Who am I? Who do I want to be? What will I be like in the next five or ten years? I don’t know about you, but those questions used to cross my mind quite often as a child. As a kid I was young, observant, and impressionable. I’d wonder what kind of person I would grow up to be. All I could think of at first was my dad. There was no better person than him to me when I was no older than thirteen. Then as I grew into myself I realized I just want to be someone worth remembering. A person I’m proud to be, and person I can be happy with. Isn’t that what any person would want for themselves?
Discovering my identity and being happy with myself was one of the most difficult challenges of my life, and I had to go through big steps to find my identity. I believe the biggest steps I had to take in discovering myself identity was the step to choose the people to keep in my life and the people I decided to not keep in my life. Another step is being able to learn from the negativity in my life, and being able to balance it into positivity. I think being able to open doors for the right things, and keeping barriers for the negative things had a big part in that. Lastly, the most important step to me was realizing the potential I have in myself. All these things alone took me years to figure out. After the age of twelve I had no idea what my life was in for.
My first step to keep certain people in or out of my life, may not have been the most difficult, but definitely a challenge. When I was twelve years old, I had my own little group of friends. I guess you could call us the rejects because no one wanted to be our friend except each other. Soon later, I quickly started to change, and I wasn’t acting or being a social outcast anymore. I was coming out of my shell, and fast. I realized I didn’t want to have people who would hold me back from coming out of my shell. By the time I was thirteen, I realized I had to make a big decision. I needed to think about who I wanted to keep in my life, and who I didn’t. Not with just friends, but family also. I was beginning to see true colors of some people who were dear to me, and one of them was my mom. “I don’t understand what it means, to have a mother who works inside and outside the home; I notice only the ways in which she disappoints me.” says Geeta Kothari in her autobiography You Are What You Eat. I can relate to that because my mom disappointed me a lot, too. She wasn’t the best of moms and she always found a way to break my heart. So you can see why this was such a challenge for me. But I gave myself a process of how to figure out who to keep around me, and who not to keep around me. I had to sit back, and think about what kind of people I shouldn’t have in my life.
Then, I needed to think about what sort of positivity certain people brought. How their negativity affected my life, and if I could deal with any of it. I didn’t want only positivity out of people, but negativity also. I need a little negativity to learn from, but mostly positivity to keep me going without too much stress. Then I had to think about which people had a big impact on the negativity and the positivity in my life. After I thought that through, and came to the conclusion of who needs to go and who needs to stay, no matter whether family or friend, I put it into action. I stopped talking to people who I thought had too much of a negative input on my life and kept those who made me feel positive. People who made me feel like life wasn’t so bad. I just needed to balance it out. Balance seemed to be my key to discovering myself, because the next step I took was balancing out the negativity I took into my life, and turning it into something positive.
Don’t confuse what I say with balancing negativity with positivity. I mean turning the negativity into positivity. To most people this seems odd, and probably unlikely to do. Fortunately, I disagree. It’s all about your point of view. Thankfully, my positive influences I’ve allowed to stay in my life helped me see that you can turn your negativity into positivity. “Attitudes, values, and behaviors play a potent role”, says Sally Satel in her story Addiction Doesn’t Discriminate. Even though she is talking about addiction, what she said is also true about how I balanced my negativity into positivity. Since I basically already did that with people in my life, it was time to do the same with situations in my life. Taking the bad situations and either learning from them, or being able to make them good. Don’t be afraid of bad situations because they are your best learning experience. Pain is your best teacher. With the good situations you would strictly learn from them. You obviously wouldn’t make them bad unless you want the added stress because life isn’t stressful enough for you. This process was a lot more difficult than choosing to keep or get rid of people. Here is a process I used and you could do the same, since it did me good that I needed.
First I think about what kind of situation I’m in. Is it bad, or is it good? If it’s good you need to remember it, and learn from it so you can keep doing it. For example, I was about fourteen or fifteen years old and in a situation where I was with a group of people, and I didn’t really know many of them. We were just hanging out and I started to just relax and be myself. I stopped being shy and started joining in the conversations. I realized I was a pretty funny and happy person, and other people reacted positively to my true self. After that experience, I learned to just be myself because that’s better and easier than trying to be anyone else. You can also think of this as opening your door to positivity and leaving up barriers to the negativity you don’t want in your life. Opening the positive doors allowed me to find a lot of potential in myself after a long time, and that brings me to my last step of discovering myself.
The last step I took to discovering my identity was the most difficult for me, the most important, and took the longest. This step was, and is still the ability to see the potential I have in myself. Being able to do that was a big process that took a lot of time from me. It’s one of the most inspiring things to me. To know and see the potential in yourself, in my opinion, just makes you want to persevere. Knowing I have what it takes and more to make what I want reality. That takes a lot for people to see in themselves. I know it did for me. To anyone who discovered that in themselves, hats off to you. I figured it out after having another talk with my dad. We used to communicate often. He always had some wise words to say to me. This one time though he really got into my head. I was barely passing school by the skin of my teeth and just passed my sixth grade. My dad knew I had more in me. He knew how smart I am and that I could do way better. He told me that, too. This conversation lasted for an hour or so. After that conversation, I lay down in bed that night, and just thought about what he said. “Study what is in front of your nose.” Said Natalie Goldberg in Be Specific. That’s basically what my dad was trying to tell me. I have so much potential in me, and I just had to look beyond my nose to find it, and I did. I am so thankful for my dad. If it wasn’t for all those talks, bonding, and caring, I don’t know where I would be today.
Closing the door to this process of discovering my identity, it was one of the most difficult challenges of my life, and I did go through big steps to find my identity. Such as realizing that I have figured out my identity, and being able to say that I know who I am. I’m confident, I’m driven, and I’m ambitious. I am me, myself, and I. I’m who I want to be, and I have no doubt that with the drive I have in myself that I will be someone worth remembering. I chose who to keep and get rid of in my life. I balanced my negativity into positivity. I took negative experiences and learned from them. I also still see the large amounts of my potential. All that’s left is to keep doing these steps until I am where I want to be in life. The only way to move forward is to know where you’ve been. I suppose that means I’m already a step ahead then, doesn’t it? Are you?
