Multiple Identities (Pt. 1)





“Good Enough” In high school, I volunteered at an elementary afterschool club near my house. I liked asking the kids what they were good at. Their responses were usually extended strings that made me smile, like: I’m really good at soccer, art, monkey bars, dabbing, taking care of my little brother, math, making slime, and microwaving pizza rolls. At what age, or at what moment, do we cut down our biographies and self-introductions? This dilution seems necessary, in a way. But when do we cut down what we’re “good at” in our heads? I think we lose confidence when we start getting “objective measures” of what we’re good at. Or when we start comparing ourselves to others. When you ask little kids if they’re good at art, they all say “yeah!” It’s true. Kids are really creative. But “adults” rarely say that they’re good at art. They’re more likely to say: the people I draw look like mushrooms impaled with carrot sticks. As a kid, I can remember thinking along the lines of: I’m not as good at math as I thought. Jessica got 10 points higher on the math test, and she’s doing a real math contest on Saturday. And she might win a certificate. With a stamp and everything. Maybe I should focus on something else. We reduce what we’re “good at” when we begin to create bundles of identity. But it seems a little sad to me. We abandon a lot of things at a really early age, maybe because we don’t see ourselves as “good enough“ at that time. When we base our ”good enough" on external feedback, we run the risk of unconsciously tying part of our self-worth to comparison or an arbitrary ranking. I’m reminded of this quote from the Coursera course “The Science of Well-Being” by Laurie Santos: External motivation actually kills internal motivation to enjoy the thing

that you used to like before. It’s a little scary that even if you’re curious and naturally passionate about a subject, if you begin to get external “rewards,” it will erode your internal motivation. Of course, there are some things that we continue doing, even if we fail at them at the outset. Those things become even more important. But we’re mostly supposed to ”pick a few serious things“ and focus on them. College & Intersections This especially miffed me while applying for college. In college-application-world, people like to talk about ”spikes.“ A spike is something that you’re really good at. According to a random PrepScholar blog I looked up online, ”a spike is what sets you apart from all other applicants.“ In this view, it seems like colleges are ”curating“ a collection of spikes, like hedgehogs who are also weirdly insecure. To be honest, I don’t know how to fix the college application system. But I know that this system shapes the lives and aspirations of literally millions of high-schoolers. Starting between ages 14-18 (and even earlier), we’re supposed to pick one or two things we’re especially good at, and shape them into a narrative about our “passions.” While writing my Common Application essay, I wracked my brain for ways to combine tech and poetry. These two interests were not allowed to exist in parallel, without explicit “intersections.” In my case, they did have some intersections. But I felt like I had to make intersectionality the focus of my essay. The trend of “passionate about the intersection of X and Y” in LinkedIn bios is maybe another product of the “unified narrative” mentality. This isn’t to say that the intersection of different fields isn’t valid. In fact, I wholeheartedly support and admire intersectionalists—and hope to be one. I believe intersections between fields are vastly more powerful and often more meaningful, especially between STEM and the humanities. Yet I still feel like this mindset poses an invisible constraint, and maybe some artificial need. If you take on anything different or unrelated to your narrative, you have to find ways to explain it as an “intersection.” The World Has Many Trees What would happen if we focused less on how our interests “line up,” and more on what we learn from different experiences, how we explore, and the multiplicities of what we’re passionate about? I’m reminded of this quote from an MIT Admissions Blog post called “The World Has Many Trees”: For many students the subject area they excelled in during high school was

the subject they intended to major in here at MIT. This made me kind of

sad, because I felt like it was silly to limit what sorts of classes and

activities I did in college by what I did or didn’t succeed in during high

school. I think it’s very true that what we’re “good at” in our heads has a tangible influence on what we pursue, maybe for the rest of our lives. It makes sense. But it seems like this mentality is massively limiting what people explore. Maybe there are a ton of things that we could be “good at” but we dropped when we were eight. This mentality might also be limiting the breakthroughs and connections that come from moving fluently between subject fields, and treating fields just as different ways of seeing and understanding the world. Obviously this is not always true, especially for some of the smartest people, who never seem to feel constrained from doing what they’re curious about. I’ve been inspired by a lot of artist websites, which list interesting and wildly different activities in parallel, without any need to explain or explicate. But I think this post is more for my younger self, when I saw nicely packaged narratives, and felt a need to also nicely package my interests into a cohesive narrative. TL;DR I started exploring this topic from the lens of social media and the need to build an online presence/brand. (Where your “brand” is a unified story that “make sense” to strangers and is unchanging.) That’s been moved to Part 2, since this post has already gotten so long. It seems weird to end this post without some concrete or at least imagined solution. Sadly, I don’t think there is one, especially when information is condensed into 15-second attention-span bits (or shorter, like TL;DR’s). There isn’t room for more than a “single story” (phrase from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk.) Instead, I think it takes us as individuals re-evaluating what we’re “good at,” examining what story we tell about ourselves, and rediscovering the joy of exploring and learning things that aren’t readily explainable. I think the things we do, and can’t explain why we do, are those that shape us to become more fully ourselves. TL;DR

• What we think we’re “good at” is solidified really early on → creates feedback loop that becomes our narrative

• Society/college/social media → expectation to package a consolidated brand → no room for interests existing in parallel

• Possibly massively limiting what we explore and the new connections we make through moving between fields, lose the nuance and joy of truly feeling free to explore