Who We Are

Social constructs are simultaneously meaningless and valid. They are based in the insignificant and intangible, but the reality they create can be momentous and definite.

The only consistent and observable factors we have for time are the cycle of the earth rotating on its axis and the cycle of the earth orbiting the sun. We have arbitrarily decided at what point in that orbit we start and end the year. We have arbitrarily decided how to break down a day into different measures, hours and minutes and seconds. The same quantity of time can feel fast or slow depending on what happens in those moments and how we experience it. And yet time passes, and these measurements that we have created as humans dictate our behaviours, our routines and how we relate to each other. New year may be a social construct, and yet that shared feeling we all have in our little pockets of society are so similar they become significant to our yearly experience.

Money was invented to create some sort of consistency in how we place value on the things we really need in life so that we can more easily make transactions between each other. And yet what makes you poor in one country can make you rich in another. We decide whether a nurse should be paid more or less than a footballer, or whether we should pay more for a tank of petrol or a pair of shoes. Those decisions affect almost every decision we make in life as individuals and collectively as people.

Humans are social creatures and everything that we experience changes the way our brain functions and how we think, behave and feel. So when somebody denies your experience of racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, when they say that they don’t see colour or it’s feminism gone mad or they can do everything I can do, when they say it is all a thing of the past, they are invalidating your very being. Not respecting all the extra effort you have to put in just to live your life. Not allowing you to be the multifaceted person that we all have the right to be.

Just because identity is a social construct, it is still very real and very important and although it can change at any time we can’t ignore its permanence. It is up to us all to acknowledge and grow from our social foundations.