Existential questions like “who am I?” or “why am I here?” can be answered through one's discovery of identity. These questions help change people’s opinions on their own selves and leads to growth and development. Understanding of one’s self comes to be once self-awareness questions have begun to be answered. Some portions of the answers to these questions stay constant throughout a person’s life, and some change in the duration as identity is constantly changing.
Identity is partially defined as the way someone chooses to portray themselves. There is an infinite amount of time before the start of someone’s life, and an infinite amount of time after their life ends. Every person is unaware of both of these time spans making their lives hold as much importance as people choose to give it to. As life is finite, people have the freedom to give as much or as little importance to the ways in which they portray themselves. It is up to the people’s own selves to give or not give meaning to who they are as a person and assign labels.
In addition to how they choose to portray themselves, society ultimately plays a role in the formation of identity. In the way that something an artist creates begins as a piece of work, but transforms into “art” once the public validates it, identity also requires validation from society. People and artists can put out whatever they have molded into the world, whether it is art or their personality and identity, but what matters is how society perceives them as. Simply stating “I am an actor,” or “I like to dance,” would not be part of someone’s identity until society recognizes it as such and accepts it. Society influences people’s opinions of themselves just as people’s opinions influences what society accepts and society’s opinions of others.
In culmination, identity is the combination of what facets of someone’s identity people make available to society as well how society perceives it. There is a duality to identity as it is not only what people self-express themselves as but also what connotation society receives from people’s identity. While it is a choice made from predetermined options and brackets of adjectives, the choice of making aspects of identity important or trivial remains up to the individual.
