Member-only story
Your Identity Is Not Fixed
Why you’re a new person every day.
I spend a huge amount of time asking myself who I am.
Why I am in this world. What I am supposed to be doing. What’s “my type of job” and what’s not. I try to pay attention to my feelings whenever I do something new, to find evidence of passion even though I know with 80–90% certainty what I want to be doing in this world.
In short, I am trying to figure myself out.
But recently, I started to doubt whether that’s possible.
Yes, I’ve heard from older people that “the process of figuring your life out” takes no less than a life. But nobody explains why.
Is it because a person is like a loaded gun — with many potentialities, which you discover as you age? Or is it because we’re too complex to define?
The right answer is that we’re not fixed identities. We change all the time.
Figuring who you are is like asking of a flying bee, “Where is it?”
One moment it’s here, buzzing in the air. Then you turn away, turn back, and it’s sitting on the coffee table. It’s constantly in motion.
People are like this. We’re not fixed identities. Instead, we’re long events.
