Have an Identity Crisis? Go to University
For the first six years of my life, I lived in the diverse, multicultural city of London, a year later I found myself in a small town named Colchester full of people that did not look like me. I was shocked by the difference of environment I had entered. London is a big city filled with different cultures and ethnicities, on the other end of the spectrum is Colchester, the oldest recorded town populated with a couple hundred thousand people. Huge difference.
I remember walking down the halls of my new school seeing that no one looked like me. Out of the hundreds of little children running around the grounds of school, not one of them was a reflection of who I am. Through all my fourteen years of living in sweet, quiet Colchester, I was constantly considered and called white-washed, an Oreo (someone who was perceived to be white on the inside, black on the outside) , the names go on. One could say that this messed with my head and indeed it did. I carried out my life with the idea that I was ‘too white’ for my black friends and ‘too black’ for my white. I became conflicted with idea of who I was meant to be, shape-shifting my identity trying not to be too much of one race. But that there was where the problem lied. How can someone be too much of a race? An ethnicity cannot define who you are and how you act. I wish I knew that it does not make sense either, but that was not the case.
Secondary school then came and then college, finally a little exposure to other reflections of me. You would think that would help, right? But no, in fact, my knowledge of who I was started to decrease even more. Guess what, teenagers are meaner than kids. The constant battle continued and became more vigorous.
Fast forward a couple of years, I got into university. I was in a new environment. I was finally free from the people that would call me the negative names. I thought that this new area would help me change my confusions, that I would carry a new confidence but indeed that did not happen, at least not at first. I was still the girl from Colchester, the one who did not know who she was (black or an Oreo), always having to change the way she spoke, the way she acted, the way she looked depending on who she was around. You could call me an Oscar award winning actress with all this acting I was doing. Call me
You could say that the negative things that I had constantly heard about myself all those years finally took a toll on me more than I had imagined. I had realised that I didn’t know who I was, and up till now, I was just playing a role; adapting to who those around me expected me to be, and even though those people were around 94 miles away from me, it was almost as if they were walking with me every step of the way.
One could argue that this so called ‘identity crisis’ carried a lot of skill, I was basically a very talented juggler. I was juggling so many things which was the result of my battle. But we all know that a juggler eventually drops all that they are carrying when they become too tired. And that is actually what happened to me. I became tired of having to juggle of all of these characters that I had to let them go. No longer concerned about whether I’m acting ‘too white’ or ‘too black’.
Thanks to university I was able to find the joys in having diversity and being diverse. It showed me the uniqueness in owning and standing in your own identity despite what anyone does and says. It was simply the fact that no one cared or even took notice. After all these years of people being concerned with the way I portrayed myself, I was almost surprised to see that no one cared at all. I no longer had eyes watching on whether I said isn’t it or innit, or if I sounded too much like someone from Towie. Being in University gave me the ability to be me and not have to second guess myself. I was given the opportunity to be choose who I wanted to be without having to please other people.
Need to get out of an identity crisis… join a university, if not for education.
