Finding who I am

I struggle with trying to figure out who I am.

On paper, I am easy to explain. I am an Iona College student in the Honors Program. I am pursuing a dual-degree program for Public Relations and Marketing. I am a commuter assistant, assistant news editor for The Ionian and I am secretary of the Computer Science Club.

I have many friends on campus, commuters and residents alike. I still talk to my friends from high school. I like playing video games, reading books and writing stories that I hope will be good enough to become a book someday.

I am skilled at telling people who I am on the outside, but I am still trying to figure out who I am on a deeper level.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a question that is very easy to answer when you are 10 years old and anything seems possible. I wanted to be a video game programmer. But then reality sets in – sometimes your dreams can’t quite come true in the way you imagined they would.

“Tell us something unique about yourself” is a prompt that comes up in dreaded group icebreakers or in very important job interviews. This is when it is very easy to explain who you are on paper, but makes me think about what really makes me unique. I procrastinate on essays, I am anxious about presentations and I am terrified of not being half of the person I have built myself up to be.

I want to let you know that I am not an unhappy person. I love my family and my friends, I have passions and hobbies and I have hope for the future. Yet the nagging uncertainty of who truly I am has been at the back of my mind for a very long time. There are bad days and there are good days, but the good days come around more often now.

I have made more friends at Iona than I ever imagined I would. I laugh more and louder than I ever have before.

I do not know my post-graduation plans. I want to have friends and I want to be happy. I want to fall in love. I want to own a home and eat avocado toast and drive across the country to visit national landmarks. I want to play video games and work at a tech company where I can translate my passion into the work I do.

I am unique simply by being myself. No one yells across campus to get his or her friends’ attention like I do. No one laughs as loudly as I do. No one sings the National Anthem to himself or herself when they’re trying to get work done. No one has experienced my life in exactly the way I have.

I struggle with trying to figure out who I am, but that’s okay. I am still young, and I do not think I will figure out who I am for a long time, and I am okay with that.

I know, objectively, that I cannot be the only person who is afraid of what the future holds. I know that I cannot be the only person in the world who doubts themselves and wishes they could be better. I hope that sharing my voice here can help someone realize that the greatest thing about the future is that it hasn’t happened yet. I am still a story that is being written, and Iona has already helped me find more of myself than I thought there was to find.

To contact The Ionian’s Alison Robles, email her at [email protected]