Figuring Out Who You Are
Our core identities go beyond our job, location, personality, and physical traits
Who are you? When faced with such a blunt question, it’s interesting how a person responds. What thoughts come to your mind to give a sense of your identity to a stranger? Usually, we default to the basics: our jobs, where we live, our relationship status, etc.
But if those common identity markers all change, have we lost our identity?
A few months ago, I faced this very scenario. Instead of “working in entertainment in Los Angeles” I was “working in venture capital in San Francisco.” At the age of 27, I was in a new place (that I knew little about) and in a new job (that I knew little about), feeling like a little bit of an impostor. At the same time, I no longer had the local group of close friends who knew me best that I had built up in LA over six years. It felt a bit like starting from scratch.
In today’s social-media-entrenched world, we constantly try to define our identities in 160-character bios and profiles on various social networks. Outside of that, there’s a multitude of ways we can frame our sense of self—from physical traits to nationality, religion, politics, and other group affiliations to self-assessed personality traits, beliefs, hobbies, who we associate with, and more.
