Who Will I Be?
And for that matter, who are you?
Do you know of the term “mental accounting?” It’s something I learned in one of my many finance courses. It means to separate money into different buckets rather than looking at all of the money together. It is something you are not supposed to do, because it makes you rigid and unable to think of your entire economic situation as a fluid whole.
In middle school, my best friend announced in the summer before seventh grade, “So, who do you think I should be this year? I’m considering preppy and rebel and I can’t decide.” When I tried to explain her conundrum to my mother, my mother said “How ridiculous. Why can’t she just be herself?
Fast forward to the advent of social media, and I think that we all started to do a type of mental accounting — not about money, but about our own personas. At one point had my art persona on Instagram and my writing persona on Twitter, and my “real” persona on Facebook (even though of course this was the curated me and not real at all.)
For what its worth, my seventh grade friend was on Facebook and actually appeared to be her actual, real self. How had she managed that? I certainly hadn’t. I had become a mental accounting junkie, a chameleon to such an extent that I wasn’t sure if there was a real me at all.
I’ll stop before I enter into an existential ramble.
As I sit here contemplating whether my piece might possibly be published on Medium, I argue with myself about who I should be. I want to be taken seriously, sure, but I want to be able to write about funny things too. Sometimes I might want to curse, or rant. Sometimes I am the person working on a novel. Other times I am the person writing sad love poetry. Occasionally I am even the person who just finished an MCU movie marathon with my kids and then wrote a love poem, based on it. And so on and so on.
And then I found the publication Reciprocal, which is a supportive community of writers and readers all willing to help one another. I feel like this is the place where I can toss my various hats into the ring, and try new things, and get helpful feedback.
Some authors I have already come to appreciation Reciprocal are:
Sahil Patel
Dr. Fatima Imam
Danielle Hestand
Please take a look at their work when you have a moment.
In the end I suppose I will just combine all of the writing people into one, into me, and give this all a try. After all these are indeed all me. Just as every one of us has multitudes within. Wish me luck…and good luck yourselves.
