I believe the most important questions anyone can answer for themselves are: Who am I? What is my identity?
In the past 12 months, I made considerable progress in figuring this out. It was lazy to believe what my culture, family, society and friends said I was. My identity was like a collage, often marred with conflicting values and perspectives on life. But now, many things have come together. It has meant that I have gone against some of my cultural pre-dispositions and disagreed with the views of people that I respect (and I still do). It has also meant that I have severed few friendships that undermined or mocked my identity. It has not been easy but I was not going to let anyone bring me down or tell me who I am. Never again.
In 2012, I am looking out for myself and soaking in my identity. I have had years where I focussed on making educational progress, career progress and even emotional progress. These were all “targets” that gave me something to run after.
I was like a dog with a bone.
Don’t misunderstand. Goals are great and I was tempted to draw up a list of things to do in the new year. But I know myself – goals just give me something to obsess over. So I will start 2012 without a list. A list may very well emerge later in the year but it will be one created on-the-go, a sort of look-see approach. The idea is that I don’t want to start “running” from the onset. I want to relax more and enjoy being me, sort of be the “me” this photo depicts all the time.
This doesn’t mean I’ll stay home all day watching TV and eating supermarket cupcakes (and there’s nothing wrong with supermarket cupcakes). It simply means: I will be confident in my identity, easily deifying when to pursue and when to let go.
This year has been extremely rewarding. I didn’t realise it at the time but I spent a lot of my blog-time saying that I have been hard on myself and that I want to change. Well, that’s done now and I’m looking forward to having a different conversation in the coming year. I’m enthused and bursting with new ideas for the coming year. I suppose that’s what it feels like to have an identity that I can most definitely live with.
Happy new year!
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