My Identity Crisis

(??? - source)

This has been a recurring theme in my life lately. For reasons that are nothing short of a reflection of me, it has been a difficult and yet relieving transition.

We all experience hurt. Anyone that tells you that pain is for the weak clearly has no passion. But we've all heard sentiments that go along the lines of "without the rain, we can't appreciate the sunshine" or "you don't know what it feels like to succeed if you've never failed". Similarly, you won't know what happiness is without having suffered from some form of pain in your past. It builds character, and, to quote my Psych prof, each transaction with the universe leads you in some direction or another and it impacts you in a very profound way, whether or not you realize it.

Without going too deep into the philosophical stuff, I wanted to touch on this issue of "identity". 

My later elementary and high school years were marked with aspects of inner battles with myself due to the climate that I was in. High school, as I quickly learned, was kind of like TV but less flashy and could stand to be more vicious than the plastic cheerleaders that paraded around fictional high school grounds. And while I had a solid group of friends to lean on, I had always struggled with trust and transparency. I look back now in life and regret the many times that I trusted people that I shouldn't have, and all the times I refrained from trusting those that I truly trusted. 

I've always had trust issues. My trust issues ultimately made me close in on myself at multiple points of my adolescent life, and it led me down some scary paths and roads that sometimes I wish I didn't take. Most notably, depression, disordered eating, and attempts at suicide.

But it wasn't until recently that I noticed myself having incredibly meaningful discussions about life, choices, and identity. At the beginning of this semester I started taking a faith study with 9 other girls on what it truly means to be a Catholic. We are called to evangelize and to bring all people closer to God. It reminded me that despite the bumpy road that I may have had growing up, God has destined something truly great for each one of His children - all 7 billion of them and counting.

Talking in great depth with friends about our life stories to date gave me a new found appreciation for choice and identity. As one friend described to me, "There are choices I made, some fantastic and some poor, but I wouldn't trade a single one of them. All of them make up me, and I wouldn't be the me I am right now if I had chosen otherwise." Some people had lamented poor choices in their past, wishing that they could turn back time and do it all over again. Others stood back in awe of their good and not so good choices, realizing that each tiny detail had amounted to who they currently are. Regardless of what end of the spectrum you identify with, I think we can all agree that our lives are made up of choices that we have made, meaning that even something as small as choosing to smile in the morning can impact your life path in some way or another.

Our identity is so important - it is who we portray ourselves to be in the world, and I cannot emphasize enough the importance of not hiding who you are. I remember high school being a tricky time for this: I hid so much of my identity to different people, playing different characters in different social circles. But none of those pictures fully showed who I was: it was different parts of the puzzle complete with some noticeable gaps. And I'm not sure when in my life I decided to forgo what people thought in a "take it or leave it" attitude, but being myself - all of myself - never felt so liberating.

I don't apologize for being a woman. I don't apologize for being Chinese. I don't apologize for being Catholic. I don't apologize for identifying as someone with depression or someone who has had suicidal thoughts. I no longer deny my past, my beliefs, and my culture. And I think that no one should have to conceal who they truly are.

I'm not telling all of us to go out and be self-righteous and pompous people. Embrace yourself and your identity; don't apologize for it. Accept the choices that you made in the past and forgive yourself for the difficult ones you had to make. Love yourself and treat yourself with respect.

Your identity is important, and it is special. Don't let your fear of conformity get in the way of your true identity.

x R

We're Not Breaking Up, Just Changing it Up

Put quite simply, life happens. Things change, people grow up, and life moves on whether you are ready for it or not. And the great thing is, even though I don't have any clue what my life is going to be like or what tomorrow brings, I have to keep reminding myself that that is okay.

It's crucial to set goals, have some blueprint of a plan and ambition so that you aren't wasting time and going forth into life bravely but blindly. Planning ahead will pay off, I promise - but the one thing I need to change is rigidity.

Change sucks for me. Failure is even worse than that. And though I have failed time and time again, I constantly get caught off guard, despite the fact that I've come to this same conclusion many times before.

In my most recent post (that is not so recent anymore, I'm sorry!!!) I discussed in brief my current relationship with music and piano in particular. I had plenty of great ambitions and a solid timeline that I wanted to meet. But most of all, like many narcissistic beings, I wanted something to show my worth. I needed something that would validate all of my hard work - something physical, something tangible, something that screamed "You did it and you rock".

In piano and some other instruments, that gold standard came with an Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Music  diploma. Since I began taking exams at the age of 9, I was dead set on one day walking across the stage in the purple regalia to get that diploma. At that point I was also set on spending the rest of my life doing music. Music was something I loved, and I wanted nothing more than to teach for the rest of my life.

Life changed, things happened, and I began to see that something was not quite right. I loved music and still do, don't get me wrong. But other things began to crop up that weren't really playing to my favour. After an incredibly awful experience at a festival, I sat back from it weeks later and thought about it. I thought about it a lot. 

We can all assume that after that experience, it didn't make piano attractive for me at all. And I know, we all fall down sometimes and we have accept the failures before we can move onto the triumphs. But in other aspects of life, I got the failure part and I worked hard to make sure that those failures didn't repeat themselves. With piano, I stopped. I felt like I was hitting a brick wall and I didn't know what I wanted anymore.

It wasn't until very recently that I radically changed the course of my path, with a story too technical and long to go in depth here. It hurt so much to step back and humbly accept the fact that what I had been telling people - the goal that I had advertised for years - had to be revised. I felt like I let so many people down, including myself, and that I couldn't go out into the world with the confidence that I once had. Because if this is what happens with something that was such an integral part of my life, what's going to happen when I don't find myself behind the news desk?

This aspect of humility was something that my parents told me time and time again when I was fighting to figure out what I wanted to do with my relationship with piano. And of course, parents are ALWAYS right. But today the truth that my parents had told me all along was brought to me in a different way, and I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.

There was a guy that I knew that made his mind up about a lot of things, and his measure of success was dependent on achieving certain "checkpoints". For him, his gold standard was medical school. He worked tirelessly all throughout high school to get high grades, and for a while, that was all he focused on. He was a bit cocky about things too, telling his ambition to everyone and looking down on other people and what he presumed to be "lesser achievements".

Today, however, I saw a different side of him, admittedly the first time that I ever felt sympathy towards him. He confided in me the trouble he was having: his classes were mentally and physically draining, he wasn't pulling the marks he wanted, he was having trouble sleeping and he even cried to his parents about it. He then said with some uncharacteristic resignation that he might just scrap med school altogether. And despite the bias that I had held about this guy for the longest time, for once in my life, I felt sad for him. I felt sympathetic, and on some weird level, I related to him. His struggle was my struggle, and suddenly the universe shifted.

Like at mentioned at the outset, goals are important to guide your focus and give you motivation. But just the way that trips sometimes go awry and performances bring up surprises, you need to learn to go with it and improvise: don't throw your whole plan out the window and start again from square one, but also remember to never be afraid to fail and make a change.

This is a lifelong concept that I know that I will struggle to contend with when something else crops up in the future. Our plans are not ours alone - they're His.

x R