*Just* an Identity

          For the last seven and a half minutes I’ve been staring at a blank page; not because I didn’t know what I wanted to write about but because I didn’t know how to start it. When I think about it, that concept is literally the bane of every person’s existence. We create these goals in our head, we know what we want to do but we have no idea how to get there. Recently I was talking with my roommate and somehow the whole idea of “Imposter Syndrome,” came up. I’d never heard of the term but I looked it up on the ever-legitimate Wikipedia and I quote, “a concept describing high-achieving individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a "fraud".
          I’d never heard a term to describe my adolescence so succinctly before. Since I was in elementary school I’ve felt like my intelligence was my identity. As I got older I came to realize I was not by any means the smartest but, I constantly felt like I had to prove myself. If I wasn’t the smartest, then who was I?
          When I started my internship last summer my boss said something that truly caused me to contemplate. He told me if I constantly devalued my accomplishments as “just -insert adjective-” then I would never get hired in the business world. I hadn’t realized how much I downplayed compliments before.
          I guess it’s pretty apparent that doubt is this huge part of my life, no matter how confident I seem the truth is that I’m not. I’m completely aware of my faults, every single one of them. Self-deprecation is this mask that I wear on a daily basis but most of the time the jokes I’m saying have a little more depth than I let on.
          We all want people to interpret us in a certain way. The ways in which we define ourselves are constantly changing with the passing of time but, most importantly with the changing of trends. In all of this I’ve come to realize that identity is completely relative and totally subjective. You are who you decide to be, I guess that’s the power in finding yourself. Like I said before, it’s not that we don’t know who want to be, it’s just that we don’t know how to get there.
          I like to think I’m on some sort of pre-determined path, it allows for the OCD-like tendencies within me to calm, it allows for me to feel like I’m not just walking in circles. I can’t say that I haven’t taken a couple of wrong turns or, that I haven’t been distracted by the wrong people (you know who you are lol) but, one thing that I can say is I’m going somewhere. Even if it’s not a place I expected to be. If five years from now I’m in a completely unexpected place I will have done the whole “life” thing right because even though every part of me wants to be predictable I never want to be comfortable with life. Being uncomfortable is how you learn, about yourself, about your strength, and that’s what is truly powerful about a person. The strength they exude unexpectedly, the adversity they face with no abandon, and the love they show to people who don’t deserve it.
          Identity, it’s a foreign concept to many. Whether you’re an imposter, or a part of the intelligentsia, at the end of the day you are who you decide to be and that’s the end of that.