Sometimes I don't really know who I am.

Though I thought I had realized a trueness about myself in New Orleans which had been unclear to me prior to the trip, there was a problem. The problem was that I was not going to remain in New Orleans forever. While I learned so much about life and compassion through my work in Louisiana, I was unable to maintain the feeling of realness individually as my environment changed. No longer was I surrounded by people thankful for just being alive. I was now in the land of materialism and consumerism, and gradually my insecurities came back to me. I was unable to maintain this sense of realness when immersed back into “real” modern society.

The quest to finding out who I am has been a struggle of mine mostly since I started college. When I was a senior in high school, I thought I knew exactly who I was. When I got to college, I lost that. I was forced to move out of my box I had created for myself. Not only had I just lost my father, but I had now moved away from my family to a place where no one knew me. Following that, my boyfriend from home broke up with me. All of these things I lost had all been a part of my identity as I knew it, so it makes sense that I was a little confused about myself. Since then, I have worked to reconstruct my self, but because I feel that I have so many parts to my self that my self self is not true. This is assuming that there is one true self, which is an idea that I haven’t been able to let go of.
While many things are always changing, the part of my self (who I am) that is constantly stable is that I am a Christian and I am a daughter. The rest is unknown. I wonder if we ever truly know who we are since we are all constantly changing. I know that in a year I won’t be the same person I am today. But even though people are constantly changing, there has to be something that is stable and remains the same (or something they think is staying the same).

I think that people’s need for stability is so interesting. I know that I have to have some sort of stability in my life. I’m a planner and I cannot plan when everything is in question.
It is also easier for me to know who I am (or think I know who I am) when things are going right and I have a positive mindset. When things start going wrong I sometimes start to get depressed and it is then that I start questioning everything about myself. I then get confused because I don’t know if when I am in my positive mindset I am just fooling myself into thinking I have everything sorted out, or if the darker side of me is how I really feel about who I am (or who I am not).