Who Are You?

How would you answer that question?

I've been thinking a lot about the question, who are you? Besides the obvious answer of your name, how would you answer?

There's a lot of different ways that people might respond to that question. It might be your job, it might be details about your identity. It might be your relationship to other people. It's also probably contextual. It might be why you're in the room. It might be telling the person that's asking who you have in common.

I've been fascinated by this idea of who you are actually meaning different things to different people or in different contexts. I see it happening in conversations around identities, specifically queer and trans identities, where the phrase “just be yourself,” has actually come to have two meanings. In recent years we’ve seen agitators using the phrase “just be yourself,“ as a way of invalidating trans identity because they think that your “self” is the circumstance that you were assigned at birth. However, usually when we talk about people being themselves, we talk about them moving away from expectation, moving out of given circumstance. Building an identity and a life for themselves, not for other people. Suddenly they forget the moral of every coming of age movie they’ve ever seen and think that who you are is who they see or what they want.

If I think about who I am, I'm not thinking about this body. I'm thinking of a person living in and using this body as a vessel. You can call it a spirit or whatever. I don't really know what I believe about how I'm here. But if I think about who I am, I don't think about this flesh and bones. I think about my thoughts, my experiences, my interactions. Who I am is not necessarily what I am.

Your body is yours, but your body is not you.

Some people think that your body is you, and some people think that your body is yours to use and navigate the world with.

Who am I? I'm a storyteller. I'm an artist. I'm an educator. I'm a sister. I'm a friend. There's a lot of things that describe me that don't describe this body. Who I am is not determined by the body that I live in. Obviously, a lot of my experiences are influenced by that. As a white person who was very thin for most of my life, there's immense privilege that comes with who I am being in this body. But for me to not be who I am is to give in to expectation, to give in to circumstance, and what other people want from me.

Perhaps it's on purpose. They are purposely changing the phrase, “be who you are.” They're purposely trying to flip that narrative and make it mean, “be who I want you to be.” Actually, that's probably the case. But I've been thinking about this as a framework that has a lot of larger implications. Think about it with politics instead. if you love this country, does that mean you love the people who exist and make up this country? Or does that mean you love and support the government and the surveillance state that we're living under? Are you supporting structure and the status quo, or supporting the evolving, growing, changing needs of people? There’s not a hug leap between these examples, because in both situations we’re asking individual people to not be unique, to not have their own personalities, identities, and lives.

People love to say, “Just be yourself.” But then if that self, that person, is queer or in any way disrupting their idea of what a person “should” be, then it just turns into, “just be yourself. Oh, not like that.” Because they don't actually mean be yourself. They mean, be my idea. They mean make me comfortable. That's not fair.

So who are you? Are you the structure, or are you the feeling? Are you the body, or are you the mind? Or are you a combination? I know I squarely think of myself as being in this body. I don't think of me being this body. Your body is yours, but your body is not you. It is yours to decorate and celebrate and live in, however is most comfortable for you. For some people, that means making other people comfortable. But hopefully, that doesn't come at the expense of your own comfort. And hopefully your joy can get prioritized, too.