After writing my paper on the argument of the body being a medium, it got me thinking about the question, ‘who am I?’.  In most cases, in order for the body to function as a medium of self-expression one need to know who they are in order to know what they are trying to express to others. So in order to express yourself, it is assumed that you know yourself. And of course this got me thinking about how would I answer the question “who am I”?

     In my case the question ‘who are you?’ has to be one of the most difficult question for me to answer. Have you ever really looked at yourself and don’t know
really who you are? Like you know who you should be, what people (family, friends, etc,) expects you to be but apart from those expectations, you don’t know who you are? Like your life is a performance for other people and maybe somewhere along the way that performance started to be who you are? How can you tell if what you portray to other are what you really are?

     Whenever I am asked to make a list of things that represents me and who I am (which surprisingly happens a lot in college) I get nervous and frustrated because from the list I usually make I feel like few or none really describes who I am. In many ways I feel like they usually represent who I should be.  It is especially frustrating when I hear from a lot of people who claims that your college years are where you discover who you are and yet here I am, on my last year of my college years, and I have yet to figure out who I really am. Or at least I think I haven’t discovered myself yet. Or maybe I’m exactly what I am right now. I am the me that I perform for others.

       But I don’t think I really believe that. Because then I would be:

The girl who smiles a lot even when things are especially bad. The girl who will do what ever I can help others, even if it means going out of my way. The one that fantasize about getting married one day to a guy and giving my parents grandchildren.  The one that has her future already planed out, or at least that what I claim to my parents. The one that try to please my parents as much as I can, even if that means shutting done parts of who I think I am or might be.

And I don’t believe that thats ‘s but at this moment in time, it is the me that I show the world.

     So who am I really? I am a girl that’s confused. I am Guyanese but don’t really fit in with the other Guyanese. I am a Hindu but not really religious. I am Asian, yet don’t identify well with others who are asian.  I am heterosexual, yet I find that I have feelings for others. I think I might be Queer, yet I don’t fit in with the others that identify in that way. I am a psychology major, yet have a stronger interest in sociology and Gender Women’s Studies.  At this point in time I can definitely say at a basic level, I am a female college student who looks at the brighter side of life and is trying to experience the world. 

     So is my body the medium that helps me express myself? I don’t know. I think in my case my body is the medium/tool that helps me give the performance that society wants me to give. And I think that until I know who I am, I will keep performing.