Do You Know Who You Are?

For quite some time, this introspection has caused me to feel like I am having a major identity crisis. It’s not that I feel like I'm the wrong person in my skin; I don't feel like I'm pretending to be someone I'm not. Rather, I think being led to believe things that are untrue, and mixed with a lack of belonging and desperation to be liked is causing this existential crisis. I feel like I know what I believe in and stand for, but I'm second-guessing a lot of the things I like, and why it is that I like them at all, and how much of this contributes to… me.

At the forefront of all of this is who I am now realizing is an unreliable narrator: my mom. It goes without saying that I love her to death, but her excessive love for me is the underlying cause for part of my identity crisis. My mother, in her attempt to keep me with her, lied to me about how "awful" my father is. I agree with her that his lack of presence and financial support made our life very difficult. And, though I was led to believe it was indicative of his inability to love me, hearing his side has shown me that that was not the case. I also felt "othered" growing up because of my skin. I’m mixed, and this meant feeling other/othered to both Black and white people while growing up in a predominantly white community. I never felt the full effects of racism and had a hard time identifying as Black simply because my colour was the first thing you noticed; but I clearly wasn't only white, and couldn't side with a community that was still treating me with micro-aggressions because of my skin tone. To add to my otherness was the layer of poverty which always set me apart, and though my mother did more than her best to try to give me everything, I was still bullied for it. I had no real sense of belonging in friend groups either. Though I had friends, I was never allowed to hang out with them as much as I wanted; it felt like I was prevented from having normal childhood experiences with friends. These friendships, while they mattered a ton to me, never really helped me with a sense of belonging because they never became fully developed until I was a young adult. And it was painful, because I would have done or said anything to be liked, or accepted into the clique. All of this was caused by my mom's need to have a friend for herself, as I've already said on this blog. Her constant reliving of her "glory days" has caused me to be her storyteller as well. It came to such extremes that I can recite back her stories from the 70's as if I was there. This lack of belonging caused me to seek out easy, and often negative, attention from men. Moreover, in my attempts to be liked I would dive headlong into the passions of these men to seem more likeable, more agreeable, someone they could connect with. During this pandemic I decided to play every song in my iCloud to see if it 'sparked joy' and I came to realize just how many bands and songs I became interested in because of a man. And while it is no sin to expand your interests and horizons, it made me start to question what things I genuinely like and find interesting because of me. That is what started this existential crisis, this dissonance between what I like for myself, and what I like because I wanted to make myself likeable. This part of who I am (becoming so enamoured with someone I obsess over the things they like) transformed into me being obsessed and going full-tilt with anything I found interesting. My obsession with One Direction came from a need to belong to a group, mixed with the escapism I felt when writing FanFictions. Even the line Do You Know Who You Are is a dig at being a Harry Styles stan and how integral that part of my identity is to me. I then transferred this obsessive nature to the band Hedley because they were closer regionally, and their attention seemed obtainable, and… well. Readers of this blog know how that ended. I am still this way. For example, I enjoy Good Mythical Morning on YouTube and have researched most of their staff on LinkedIn simply because I need to know The Most about it, be The Best Fan, and flex an encyclopediac knowledge of the company. And for what? To impress any other fans I may meet, or catch the staff’s attention on Twitter or IG by referencing some minor detail catalogued in my brain? This obsessiveness and willingness to do anything to be liked is what catapulted me into substance abuse and an abusive relationship. All of these self-realizations came to a head yesterday when my father told me, "Everything about you screams needing to be liked." I feel pretty crushed, to be quite honest. I have spent all day realizing that I'm loud because I want to be noticed. I do my makeup and dress well not only to be presentable, but to be complimented and get attention. That a lot of my interests are others’ interests, and at the end of the day I don't know who I really am. I will still do quite a bit to be liked by those I feel I want attention from. I have become a jack-of-all-trades (educated, party girl, well-versed in a lot of cultural things, willing to learn about others' interests to be liked) but a master of none. I feel like my entire identity may be made up of fragments of other people, glued together by trauma, to create someone I am not. My performative nature in front of my father is probably because I want to be seen with him. I have never had that moment of Dad dropping me off at school, or having people be aware of my relationship with my dad, if anything my mother and I were very vocal about him being absent and now I want desperately for the world to know I was wrong. I also equate seeing him to summer vacations, to fun, and it’s hard for me not to be over-the-top excited at the smallest modicum of attention from him. I also have only been living as this version of myself for 7 months. I need to be compassionate with myself, and learn who I want to be. I already knew I was doing things to be liked, but (slowly) I have become quieter at work: private about certain aspects, but remaining opinionated about issues that truly matter to me. Less loud-about-my-adventures-over-the-weekend, and more loud about human rights and the things I believe matters. If I need to feel seen at least I am being a mental health advocate, a speaker on my traumas, normalizing addictions. I know what I like about myself, but I am still working on the things I don't. Little by little, day by day. Cropberry