Good evening, it’s 10 p.m. in New York and I am drinking Concoction Juice (a non-algorithm-based rec I may share soon) and thinking about writing and identity and graduation. Here’s something that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while.
It was the beginning of summer 2023 and I was flirting with a cute CS major I met on Hinge who later won the nickname “Husband #1” in my household. Not one of my friends found this nickname, which I coined, as funny as I did. “It’s ironic,” I remember texting my unamused friends. Nonetheless, the nickname stuck.
In my last relationship, I left because I didn’t feel seen. And over the next few weeks, I waited impatiently for Husband #1 to counter this. I hoped he’d wake up and notice me, see me, for real. I painfully willed him to look at my wall which I had decorated a month before the end of the semester with strategically chosen knick knacks from my life; a library card from home, name tags from conferences, museum tickets, old receipts from local spots. It was all part of who I thought I wanted to be. The perfect mix of creative, professional, esoteric and sexy.
Even at the time, I felt that the Husband #1 scenario was foreshadowing something bigger than a bout of summertime madness. And I was right. It turned out to be an indicator of a growing identity crisis that began to show up in my writing.
My writing and identity are so closely tied that when one is impacted, it is almost always an indication that the other will follow suit. In high school, I stopped reading for fun and my words became longer and turned clinical. In college I read more articles, watched SATC and started chasing career success. One minute I was Bradshaw-witty, the next I was “professional” (whatever that means) and the next still I was back to cold and clinical. I remember being very concerned with legitimacy throughout it all and trying to present myself as a voice of authority.
This summer, I graduated. And that came with a huge blow to my identity. As I began the process of untethering myself from the student version of me, I started looking for myself in everything. In Oakland mountains, in ex-nemeses, in TikTokers and podcasts. I watched my reflection ripple in a California creek and tried to strategically resurrect it again, to reconstruct some version of the bedroom wall in my head. Am I a Silicon Valley Princess or So-Cal Sober Girl? A New England Corporate Baddie or give-no-fucks Independent East Coast Creative? Some of this language is inevitable. My theory is that it comes from a couple different places. I grew up in the U.S., which I think ferociously values individualism and on the internet, which adores a good identity trend. I studied marketing and PR in college. It’s encouraged, maybe even profitable, to package yourself as one such thing and sell that. It projects a false sense of security. And as a recent grad, I think I was desperately grasping for any form of security I could get my hands on. But those identities floating around in my head were not made to truly reflect myself; they were made to engage. If I had adopted any one of them, I feel like they would have turned me into content. I’m not ready to be content; I want to be a real, live girl. I’m not one thing or the other, I’m all of them all at once.
I used to write about myself so much. I mean, I’m writing about myself right now. At the same time, I think I’m finding that my favorite pieces are not exclusively about me but rather based on external interests or clearly connected to universal concepts. When I write about the process of getting off of social media or about people I meet or anything else external, my output feels more interesting and takes a bit of the pressure off to have everything figured out before I write, which is a huge inhibitor for me. I also like when my work is less black-and-white, less unabashedly certain because the world is uncertain and so am I at the moment. Selling certainty has gotten me far in the past, but it feels like a fool's errand for a girl in her early twenties with no clear idea of how all her parts best come together quite yet. I keep saying I need time to know who I am and forgetting that if I’m doing it right, I’ll probably keep working on it for the rest of my life.
With my early writing I feel like I was bringing my readers to my room like I did with Husband #1 and spilling out as much information as I could to ensure that I was seen in a particular way. And so I’m actively working on having my writing (and thinking) focus less directly on the self and more on the interactions I have, the people and experiences I encounter and the meaning I make of all of it. More about the world outside myself. I still want there to be intimacy because I think that’s one of the most beautiful parts of writing and probably what attracted me to self-coverage in the first place. But I no longer care for the excessive vulnerability or pressure to define myself that comes with it.
In the room I live in now, the walls are bare. They’ll fill up eventually. In the meantime, I’m still inviting you in and showing you interests that probably serve as reflections of different parts of myself. But it’s a conversation now and the goal is no longer to be seen (at least primarily) but rather for you, reader, to find some reflection of your own worldview and make some meaning for yourself.
This is so profoundly relatable to me it hits me right in the chest. I’ve never read a passage that I so heavily resonated with from beginning to end, right down to the mention of Oakland, California. I just wrote a very similar (less coherent) jumble of thoughts in my notes app but you’ve perfectly expressed the heart of what I was bouncing around in my notes. So cool
everybody say thank you ananya