It is a famous saying that “Someone’s opinion about you doesn’t have to become your identity”.
Recently, I have wondered how we get our identity. Do we receive it? Or do we create it? For most of my short life, I have been under the impression that what others say about you, is true. Convinced that other people knew something that I would never be able to understand about myself, their words rang true in my mind, opinions turning to facts. In this way, society creates your identity and you then receive it. This is not a bad thing, it can be helpful to get insight from others on who you are. It only becomes a bad thing when society refuses to acknowledge what you’ve decided is a part of your identity. So perhaps it’s the opposite, perhaps you create your identity and society is then the one who receives it. How they receive it, is not up to you.
We tend to see our identity through our position in society, our friends and family, the needs and desires of our bodies, and the emotional and intellectual expressions of our minds. For example, I might say ‘I am a student studying Mass Communication, I have three sisters and live in Pakistan. I rarely take the time to contemplate the real nature of our existence; to ask the question, “Who am I ?”
All these things pirouette in our mind when we are not aware of ourselves, Being self-aware is having a good knowledge and understanding of yourself including being aware of your own feelings, character, and sense of dressing. Practicing self-awareness is about learning to better understand why you feel, what you feel and why you behave in a particular way. Having this awareness gives you the opportunity and freedom to change things about yourself, enabling you to create a life that you do want not others to want from you. It is almost impossible to change and become self-accepting, if you are unsure of who you are then you can not decide your identity. Having clarity about who you are and what you want to give you the confidence to make changes.
it looks quite challenging but whenever one gains the confidence to take challenges and do changes and modifications by self and conquer the belief of ” What society thinks” then there we realize the real meaning of life and build our own identity from which the society will identify us because self-identity is one of the most important reasons living in the society.
Henry Wadsworth once said, “We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.”
