Grateful Series: The BestWorst Two Years
Chapter 1: Identity
The last two years have been the best worst two years of my life. Every day it felt like I was faced with another challenge I couldn’t handle, yet tomorrow always seemed to just arrive out of nowhere. It wasn’t like I was overcoming the challenges, or that I felt I was learning from them, it was more that the consistency of time didn’t afford me any other option. 2016 was a year of uphill battles. 2017 was mostly a year of loss. But half of 2017 and up to today, I could not be more grateful for it all.
The introduction to this series concluded with the consequences of my jaw op, but I feel it’s important to travel a bit further back in time to cover the first challenge I was presented with: identity. I am a psychology major who studied brain-behaviour relationships, so I guess this is a bit of a self-diagnosis, but I believe my depression and anxiety stemmed from a complete lack of knowledge of who I was.
In society we subconsciously and occasionally consciously place people into social categories based on what they do, who they hang out with and how they behave. i.e. we put people into boxes. I believe it’s our way of trying to frame groups of people so that we can better understand them and therefore better engage with them.
We see this all the time in schools.
We don't realise it at the time, but school is a small space. My junior school was made up of 250 girls and my high school had roughly 500. Within these confined institutions, students are expected to fit into a particular mold. There are set subjects, a few options for sport and cultural activities, but if we are honest, the majority of schools are in favour of those more academically gifted students. In my high school at least, if you weren't the top at academics, specifically getting firsts in Maths and Science, you felt kind of irrelevant. This is a difficult space for the creatives, the entrepreneurs or the students who had stronger EQs than IQs to be in.
For me personally, it's not that I was academically inept or that I was even average, but in a school where the majority of girls were achieving way above average, it is easy to feel incapable and...well...stupid.
From a social perspective, we place identities onto our peers so that we can have a sense of knowing them and knowing how to interact with them. But do we really? I think the identities of the people that make up the Jocks, the Nerds, the Losers or the Popular people, are rather decided for them by the imposition of our own impressions of them. From the outside they appear to have similar interests and characteristics so they should fall under the same category. Shouldn't they?
For me, right from the early years to Matric, my identity was either Jamie the Hockey Player, Jamie the Water Polo Player, Jamie the Horse Lover, Jamie the Artist or Jamie the Musician. I latched onto these identities and started to believe those things I did, were who I was. In Matric I added one more identity to the mix, Jamie the Girlfriend, which subsequently became an all-consuming identity, but at no point had I figured out just who Jamie was.
When it came time to leave the fish pond we call school, the place where everyone knew me, a place where I understood my role, I was completely and utterly lost. I had spent all my time fulfilling these identities: being the best sportswoman I could be, trying my hardest at art, throwing myself into my relationship, that when I stepped onto UCT campus in 2013 and met a sea of mixed-bag people from all over, I felt dumb-struck. I couldn’t rely on my previous identities because these people didn’t know a thing about me, and it was only just dawning on me, neither did I.
Without all of that, who is Jamie?
And so came the social anxiety. From being an incredibly outgoing, playful child who loved people, I stopped knowing how to engage with them. I actually just didn’t know what to say and I was always afraid that if I did say something, it would come out totally wrong. Because of this I had no idea how to move beyond the "Hi", "Hi", "How are you?", "Good thanks and you?", "I'm good thanks", "Good!" [awkwardly shuffles off]...and every time I knew I was going to meet up with someone, I would make sure I had enough topics in my arsenal to keep the conversation flowing for however long we would be in one another's company. It was exhausting!
I felt a crippling awkwardness around people, so the next logical step was isolation. I believed I didn’t have any positive value to add in social settings, so I retreated and subsequently abandoned what I now know makes up a large part of who I am: being sociable and enjoying shared experiences. With my retreat came the depression. I think a lot of people experience feelings of intense sadness, loneliness, apathy and fatigue, but for me the worst part was the numbness. I felt absolutely nothing...but that's a story for another time.
Looking back, I see now it was all just a lack of understanding myself. I didn’t know how to share what I had to offer because I genuinely didn't know what that was. As a result, the people around me weren't sure either. I would constantly adapt my personality to fit the circumstances I found myself in and who would want to take the time to understand someone who is so inconsistent, when they haven't even proven that they are worth the effort?
Because of all of this I didn’t make many friends at university, but I am so grateful for the ones that stuck by me. There were a handful of gems who took the time to decipher the blurred image of the Jamie I gave them and actually found something there that was of value. And that was a big lesson for me: Find those people who add value to your life and make the effort to invest in the relationship.
Those who don't add value, or who sap you of your energy, are a waste of your time - time that could be better spent on the people who matter.
We may think we know who we are at 16, 19, 25, 50…but the reality is that experiences constantly shape us and our identities are a work in progress. I am so grateful for those difficult years of confusion and struggle because I would never have been satisfied with being just Jamie the Water Polo player. That girl had no substance. That girl lacked depth. That girl mindlessly followed the trends of the "in-crowd" despite her own beliefs. That girl was afraid of vulnerability. But worst of all, that girl didn't truly see people for who they were beyond what they did. I am so glad that girl has evolved into something more.
I know I am not done changing, not even close, but I can safely say I have a better understanding of who I am, I hardly experience social anxiety anymore and I’m actually enjoying watching my story unfold.
If you’re interested to find out about how things changed post-op, watch this space for the next post in the series.
