I remember the day that I realized that I didn’t know who I was. When someone asked me, “Tell me twenty facts about yourself,” I thought to myself, “No problem, this is easy.” But nothing seemed to come to mind. I literally had to think, “Who am I?” A question up until that point I have never asked myself. So, after about 10 minutes passed, I got to about five facts, none of which accurately described me as a person. All of them were very generic like, “My favorite color is blah,” and “I was born in blah,” — facts that didn’t express the depth of who I am.That is when it hit me, “You are authentic,” and from there, I made it my mission to find out who I was.

I always enjoy starting new things. It always excites me to be exposed to something different. So when I started college, I took it as an opportunity for me to learn more about myself. It's a new environment with new opportunities to find out who you are as a person, so needless to say, I joined everything, saying to myself, “I may like this.” Everyone thought I was crazy for joining so many things, but to me it was more about seeing if that was something I could be doing, because you will not wake up one day and say, “I like doing this," or "I like doing that.” You have to get out there and try it. So, that’s what I did, and to be completely honest, I had a pretty stressful year because of it; but, I would rather know that I did it rather than I wish I’d done it. With every club and every organization, I immediately went back to the question, “Who am I?” and, “Could you see yourself doing this?” and I learned a lot about myself this way.

As the year ended, I came home feeling different. I felt more like “me” (if that makes sense). It was because I used the opportunity of living on my own to learn who I was and to experience life to its fullest. So, I came to the realization that no one knows who they really are. It takes living life and going through experiences to realize who you actually are. It requires you to ask yourself, “Hey, is what I would do?” and it also takes genuine people around you to constantly reassure you of what you are doing and how it may be out of character for you. You need people around you to say, “Hey, you seem a little off today- is everything good?” So to the guy that asked me to tell him facts about myself here they are:

My name is Sharmond Tanner and:

I enjoy writing music and singing.

I have a dog named Bullet.

I dream of sharing my music with the world.

I enjoy talking about social issues.

I feel that men are held to rigid gender stereotypes.

I feel the women are overly sexualized in media, music, etc.

I feel like marriage is becoming obsolete.

I am sometimes scared to fail.

I believe everyone should be able to love who they want regardless of gender.

I feel black men and women are underappreciated.

I believe in God wholeheartedly.

I feel that, to be successful in anything, you must be fearless.

I am learning to be fearless.

I feel that I am sometimes held to a standard of perfection that doesn’t exist.

I feel that I must work 10 times harder because of my skin color.

I wonder how life would be if humans had tails.

I sometimes think my dog can talk.

I have a spot in my left eye.

I have a scar on my right foot.

I can now say that after all these years, that I am finally getting to know myself.