What makes up your identity? Is it your physical being, your mind itself, a mix of both? Or more importantly, what is identity in the first place? Those are the questions that will hopefully be answered in this post and maybe we can go even deeper then that.
Let’s start with the most vague question of them all, what is identity? When you hear the word identity what comes to mind? Most likely you think about things like your name, maybe what you look like, you may even think about things like your favourite hobbies, and you wouldn’t be wrong. My classmates defined it as: Identity is what makes you you. It is comprised of your world view, culture, environment, ideals that shape who you are internally, and the experiences that impact you knowledge of the world. But in truth you are the one who in the end defines what identity means to you.
Speaking of what identity means to you, you may have noticed a GIF at the top of the post, that is a visual representation of what I believe to be the most important parts of my identity. As you’ll probably notice I put some weird patterns on top of my face and mor prominently on my forehead. This is supposed to represent the jumble of thoughts I’ll have at any given moment because to me, the way my mind works and processes things is a good part of my identity and I would be totally different without that randomness.
But that is only one part of my identity and I could probably go so much deeper with my thinking on that subject if I spent some more time just thinking about what that means to me. The reason for that is because there are different levels of your identity of how you perceive it and how deep you go with your thinking. One example of this is in a bit of reading we did as a class called ‘My Name’ by Sandra Cisneros, that was five paragraphs talking about this girl’s name but within it we got to see what her personality was like, what she thought of herself, and her view on her identity all based around her name.
In conclusion, there are so many things that contribute to your identity that it would be impossible to list them all. However, even if we tried the one determining factor that never changes from one person to the next is how you yourself see your identity with is truly what your identity is.