Identity? What does it really mean? When it comes down to it, Who Are You? These were the rather tough question, we were challenged with answering in this post. Identity, of course has a literal definition, but every persons identity is completely different. I’ve lived a different life to every other person on this planet, and that leaves me a different person to everyone else.

Here is the literal definition of identity:

Identity is the qualities, beliefs, personality, looks and/or expressions that make a person or group. 

However I believe identity stretches beyond even those categories. We’ve been talking about identity quite a lot in class recently, and as a group we’ve been able to come up with a much more widespread understanding of what our definition of identity is. Of course we started off with definitions similar to the one above, with maybe and extra thing or two. As we viewed each others definitions we started adding words and coming up with a much broader definition of identity. Because identity is so big. It’s made up of your race, like we learned in farewell Manzanar, your culture, and even your name, both of which we learned about in Esperanza’s story. Your identity is about your hobbies, relationships, values, worldview, upbringing, experiences, environment, and much more. Still I think one of the most important things to remember about identity is that it’s yours. We learned in “The Bear Who Wasn’t”that your identity can be influenced by others, but it’s truly about you and how you identify. Because even when everyone told the bear he wasn’t one, he deep down still always knew he was a bear. As you can see we’ve spent quite a lot of time looking at identity in class, and I think I’ve done my best to answer what is identity, but for this post we were also asked a second question, who are you?

It’s surprisingly hard to answer the question who are you. Truth is I’m a lot of things I’m a girl, a teen, a student. But those are just some of the most surface level things about me. As you can see in my GIF there’s many more things to me than that. I’m a climber, sister, daughter, friend, there’s a picture of some of my closest friends in my GIF image . I love the outdoors as you can see my photos of the boulder fields where I climb. I’m curious, and spend a lot of time reading and asking questions. I’m Irish, and the background photo on my GIF is a picture of the beach near my cabin in Ireland, and is where some of my favourite memories take place. But there is more to me then what one image can even explain, I have so many interests, memories, values, and beliefs that can’t be shown in one image. There are so many parts to one’s personality that can barley be put into words, let alone images. I still think I managed to succeed in capturing the more major parts of myself in one image. Still I thought this was a fascinating experience, because it’s not everyday where you try to answer the question  “Who Am I”, and it really made me realize how much I have to learn about myself. I asked my mom this question and she had a far easier time answering then myself, I suppose this comes from living longer, but I guess I’ll have to wait and see. 

Honestly I recommend going and asking your families this question, because it’s often surprising what people have to say when you put them on the spot, and I hope you enjoyed that little peek into my brain. Thanks for tuning into the first blog post of the year, and I’m sure I’ll see you soon!

Holly