MYTH: Finding Yourself
What do you want to be when you grow up? I remember being faced with the process of self-identification as early as grade school through this common question. This question planted into my mind the seed that one day, I will ‘be something’, and in order to ‘be something’, I needed to decide what that something was and move on an unwavering path toward it. That idea grew in me throughout high school, where in The United States you are forced to decide what you will do after high school graduation. At the age of eighteen, I quite literally I found myself trying to finalize my answer to ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’.
Growing up queer and trans in a hetero-normative, majority republican place, I was always thought of as an ‘other’. I felt a pressure to define what I was to people, and if I did not know ‘what I was’ I would find myself being comforted by some cishet person with the words ‘Don’t worry, you will figure it out’. So, I spent a majority of my life trying to discover my ‘true self’ in order to feel accepted and valued.
To me, identity has always been a moving target. When I was fourteen I met someone at a summer camp who became my first same-gendered love, so I came out as bisexual. A few years later, I decided that I was not a ‘bisexual who preferred girls’, but a lesbian, something my internalized homophobia did not want me to be. I felt so free when I accepted myself in this way, thinking I had it all figured out, but then there was pressure to stay in the ‘lesbian’ box. I could be either butch or femme, but not in between. I started to wonder, if I dated an AMAB person or a non-cis-femme would that mean that I could no longer identify as lesbian? What about if I stopped identifying as female? Suddenly the title which once granted me freedom no longer seemed to fit, and I was once again chasing the feeling of clarity and happiness. In these moments I would feel constricted, like a snake wrapping around a tree. I was the tree.
The older I get, the more I realize that there will never be a point where I have it all figured out, but rather I will continue to evolve. Even in points where I, hopefully, feel more settled later on in life, there may be moments where I will have to swap jobs, or retire, or have a kid, and need to rediscover parts of myself that I have forgotten or adapt to new ways of living. It is likely that at some point something unexpected will happen like the loss of a love one, or, relatably, a global pandemic ensues and I will change in adaptation. The path we are on is ongoing and we will never stop learning and evolving until the day we stop living. A myth is a widely held, but false, belief or idea (Oxford, 2021). The notion of ‘finding yourself’ is a myth I had been fed my entire life.
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