Who Are You?

Lauren Deaton

You are, as an individual, a unique sum of common parts. Your mother’s smile, your dad’s soft eyes, a joke your third grade best friend told you on the playground. You are a combination of all the things you have experienced, the people you have loved; you are a culmination of everything that has washed over you in your life. So then, who are you? How are you an individual amidst all of this?

It’s hard to distinguish yourself when you feel so similar to others–especially in college. There’s so many people with similar interests, majors, goals, and styles. It’s easy to become lost in the crowd. You can feel really fearful sometimes, scared that you’ll never find a way to stand out, or a way to make yourself appealing, or that you’ll ever seem exemplary or compensable, or worthy of hiring. That’s terrifying. 

You’re always told that so much of college is about finding yourself, and, while that in and of itself is a difficult idea, trying to “find yourself” amidst a group where you feel like you’re struggling to stand out is all the more complicated. Then there’s this seemingly unending amount of comparison; you think someone is doing something so much better than you–their paper is better, their outfit is cuter, they just seem to have more of themselves figured out. There’s this constant push and pull of wanting to be ‘good’, wanting to stand out, and just not knowing how to. 

When trying to figure out who you are, what makes you different. The answer is one thing: combination. You reflect so much of your world around you; your past, your loves, your everything–and so does everyone else around you. Each person is a unique sum of things. You may have a similar experience to someone, a similar aesthetic, but no one has the exact sum of experiences and inspirations as you. No one else has ever stood directly in your shoes, seen directly from your eyes–they may have come close, they may have stood directly next to you, but they still cannot be you. 

They cannot be you. 

There is no one who can offer exactly what you have. There will be people who offer similar things, but no one can offer exactly what you have. You have a unique gift and wonder to offer this world, and the pieces of you that you see in others are a part of that beauty. Similarity and imitation can be an act of love. Love and attention work together–to see someone with similar style, with love for a similar topic, is to be reminded of all the people who have loved that before you, all the people who have been echoed in love and in passion. To have a similarity is to be reminded of a legacy of love and celebration. And to have that similarity is to recognize that that similarity is piled on a layer of similarities that you contain within different categories to make a singular unique person. It’s all kind of paradoxical–you are you because of similarities, and that makes you different. 

Edited by Teagan Chandler & Elisabeth Kay