What is my identity? What defines us? Our actions, thoughts, friends, surroundings? What really defines us?

Coming from a highly patriarchal Indian society, sometimes I wonder whether my definition of myself is really my own. Or is it something that the men of this society have assigned to me?

I saw “The Breakfast Club” movie recently again and felt reminded that these definitions of personality may not be a plague of just the Indian society. It is, after all, a plague that the whole world suffers from.

When I meet someone these days I try to see them as individuals with more qualities than what appears the eye. I try to see what aspects make them. I refuse to believe that anybody fits into a single mold. Everybody is so complex and they make so much of their own world around them.

I met someone recently who talks a lot, who is very very fashionable and who believes in work hard-party harder. She was someone who will easily be categorized as a rebel or a show-off to the eyes of many. But looking closer, she turned out to be one of the most helpful people I’ve known and a very religious person. Religious to the verge of superstitious almost but in no way was she a rebel.

I’ll state another example of a person who was very quiet and mysterious. Kept his thoughts to himself all the time. Extremely tolerant but when it came to sports, he suddenly became this raging bull with extremely competitive and enthusiastic outlook. And I mean in a good way.

Now coming back to my question of what is my identity, or what defines us. According to me what defines us is what we aspire to be. It doesn’t matter if one is weak today if he works hard to be stronger every day then I find him to be of bold and positive personality. If you have a reached a stage in life where you have achieved enough and stopped working harder, I am sorry but you won’t have my respect anymore. Nothing entitles you to become arrogant and to stop making yourself better.

So then I ‘ll make a valiant effort at defining myself. In one word, “Enthusiasm”. The eagerness to learn something new every day is what kept me going till date and that is what will keep me going forward too. I continue to believe that I can work on anything and make it happen if I put my heart and soul to it. Nothing can shake my will.

Of course, I meet people who sometimes demean me, underplay my achievements, suppress me for being a woman, judge me from what happened to me rather than what I did, try to put in a box of their own definition (typically – jack of all trades, inferior because I am  a woman, etc). But this is what I am. Take it or leave it.

And yes, my definition of myself will evolve with time or place or situation. Deal with it. Next time somebody judges you by just one act of yours, tell them you are too narrow-sighted to judge me.  I urge each of you readers to think of what defines you and own it. What defines you is what you think and make of yourself and not what the world makes you out to be!

-ShiningPoornima.