Identity: I think therefore, I am?

What is identity? What defines us? What makes us who we are? These questions keep swirling around as I try to make sense out of the world.

Peter Weinreich defined identity as the totality of one’s self construct, the capacity for self-reflection and the awareness of self.

As a teenager, I struggled a lot with my identity. Am I who I say I am or am I who people say I am? The society I grew up in did not help either; from a young age, a lot of us were indoctrinated with a set of rules on how to live. So instead of seeking to understand ourselves as individuals, we simply assimilated the identity of family, culture, and religious upbringing.

From the division into separate classes in our fourth year in high school which started to snuff out traces of individuality within us, to outdated university programs, one shouldn’t wonder why there’s a lot of degree holders without a sense of purpose which lead them down the road to frustration, anger, self-loathing and depression(and there goes our roaring twenties).

This isn’t a remote case; friends, acquaintances and coworkers have all at one point brought up the topic of identity, who they are and who they want to be but cannot because of how society would ostracise them.

So how do we find our purpose? Our why? How do we avoid the pit of existential crisis? I’ll be honest, I have no answers to these questions yet and neither do those self-help books do (sue me).

Knowing who we are would make finding out our “why” a lot easier and I know that finding our purpose could be a life long journey and it could be overwhelming and when we focus too much on how we are perceived externally, we tend to follow whatever is trending and this often ends up with no lasting and satisfying meaning to why we are who we are.

One day, I hope I find mine and I hope you do too. Till then, to infinity and beyond.

You can take this test to know a little bit about who you are and what might be your purpose.