Nicole Snyder Rough Draft
Nicole Snyder
CPLT Rough Draft
February 10, 2012
Identity Crisis
“Who are you?” is one of the most common questions I’m asked and also one of the most difficult to answer. In every facet of my life, it feels like I’m required to identify myself and it’s something that I think I have always struggled with. I remember on the first day of my sophomore year of high school, my English teacher asked us to write an essay describing ourselves. Even though I ranted on for about five pages, I still titled it “Orange Peel” because I couldn’t help but feel that that essay barely scratched the surface of who I was. When I prepare for interviews, I know I will inevitably be asked what makes me stand out and I’ve never been sure how to put it in words; I almost want to respond that I can’t describe myself, they’ll just have to spend a lifetime getting to know me. These days, it feels like an even weightier question. Law school admissions are drawing closer and I have think about how I’m going to define myself in my personal statement. I’m approaching the point in my life where I’m entering the world to begin my real life. You’d think I’d be certain of my identity at this point.
But the fact is I’m not and the scary part is that I’m not sure I’ll ever completely know. My identity seems to be constantly changing – as I think most people’s do –, shaped by my day-to-day experiences and thoughts. There may be moments when I’m certain of who I am, but they are always interchanged with times when I don’t have the slightest idea.
This fluidity of identity seems to be reflected in a lot of the books that we’ve read in class so far. In Zeely, Elizabeth is pleased with the fact that who she is can change so easily. She thinks to herself that “alone, she could be anybody at all” (Hamilton, 8). Hamilton italicized the “be” to stress that, for Elizabeth at least, her change of identity is not make-believe, but a reality. Hamilton further emphasizes this by referring to Elizabeth as Geeder the moment she changes her name, pointing to her complete transformation.
I also connected with Lyra’s loss of self in The Amber Spyglass. Lyra seems to define herself by her ability to tell lies and read the alethiometer. By the end of the story, she has lost both of these skills. When she loses the first, I could feel her pain ringing out from the page when she cries “I can’t do it anymore – I can’t do it! I can’t tell lies!” (Pullman, 263). Lyra’s words, fragmented by dashes such that they aren’t even whole sentences, convey her utter despair. In comparison, the loss of her ability to read the alethiometer is even more gut-wrenching and it was the part that struck me the most.
She gulped and nodded and angrily brushed her wrist across her eyes, and took several deep breaths; but [Will] could see she was too tense, and he put his hands on her shoulders and then felt her trembling and hugged her tight. She pulled back and tried again. Once more she gazed at the symbols, once more she turned the wheels, but those invisible ladders of meaning down which she’d stepped with such ease and confidence weren’t there. She didn’t know what any of the symbols meant … She sobbed with desperate abandon (Pullman, 438-9).
To me, it seems like this is the point in the novel where Lyra really grows up. As a child, she was able to have the innocent and carefree nature to read the alethiometer; she could move with confidence because she was still in some way sheltered from the world. Once she grew up and became more knowledgeable, she lost her ability to blindly rely on the compass to point her in the right direction. If the compass is a sort of parental figure, then Lyra is the child who must leave home.
I interpret Pullman and Hamilton’s message to be that everyone has to question who they are and that it’s a part of growing up. Granted, I’m 20, not 12, but I think the comparison is still relevant. I have been wondering who I am since I was about 12 and though I have yet to find an answer, I’m still working at it, similarly to how Lyra dedicates herself to learning how to use the compass again. Also like Lyra, I feel as though parts of who I was are slipping away from my fingertips. My life feels so much more complicated and confusing, and I find myself yearning for how things were. Looking back on my life, even June 2011 felt simpler than February 2012 does. I went through a major break up in September, and since severing that part of me, I’ve had trouble figuring out who I am without Elliot. I find myself breaking out in bouts of rebellion, whether it’s partying too hard for too long, reneging on my schoolwork, riding on motorcycles, cutting my hair short, or considering getting a tattoo. I sometimes look in the mirror and think to myself “this is not who you were” and wonder what I’ve turned into, as though I’m some foreign animal that’s too dangerous to handle. Elliot was my alethiometer and I had been so dependent on him for so long that once he no longer fit, I wasn’t sure where I stood, and I’m still not quite sure.
One of the other issues that I struggle with in defining who I am is the criterion by which I’m supposed to do so. In the exercise in class, I not only focused on how I see myself, but also on how others can perceive me differently from that, and I questioned whether the latter should be relevant. My personal answer to that is that it should. It must not overpower you completely, much as it did to the Stepmother in many versions of Snow White, but society is a mirror and it is important, for me at least, to have a sense of what that mirror sees and to what extent it matches up with my own perceptions of myself. There have been times, I’ll admit, when I’ve toed the line that the Wicked Stepmother fell over. I sometimes get so jumbled in my own thoughts that I depend on others to tell me who I am and what I feel. I rationalize that from an outside perspective, they must have a clearer view of the truth that I cannot see. Currently I’m trying to stop that from happening often and reminding myself that they don’t know everything. A mirror can show me the surface – the orange peel, if you will – but it cannot dig within me to my core. Only I can do that. In a way, that is what I’m attempting to do throughout my spiritual journey.
As daunting as all of this inner turmoil might sound, I don’t think that I’ve regressed on the path of my journey. I suppose it’s just that I’ve never seen that path as straight to begin with. I expect to struggle with this question of who I am probably for the rest of my life. Part of me almost doesn’t want to find the answer. I think that if I find one that I am happy with for too long, then that means that my identity has been set in stone. While not being sure of who I am is nerve-wrecking and makes me feel like a baby floundering in the water sometimes, it is also perhaps one of the aspects that makes me human and unique. I don’t want to be able to define myself in a nutshell. Even though I recognized sophomore year that there was more to me than a five-page paper could sum up, I still attempted to present myself in some fashion within that page limit. At this point in my life, I realize that I can’t really attempt to do that, and in the end maybe I won’t want to. I understand that in life I will still have to answer the question of who I am succinctly and eloquently in interviews, dates, and my ever fast-approaching law school personal statement. But if it was up to me, I wouldn’t take five pages. I wouldn’t even take a paragraph. I would simply write one line: we’ll have to find out.
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I like that you started your paper with this question. I remember to have a different answer when we were introduced this question in class; an answer I’ve never thought of before. I also liked that our identity is constantly changing. There is no way to fully describe “who you are”.
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the flow is a little off, almost seems like a run-on sentence.
maybe using a semicolon:
gut-wrenching; it was the part..
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great analogy!
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*similar to how
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Sometimes, I ask my friends what to think, what to do, what to feel, and what to believe in hard times; especially when I fight with my boyfriend or with a friend.
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I like this metaphor :)
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very nice conclusion, I like the last sentence. Your paper is very engaging, I was nodding my head at some points and holding myself back from trying to start a conversation on points you made (focus on revision, Cathy.)
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I like that you went back to what you started saying in this paper. Good summary.
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I apologize that I cannot offer any better advice for adjusting your essay. The writing is clear and very relatable (maybe especially for me..?)The organization and flow are good too. I like your understanding of the aletheiometer, and how you related it to your own journey.
And on a side note, I completely agree with alot of what you said. I feel as if I am always changing too, and that I’m pretty unrooted, without an alethiometer. I become pretty depressed thinking about how jobs and school force you to tell who you are in a page or so; but then again, such a feat proves how well of a writer you are and how deeply you’ve thought about it, and at least the latter is some measure of who you are.
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I want to apologize too for not offering good advices. English is my third language, so I’m not a good help with grammar. Nevertheless, I loved your essay. I agree with everything that you said. We don’t have a defined identity. Even our physical appearance changes through time. Nothing is temporal. In addition, I liked how you talked about your personal life to answer this rhetorical question. This is a super unique paper!
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