“Who am I?”
It’s a question that seems so simple, yet in reality is one of the most difficult to answer. At age five, if someone asked you who you were, you’d proudly state your name. If someone were to ask you that same question at age sixteen or twenty, you’d be a little more hesitant and unsure of your answer. Nowadays that question comes with so many additional connotations. What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you believe in? How are you going to go about your daily life? What makes you you?
The problem is that as you mature, you enter a time in your life when you don’t really know. The time between middle school and the end of college, and likely some time after that, is so incredibly turbulent and constantly changing that you can’t really get a grip on yourself or the path you want your life to go down. The person you are at age fourteen is so different from the person you are at age eighteen, and even if you feel confident about who you are and what you want to do, chances are you’ll feel completely different about the situation in two years.
The struggle is magnified by large changes in life, such as a move or graduating high school and going to college. Everything you once knew and everything you were familiar with are taken away and replaced by something new. All of a sudden you realize that you might not be who you thought you were, and everything you were interested in and loved doing don’t seem all that fun anymore. What is it? Is it maturity? The newfound lack of parental guidance? A new set of people with different expectations for you? Or are you actually changing as a person?
The realization that you might not know exactly who you are or who you will be can be terrifying. For the longest times in our lives, we didn’t think about it. And though changing as a person can be scary, for millennials, change is actually the status quo. In our lifetimes, we’ve been living with change at lightning speed. Computers, phones, gaming systems, and so much more have all gone through huge changes since we’ve been alive. When we were born, the iPhone didn’t even exist yet. If technology can advance that fast, it only makes sense that we as people can, too. As the world changes, beliefs change, and we learn more, changing as a person is inevitable.
When you consider how far society has come in the last fifteen to twenty years, changing as a person doesn’t seem like all that much. Whether you’re discovering your sexuality, gender, personality, interests, or whatever part of you, change is natural. Change is always going to happen. The real struggle is knowing whether or not a change or stage in your life will be permanent. And the answer is likely not. You’re always going to change and mature, and while that may be a daunting thought, it’s inevitable.
