Who am I?
This is a question that is almost always on our minds. I personally believe that discovering your identity is very challenging, and is most difficult as a teen. We often don’t know what we’re doing and how to act, are thrust into situations where we feel like we need to adapt our identity in order to belong, and aren’t embracing who we really are because we’re afraid of how people will react.
When we first ask the question, “Who am I?”, we often are at a loss. To be fair, it’s a pretty big question to ask, and its not exactly something that can be figured out over a lunchtime by talking to your mates about it. It can take years. I myself still don’t really know who I am, and I ‘ve been thinking about the issue of identity for years. I now think the majority of my identity (as seen by others) is my appearance, my opinion, and how I voice it. All of these things I’ve had problems with, which I don’t think is that different from the rest of you. Image is one of the key issues we as teenagers have, which directly links to our identity, as we often feel like our image is apart of who we are, like I do. A few years back, I always seemed to dress in black and wear a LOT of eyeliner. Looking back, it didn’t really summon an accurate interpretation of who I was. I looked moody and annoyed, and not like someone you could talk. At first I wasn’t like that, but my personality soon moulded to fit my image. My appearance had formed my identity. In the 1990s movie, ‘Looking for Alibrandi’, Josie feels like she is defined by her heritage, and can’t escape it, so she denies it, which left her quite empty. From this both Josie’s and my experiences, I have learned that I need to be more honest and accepting in all aspects, in order to embrace my identity.
A common feeling that we get as teenagers is a feeling of loss, or being torn. Sometimes, we don’t know what to believe. I often feel torn between the