Hey guys!
I hope you’ve all began to situate yourselves in your new year at UBC. For many of you, this is your first year, which means this is all brand new. Hopefully by now, you’ve been able to make some new friends, and identify yourselves with a social group, because this will help you relate to what I’ll be discussing today; the topic of identity. Recently, in our ASTU class, we have finished reading Running in the Family, a memoir, in some sense, by Michael Ondaatje. However, the novel is better classified as a historiographical metafiction. The story follows Ondaatje’s journey back to Sri Lanka to help him discover the truth about his father, thus aiding him in resolving his identity crisis. Although not everyone can relate to Ondaatje’s epic adventure, I believe we can all relate to the idea of identity.
When I was started high school, I felt a little out of place. Not that I didn’t have friends or anything like that, but I wasn’t entirely sure where I fit in and I think this was because I wasn’t fully sure of who I was. Unlike Ondaatje, I did not have a sizable part of my life missing from me, that I felt I needed in order to accurately understand who I was. However, I was not aware of what my morals truly were or what I genuinely liked and disliked, all contributing to the gut wrenching feeling that I did not know who I truly was. Throughout the first couple years, I did some things I am not entirely proud of, that I am not comfortable disclosing on the internet, but I did these things because either my friends did it or I felt that by doing it, people would like me. By the end of ninth grade, I felt that the person who I pretended to be was completely disconnected from the person I truly was.
In grade 10, I ended up going to a different school to participate in a year long outdoor education program. After sort of escaping the environment I had been in for the past two years, I was able to sort of locate my bearings. I found friends that I felt I could truly be myself around and I slowly developed into the person I felt I was. I think many other people “found themselves” that year, because when I returned to my high school after that year, the atmosphere was much calmer than it had been the previous years. In a similar sense, Ondaatje needed to escape his current environment in order to uncover aspects of himself he had yet to discover.
You hear it all the time that high school is when you “discover who you really are” and from many of the people I’ve talked to, it seems to be true. It takes some time, and you make some mistakes along the way, but I found it was from those we were able to learn of our values, which helps us establish the type of person we want to be.