I’ve been struggling with confidence issues but not in the way that struggle and confidence so often connote when sharing a sentence: that (hopefully) relatable “so when are we gonna burn off this college weight” mumbling to a foggy, post-shower, finger-smudged apparition of oneself in a mirror kind of way. No, while I’ve suffered such an affliction, my current is a bit less superficial and thus a bit more difficult to illustrate than a simple, aesthetic-obsessed annoyance. It’s less brash, but more stress-inducing; it’s less blunt, but more consistent: a chronic bubbling of thoughts swaying back-and-forth from conscious to subconscious, never blooming into full-blown anxiety but, all the more, never subsiding enough for me to claim, in confidence, a peaceful state of mind. If I had to put a name to this plague of prickling thought: it’s an identity crisis. But, through reflection, I’d like to believe I’ve dissected and refined this crisis into something less vague and cliché than a word as achingly overused as existential.
I must concede that this crisis does seem to stem from a fundamental, nature-of-existence-focused and thus, yes, by definition existential question. And that question, at the risk of sounding like the white-dreaded-drug-rug-kid who shows up to Intro to Philosophy twenty minutes late only to steer socratic seminar towards the deconstruction of truth and reality in the context of 9/11, that pseudo-deep-if-taken-at-face-value question is: who am I?
My first memory of self, or rather my first attempt to construct said memory through the secondhand accounts of my family’s recollections, is when, by their account mind you, I gave myself the title The Whipped Cream Cowboy. Cladding myself in nothing but cowboy boots, a ten-gallon hat and Toy Story undies, I ran around the house shouting my newly found identity to anyone who could bear a toddler’s rambling excitement. At the time I, to no surprise, loved whipped cream and cowboy movies, so it would only follow that I’d define myself, and thus my idealized future self, by exactly those two things: I would one day run a ranch, riding horses and devouring as much whipped cream as my belly could fit. In that future, I’m my own man or, better yet, my own cowboy and, as my own cowboy, my mom would no longer hold power over me and thus would now be helpless in her ever-persistent attempts to stifle my conquest of consuming copious amounts of cream. But even if my mother were to try and stop me, my young imagination had conjured a backup plan: I’d escape on horseback, leaving her in a dust of empty aerosol cans with bags of that whipped stuff hanging from my saddle.
A few years later, around the age of six or seven, my cowboy aspirations faded fast when I began assisting my adoptive grandfather, a shepherd and thus a kind of cowboy in his own right, on his farm. Tending to sheep was gross, grueling, and my miniature-self could only imagine the work would be substantially worse if I were to take on the then-unfathomable responsibility of owning my own ranch. And, with the soul crushing smack of reality the hand of hard work so often provides, my toddler-dreamed cowboy had died. But I spent little time mourning for the cowboy, as a new dream would soon emerge; each day after helping my grandfather, I’d go inside his house and play with the thousands of lego pieces he and my grandma had bought; I built countless structures, skyscrapers and, for whatever reason, became fixated with measuring each one of them with a worn-out ruler I had found in the barn. It was clear to me then, in those moments of what my boyhood sense of wonder would perceive as an endless supply of legos at hand for my precise, ruler-measured constructions, that I would become an architect or engineer or construction worker of some sort; I believed then, without a doubt, that I was destined to become the next bigger better Bob the Builder.
But on an unassuming evening, over a year after the budding of my building dreams, I was lounging around with my mom, watching MTV when, if memory serves, I became deeply mesmerized by a myriad of Tim McGraw and Mariah Carey music videos that, given my looming bedtime, served as lullabies and drifted my overactive child mind to a place of serene stillness. This lucid bedtime journey I was taken on by McGraw and Mimi, both of whom I remain unabashedly enamored with to this day, coupled with the countless evenings I spent eating dinner with my grandma from an American-Idol-purposed television tray, quickly pushed my construction dreams to the wayside; I knew then and there that my true passion, where I would truly derive the most pleasure in life from, was not in architecture or an engineer’s monotonous process of planning to precision, it was to be a performer, a singer! I wanted to make people feel what that night of MTV had made me feel and so I, ready to burst from the thrill of my new found calling, asked my mother to record me singing a song my child hands had spent the whole week writing on the back of a scrapped math assignment. But, when she played it back to me, I immediately broke down and bawled because my voice sounded nothing like I had thought it did. My mom always laughs when she recalls my devastation: I wailed “I’ll never be the next Tim McGraw!” before running to my room, slamming the door, and crying myself to sleep face down into my Pikachu pillow. Thankfully the trauma soon subsided when, on the next day, I cracked a few jokes that resonated with Mrs. Craig’s Second Grade Class (sans Mrs. Craig, she sent me out to the hall for being too disruptive at reading time). And, from that moment on, all my elementary school friends encouraged me to be a comedian. This became the new goal and it mostly stuck with me, up until adolescence at least.
In high school, if I had reflected on all my past dreams, I would’ve scoffed at just how silly they were. I would’ve pawned them off as youthful naivety because now, as a high school senior, I knew just who I was and who I would continue to be: an atheist intellectual destined for some arbitrary academic position. Since I had reached physical maturity, as my logic would follow, then I must also have reached emotional maturity and must, undoubtedly, know myself completely. If high school me sounds like an overconfident jackass to you, it’s because he undoubtedly was.
Now, out of college and working my first career, which is far from academia, there’s a bit of distance between who I am now and who I was in high school and, from that distance, I can’t help but cringe at my high school self. I cringe at his cocky, unfounded confidence, all the while current me, ironically, is searching for a similar confidence once again (albeit without the asshole attitude). But while current me and high school me do differ greatly as far as confidence goes, what’s changed most about us is our empathy and general perspective: if The Whipped Cream Cowboy could travel time and speak with all the future iterations of himself, the ass that is high school me would criticize the little cowboy’s hopes and dreams, he would brush them off as unrealistic, childhood fantasies. While current me, current me couldn’t help but to encourage, to empathize with the cowboy; are my current dreams not just as silly and arbitrary as his?
I get the sense that in periods of transition, like going from school to career, we often feel as if we’re floating. We’re floating in that transition, trying to hold on to something, and with that float comes an anxiety, an underlying sense of urgency to move forward, yet we don’t know where to. We don’t know because we’ve become so obsessed in making sure each step we take forward is a step towards our ideal future and any step less than that is one not have worth taking in the first place. This fear that we must always make the right move turns our float into a stasis; if we keep questioning whether something is the right move, we’re unlikely to progress, because it’s more likely that we’ll never find that impossibly elusive right move. This is the irony; our dreams, our ideal-selves, our long term goals, they’re not static perceptions destined to stick within our psyche for a lifetime. From cowboy to comedian, or architect to academic, our idea of self changes constantly, no matter how confident we may be in its permanence at the time, and with each step forward, with each new experience, our identity shifts and shapes itself into something new—sometimes drastically so.
So, when moving forward, maybe the best plan is no plan. Instead of obsessing over whether each step taken is the right one, the one that will bring us to where we’d like to be, maybe we should find comfort in the fact that our identity and dreams are in an inevitable, perpetual shift and, by confronting the metamorphic nature of self, we may come to conclude that though a particular step may not lead us to where our current self would like to be, it could, just as likely, take us somewhere even more exciting—a place we had never thought to imagine: a place our future self would enjoy all the same, or maybe more.
My Dinner with Austin 