Who are you?

I know how you feel, it’s hard to understand. You feel like two different people, your feelings and mood are always in flux. Today, you’ll feel like an emotionless robot who doesn’t let anything get to them. Tomorrow, you’ll be an emotional wreck, you’ll be on-edge and your mood will be going from one end of the ‘spectrum’ to the other. You hate that you care too much about everything, you just want to feel at-peace for once. But let me tell you something, one day you’ll look back on all the shitty things you had to endure, and you’ll realize something very important about yourself. At the end of the day, you’ll realize how much stronger all of this made you, and even though you like to contain your emotions, you’ll learn to embrace them. You’ll learn that it’s okay to be emotional, but you will learn to not let every little thing get to you. One day, those two ‘people’ will come together as one and make something amazing.

Rationale: With both my portrait and flash fiction, I tried to focus on expressing how I feel like two different people. Focusing on the portrait, I used the black and white filter so that only two colors would be present, connecting to the ‘two different people” idea. Another edit I did was apply some blur to the picture, as to say that who I am as a person is "blurry". I also didn’t show my face in the picture so that it would reflect how I don’t have one “defined” face, so my face can just be up for interpretation to the reader as to which “person” it is. I also took the picture at the gym because when I’m emotional, that’s where I go to calm myself and release a lot of anger.

                Focusing on the flash fiction, I wrote it in the second-person. I wrote it as if I was a future version of myself giving advice to a past version of me when I am just trying to figure out who I am as a person in moments of self-reflection. I also touched a bit on my past and how it has shaped those two personalities, but I didn’t make it more of a focus because I thought it would take away from the main focus, that being the two personalities. 

                One-Pager: What causes your personality to be the way that it is, and is your personality “set in stone” or does it change? When it comes to these difficult questions, most people believe that over the course of your life your personality doesn’t change. They also believe that a large part of your personality is shaped by your parents, that you receive a lot of their traits. Personally, I believe our personalities are always changing, based on our life situations, and our surroundings. Essentially, I believe that our identities are shaped by our experiences in the past.

            After listening to a podcast in class, my belief was only strengthened. In a radio podcast titled, “The Personality Myth”, Alex Spiegel challenges the notion that our personalities don’t change. One of her main points, involves an inmate in prison: “One of the first prisoners she met was a man named Dan. He had the word "hatred" tattooed on the back of his neck. But as soon as she started talking to Dan, Cohen completely forgot about the tattoo. His personality didn't seem to have anything to do with hatred.” She included this story to show that over time, peoples identities can change, even people who have done horrible things in the past can re-shape themselves. Another argument that was key to persuading me, included a statement from a psychologist Lee Ross: “The point, Ross says, is that ultimately it's the situation, not the person, that determines things.”People are predictable, that's true," he says. "But they're predictable because we see them in situations where their behavior is constrained by that situation and the roles they're occupying and the relationships they have with us.” I think the fact that an esteemed psychologist agrees with her argument, really strengthened it as a whole and sold me on this idea that personalities are ever-changing.

          I used to believe, like most people now, that my personality and identity was “set in stone” and that it would be that way my entire life. But now that I have grown and experienced more and more things, I have looked in the mirror, so to speak, and realized that I have had many different identities. If things are tense at home with my family, I’m more than likely to be on-edge and emotional. But if my household is drama-free, (an unlikely scenario) then I’m more than likely going to be friendly and more laid-back and carefree, it all just depends on the situation. So after self-reflection, I have realized that the notion that our identity is just one defined thing that will never change, is something I don’t believe at all, because it doesn’t apply to anyone that I know, and most importantly, it doesn’t apply to me.