Finding the Beauty in Inconsistency

Identity.

If you’re like me, you probably read that word and decided it’s a concept you don’t even want to approach. You probably read that word and contemplated closing out of this tab, because the word “identity” is a portal to worlds of confusion, frustration, and self-doubt. Or maybe you did the opposite. Maybe you read that word and picked up your reading pace, hoping to find some answer that’s managed to elude you for years. Point is, identity is a struggle, and it’s one that every college student knows well. 

Regardless of how thoroughly someone has planned for college, there is no way to prepare for the identity crisis it causes. Everything changes. We tend to form our identities in relation to people around us. For example, if you had the top grade in some of your high school classes, you might have thought “I’m smart,” and added it to your internal list of characteristics. But then you got to college. You met new people – smart people. Suddenly, you weren’t the smartest person in the room. Others could score higher on tests than you, and they didn’t need your help on homework. Your identity list began to get some eraser marks. Am I really smart?  

Or maybe you were super outgoing in high school, when you were surrounded by your friends. Ok, I’m extroverted. It’s added to the list. But then you got to college. You had to make new friends, and it was a slow process. You didn’t fit in with them the same way you did in your past friend group, so you didn’t speak up quite as much. Am I really an extrovert?  

Selecting a college major is another contributor to the collegiate identity crisis. Maybe you are one of those lucky souls who’ve known since the fourth grade which career path they’d head down. Or maybe you’re more like me. Maybe you didn’t decide on an area of study until you ran out of time, grateful that you finally had something to say when people asked what you wanted to major in, even if you didn’t say it with conviction. Maybe even now, a year or more down the road, you have a few quiet but persistent doubts. No matter when or how you chose a major, we are all on a career path. But that doesn’t mean it’s a smooth one. It’s often filled with questions, like “Is this right for me? What if I graduate and don’t like my job? Am I even good at this? What if I’m actually better at something else? Am I just doing this because other people want me to? What happens if I change my mind?” College major is something that can determine the rest of our lives, and that’s scary because we don’t really know who we are. We can’t predict whether we’ll like our career in fifty years. We don’t know whether the way we act is based on who we are or what mood we’re in. We sometimes can’t tell whether we’re kind or rude, patient or impatient, outgoing or introverted, humble or egotistical.  

I think the answer to this problem is simple, and it is also frustrating: we are all of them. We possess, to a degree, each and every possible characteristic. Michel de Montaigne, a French author and philosopher in the 1500s, knew this, and he wrote about it in one of his essays, saying, “Every sort of contradiction can be found in me, depending upon some twist or attribute: timid, insolent; talkative, taciturn; tough, delicate; clever, stupid; angry, meek; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant... I can see something of all that in myself, depending on which way I turn; and anyone who studies himself attentively finds in himself… this turbulence and discord.” We, like Montaigne, have characteristics that are not constant. We change daily, hourly even. This makes it so hard to pin down our identities.  

But maybe that’s ok.  

We want to classify ourselves. Humans classify things – it’s what we do. As small children, we learn to sort by size, shape or color. As adults we classify everything, give it titles like “friend”, or “enemy”, “right” or “wrong”. We want everything to be constant and clear-cut, fitting nicely into our organized little classification boxes.  

We weren’t made to fit into boxes.  

We aren’t constant, but that’s a good thing. The ocean isn’t constant, and its waves have inspired countless poems, been the models for thousands of photographs. Sunsets aren’t constant. They astonish because they are unique and vibrant. Music isn’t constant. It shifts from note to note. Paintings aren’t constant. They have depth, variation, and shadows. All of these things are beautiful, and they are beautiful because of their inconsistency. Are we, and all of our variation, our confusion, our inconsistency, not all the more beautiful? 

We will continue to struggle with identity, through our college years and beyond. We may not have all of our answers now, but that’s ok. Maybe we’ll have them someday. For now, we’re in college. Learn, explore, and appreciate both outwardly and inwardly.