Today, unlearner, we are talking about one of my favourite topics, identity. When someone asks you who you are, I really want you to think about how you define yourself. Because the word identity has the root word identify in it.
The Cambridge dictionary says that a person’s name and other facts about who they are is their identity. But I always go right back to that root word identify. Because an identity is how you identify when you are with a group of people, when you are alone, when you are at work, when you are in an academic setting.
How do you identify?
And often the words that come to mind, or even the categories that come to mind — how you look, how you sound, how you grew up, how you act around others — those are all things we bring up as parts of our identity.
But here’s the real question: how real is an identity if it keeps changing?
You used to define yourself very differently 10 years ago than how you do now.
And so this conversation is about how to let go and to grab hold, but also how to be at peace and to accept the changing identity.
Because one thing we know for sure is this: when we change identities, the hardest part for most of us is having to let go of who we thought we were.
And that is often the moment where people say: “I don’t know who I am anymore.”
