I Was Thinking... Who Are You?

While we usually expect the question, “Who are you?” to be made by somebody you don’t know, it doesn’t have to. Who you are depends an awful lot on who is answering the question. The question can also be directed at ourselves. Although we are just one person, we can be different things to different people.
A person fulfills many distinct roles throughout their life. We all start out as a son or daughter. But even that identity of who we are, is often affected by our birth order. Are we the first born, the baby of the family or are we one of those middle children? Your relationship with your sibling also contributes to who you are. Do you have older or younger brothers or sisters or are you an only child? Who we are depends on our relationship with others.
As we progress through life, our own personality may determine who others think we are. Are we shy and subdued or are we energetic risk takers? Our own actions start to determine who we are in other people’s eyes.
Who we are is often shaped dramatically during our school years. Some may be recognized as a good student, an excellent musician, or a talented athlete. However, many of us start to wonder “Who we are?” because we don’t fit in any of those select groups. But like it or not, during those teen years, who we are gets defined by the judgements made by people around us.
Luckily, those determinations don’t have to be lifelong labels. Class reunions often reveal major changes in the expectations others had for us. It is a major reason why some people choose to attend, and others decide not to go to reunions.
As life moves on, we start taking on new roles with societal expectations. As we join the workforce, our identity is often associated with our job. We are a nurse, a police officer, a teacher, a trucker, a farmer, an electrician, an IBMer, or a waitress.
What we do becomes a part of who we are. How well you do your job is often how people conclude who you are. Your position in your profession also results in how you are perceived. Are you an employee, a supervisor, or the boss? But how you handle each of those positions has a lot to do with who people will say you are.
Along the way many of us become husbands and wives and then fathers or mothers. Each role adds a new dimension of who we are and the accompanying responsibilities. While it is pretty easy to obtain each of these new roles, how we perform them is a whole different matter. Some people would say getting married and having children should have at least the amount of training needed to get a driver’s license. We let people take on huge responsibilities of being a spouse or a parent with little or no training or experience.
For those of us who are retired, our identity is no longer connected to a job. We are past the child raising phase and what people thought of us in high school is no longer a concern. But we are often just as concerned as to who we are. Are we doing anything worthwhile? Am I valued? Do I still have more to give?
The question of who we are depends a lot on what we think is important. Is it the size of our bank account, the degrees we accumulated, how high of position we achieved or is it about how we treated the people we touched along the way? They are probably the best barometer that can tell you who you are.
Did You Ever Wonder? — Which side is the other side of the street?