in our personalities, and greatly tie to who we are. In a more general approach, they are easy to seperate us from each other. What each person does in their life as their main field of expertise almost makes up who they are. Almost. Because there are so manyother things. But it’s easy for us to generalize each other based off of what we choose to do, and based off of the things that we love.
