One of the most frustrating parts about growing up is that on top of getting an education, a job, and leading a productive life, we also have to figure out for ourselves who we are. We’re given millions upon millions of seconds filled with data and our brains have to organize it as a side job (the main one being actually living). We learn what we’re good at, what we hate, what we can’t handle, what we’re scared of, and society asks us to come up with a simple conclusion to our identity.

I don’t know how other people fit on this line, but for me this means living in contradiction. I cannot handle being disorganized, but I’m also too lazy to clean my desk up. My Google Drive (where I keep all my writing for both school and fiction) has so many sections and subsections of folders that you may have to open five folders to get to the document you want because everything is so neatly categorized. This, ironically, means I can lose some files in that labyrinth. Thankfully there’s a search bar on Google Drive, but if I use it often enough, there’s no point in organizing everything so much!

I’m taking a course on human sexuality right now. Recently I’ve learned that according to some people, there is almost no relation between gender and sexual identity. On top of that, romantic attraction and sexual attraction can be entirely separate from one another. People can marry somebody they enjoy spending time with, yet mutually agree to share sexual intimacy with other people.

This is the part of society nobody talks about. The world paints us this picture that we can only be attracted to the opposite gender, but studies have shown that most people can be physically attracted to both on different levels. It’s actually quite rare for somebody to be exclusively attracted to the opposite gender. We’re left to figure all this out on our own, if we ever do.

The future is a scary thing. I have no idea where my path leads. Am I going to be a published novelist? At best I would say the probability of that is fifty percent, and even then I’m including the chance that I make a life somewhere else and then publish in my old age. Now, the probability of me making money off of something related to Nacre Then? I’d say that’s over ninety percent, but I can do that in so many ways other than writing novels.

Life is scary. This post may be a bit scatterbrained today. It could simply be that “identity” is such a broad subject to condense into five hundred words, or it could be that I have a lot of half cooked ideas I wanted to include. Either way my point still stands. We’re all just specks of dust floating on an ocean. But it also gives me some hope. I don’t know if I’m going to ever become an actual writer, but wherever my life is going to lead me, I’ll end up there regardless. I imagine I’m on that ocean of life, manning the helm (of that speck of dust I suppose), yet not really sure whether steering the wheel actually does anything. Sometimes it feels like I can steer it in the direction I want, but maybe the winds are blowing in that direction and it’s simply a coincidence. I don’t really know who I am or who I’m supposed to be, but I know that I’ll find out in time.