You are not your culture.
Your culture is a big part of who you are, but it is not everything.
When we are moving overseas, we are often defined by ‘where we are ‘from’. People speak about us as “that German guy”, or “that French woman”.
It is somehow understandable that other people reduce our identity to the easiest possible identifying marker when they talk about us. The strange thing is, though, is that we do it about ourselves, too.
When we are introducing ourselves to somebody in a foreign country, one of the first things we are saying about ourselves often is the country where we are coming from.
How is that relevant?
When you are in your own country, do you tell everybody which country you are coming from? Do you go around telling everybody: “hello, I am Tim from Germany. Hello, I am Tim… from Germany. Hello! I am Tim. From Germany“… ?
Yes, your nationality is an easy identity marker.
But isn’t it much more interesting to see who you really are, deep inside of yourself?
When we are focusing on our nationality as an identity marker, it puts emphasis on the cultural values and beliefs that have been ingrained into us since our childhood.
The keywords here are “the cultural values and beliefs that have been ingrained” — written in passive voice.
You have acquired a large number of values, beliefs, assumptions and behavioral patterns during the time that you were growing up.
They have developed through imitation of the people and institutions around you and the things you’ve learned through interactions with people and other cultural objects.
Most people have never made an active choice to learn these things. That has automatically developed as they were living their lives.
What are the characteristics that really define you as a person?
All learning is cultural. The difference lies in conscious versus unconscious learning.
I admit that anything we learn, and therefore anything we believe in, is cultural in nature. All of our knowledge has been acquired through interaction either with other people or any other cultural objects such as books, videos, and songs.
From that perspective, it would make sense to say that you are a result of your culture.
After all, what lies in our history is not something that we can influence. Neither can we erase any of the factors that are influencing who we have become from our memories.
But we can make a choice.
We can choose…
… whether or not we want to continue to believe in some of the things that have been ‘told’ to us.
… which aspects of our identity are most important to us and which one’s we want to be defined by.
… when we want to adapt a new set of beliefs that is more suitable to our current situation in life.
… to expose ourselves to certain environments that are more conducive to helping us become who we want to be.
When we are making an active choice around questions like these, we are moving our learning process away from the unconscious-, towards the conscious level.
In other words: we ourselves choose we are and and who we are going to become.
Don’t let yourself be defined by who you once were
There are two extremes which both are easy to fall into, and which both are dangerous for our development:
- letting ourselves be defined by who we once were
- completely denying where we came from
If we are too strongly focused on our roots, we are blocking out change, adaptation and learning.
If we are trying to deny our roots — where we were coming from and the lessons we have learned in the past — we only make ourselves unhappy and destroy ourselves internally.
Our memories, our history, and our cultural lessons, they are central in shaping our identity of who we are now.
We should be aware of our history and the memories that have shaped us, acknowledge them and be proud of them. But we shouldn’t let them limit who we are in the process of becoming.
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