For this blog post we have been tasked to write about what we now understand to be identity. This question might have been hard for me to answer before the start of the school year, but in the past three weeks we have learned so much about identity and what our own identity is. In this post you’ll find my “mega good” definition of what identity is, supported by all the readings and writing exercises we have done in class. Now that you know what to expect lets get in to the post!

Identity is:

The combined representation of the key attributes and traits of a person or individual. 

This is the final definition that I came up with for identity but I didn’t do it alone. The first thing I did in class to come up with this definition was when ms Willemse gave me 1 minute to write up a definition from the stop of my head for identity. Obviously this was not the perfect identity definition and it needed some revision. This is the first definition I came up with, “Your Identity is the combination of all your key attributes and traits that make up the fact of being you or what you are”. As you can see its not worded nicely at all and is missing some key words and concepts. Luckily we were put in a group to work this out. I was grouped with Noah, Tom and Brenton and we all read our definitions aloud. We gave each other feedback and then worked as a team to make our ultra good definition. We used brentons definition as a base because I thought it was the closets to perfect. We then added all the other good aspects from all our definitions to come up with the definition I pasted above. I think that this definition really encompasses what identity is in a short and understandable set of words. Let me give a few examples.

one exercise that I think supports my definition and understanding of identity was the letter to myself. In this exercise I had to write a letter to my future self. When I finished writing my letter and gave it my final read through I noticed something interesting. Even though I didn’t really structure the letter to myself at all, I almost wrote things at random, I kept writing things that were similar to each other. I realized I just kept writing about the key attributes of myself. I wrote about skiing, biking, food, fitness and being happy. I realized that what I wrote about was my identity because I wrote about all the combined attributes that make me, me. This is almost exactly what my definition says about identity.

My identity GIF

Another exercise that I think supports my definition for identity is the bear story we read. In this story People make the assumption that the bear is a human instead of a bear because of a few judgements they made at the start. “A bear cant be in a factory”, “your just a silly old man who needs a shave”. Even though they only knew his location and appearance they used those things to determine the bears identity. This obviously didn’t work because the bear is a bear not a human. The bear didn’t believe that he was a human because he knew that those things weren’t the key attributes that made him who he was. Once he reminded him self of those key attributes the bear was confident he was a real bear. That definitely proves that identity is The combined representation of the key attributes and traits of a person or individual. Which is conveniently my definition!

The bear in the factory

in conclusion I think that the mega good definition I came up with defines identity nicely. I hope the evidence I gave you also convinced you that my definition is right and really showed you that I have a good understanding of what identity really is. Thanks for reading my blog post and be on the look for more posts all the time!