Experiences Of Controlling Self Concept

For most of my life, I have grown up in a predominantly Asian and Indian community. I was constantly surrounded by peers who wanted a career in the STEM field, to become a lawyer, or go into finance. I, however, wanted to perform. Apart from identifying myself as Indian, I identify myself as a singer. I know many other Indians who are trained in singing who also identify themselves as a singer but don’t choose to make Vocal Performance (VP) their career. So in a way, I always felt like I was a part of a minority. Finally, after 18 years, I moved to New York City to attend NYU as a VP major. I remember being very excited to come and meet people who have the same career goals as me. One thing I didn’t expect was that I would be the only Indian in my program. Once again I was a minority.

During the first few weeks at NYU, interacting with my other peers was unusual, but I eventually found myself relating to them musically. During the same time frame, I had found my group of Indian friends. There was one instance in which both my worlds of music and culture collided. Right after this interaction, my Indian friends explicitly told me that I am not the same person that I am with them. They told me that my body language, tonality, and verbal language were completely the opposite of what I was like with them. I was shocked to hear this. I had to ponder on why I was acting so different and where I was more comfortable after having adapted to two different versions of me.

“Girl” by Alexander Chee reminisces his emotions and experience on a Halloween night during the 90s in San Francisco. Chee describes himself getting ready by explaining to his audience the type of makeup he is applying, how he’s applying it, and what type of wig he is wearing. He tells the readers that on Halloween night walking on the street and getting attention for the way he was dressed up made him feel beautiful and gave him a sense of power. Under his section of “Real” he finally comes to a realization, where he explains that although he felt powerful, he didn’t feel real. He states “I can’t skip what I need to do to love this face by making it over. I can’t chase after the power I felt that night, the fleeting sense of finally belonging to the status quo, by making myself into something that looks like something they want. Being real means being at home in this face, just as it is when I wake up.' (Chee, Alexander). Through this, we see that Chee believed that dressing up as a drag just served as a mask that he needed to feel confident. He needed to experience being a drag to realize that he has to learn to feel powerful in what he believes is his true self, which is not going through the whole process of dressing up. He is essentially portraying that people have one identity that they need to embrace and that acting a different way can be considered as “faking it.” Yet, Chee’s essay makes an interesting point, by which even if people might be “faking it” it still teaches them something about their personalities. Sometimes I had to wonder if I was faking it, and which group out of the two I was faking it with.

Gloria Anzaldua’s essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” highlights how she overcame society's negative outlook towards the Chicano language, and her journey with self-discovery in which she embraced the internalized conflict of her dual identities. She explains that she had difficulties because being a Chicana she was not identified as a native English or Spanish speaker. She illustrates how she had spoken different languages and changed her character to fit in with the different groups she interacted with, especially when talking to feminist Chicanas because “Chicanas feel uncomfortable talking in Spanish to Latinas, afraid of their censure.” (Anzaldua, 80). This portrays that Anzaldua was initially insecure about her culture and did not want to embrace it. However, over time, like Chee, Anzaldua learned that her identity isn't something that people can take away from her. She states “I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice.” (Anzaldua, 81). Anzaldua shows that acting a different way from what one person perceives you as is not “faking it” but it is just another part of your identity which is expressed under different circumstances. After pondering why I was acting so different, I realized that this other side of me, the musical side, has probably always been present but never expressed because I was never exposed to new surroundings.

In the moment when my two worlds of music and culture clashed, I thought that maybe I would be more comfortable because the two sides of me were present at that moment, and for the first time I wouldn’t have to feel like a minority. However, it just caused more confusion and conflict within me. I did not know who I was supposed to act like, my musical self or my cultural self. I still felt inferior to my friends. After receiving the comment about being “fake” from my Indian friends, it made me wonder why they were so hurt by me expressing my musical self. Did they feel betrayed because they had never seen this side of me? And why was I so conflicted about letting both sides of me be expressed at once? Is it because one side of me felt more inauthentic than the other? If so, which side was it?

The portrait 'The Two Fridas' by Frida Kahlo, shows two Frida Kahlo’s sitting in a chair. One Frida is dressed in a European dress while the other is dressed in a traditional Tehuana dress. Being born to a German father and a mestiza mother, this represents Kahlo’s two cultures. This also represents Kahlo’s conflict between her dual identities. As shown in the image, Frida in the European dress has an open heart that was cut into by scissors, while Frida in the Tehuana dress has a closed heart. (“The Two Fridas”). This portrays that two different identities can never coexist without one sacrificing for the other. Yet the holding of hands of the two Frida’s shows that she hopes that there will eventually be unity between the two. Similar to Kahlo, Anzaldua states “One day the inner struggle will cease and a true integration takes place.” (Anzaldua, 85). This is unlike Chee who believes that acting in a way that’s different from what a group of people perceives you as is “fake.” If this was the case then why did I feel like I wasn’t acting “fake” with both groups? Both sides of me felt equally authentic.

In “What It Feels Like To Be Colored Me” Zora Neale Hurston shows her readers change is necessary for one’s discovery of self-identity. In the essay, Hurston talks about a drastic change in her life when moving from Eatonville, Florida, a town that was all black, to Jacksonville, a more diverse neighborhood. This was when Hurston realized for the first time that she was a “little colored girl.” She states that she used to feel the most colored when she was “thrown against a sharp white background.” She states how the contrast is “just as sharp” when a white person sits amongst a room full of African Americans. She uses an example when she took a white friend to a jazz club, and when the music started playing she started dancing “wildly” within. She explains how she is “in the jungle and living in the jungle way.” When her friend responds by saying “good music” she states how the music had not touched him the same way it had her, and she can see his “whiteness” and how she is so “colored” (Hurston, 94-96).

With this, she goes on to say how she sometimes does not feel like she belongs to a race. She uses the metaphor of a “bag” and how there are different color bags such as brown “white, red and yellow.” She explains how when the bag is poured out there is a “jumble of small things, priceless, and worthless.” (Hurston, 97). Much like Anzaldua, who was not allowed to speak Spanish in school or at home due to being a Chicana, Hurston shows how she had to experience going out of her comfort zone to understand how society needed to surpass the stereotype they perceive by seeing color, and how that helped her true value and understand herself and her culture.

My entire life I never felt racially differentiated from my peers. We all had the same culture, same slang, similar actions. Culturally, it was my place of comfort. Moving to NYU, I experienced what it was like to be “thrown against a sharp white background” and for the first time I had felt “colored.” But I am thankful for this experience because I got out of this bubble that I have grown up in my whole life. Getting out of the bubble made me realize how much I embraced my culture and it helped me interact with people who understand what I wanted out of my career as a performer. For the first time, I was not being judged for not choosing a more straightforward career path as an engineer or lawyer. With this, I finally understood why my Indian friends believed I acted differently and why they probably felt betrayed by it. It was because they had never seen the side of me that was passionate about music since they had only been exposed to the side of me that related to them culturally. Therefore, experiences that force an individual out of his or her comfort zone will prompt a person to discover new aspects of their personality, helping them further develop their identity. For example, a change in the people you surround yourself with, a change in interests or hobbies, even a change in the way one dresses up are all significant to creating one’s identity. Perhaps there is not a side to me that is more inauthentic than the other, because dual identities are not a falsity but are a result of adaptation due to change. I needed to adapt to my new surroundings, which resulted in me discovering the second half of my identity.

Having gone through my experience here at NYU and looking at the works of Anzaldua, Chee, Hurston, and Kahlo, I realized that there is no one path to self-discovery. While we all started at the same place of confusion and internalized conflict, each person had eventually branched out on their own- each person had different experiences that helped them learn something which differentiates them from others. On this path of self-discovery, going out of your comfort zone is an experience in itself that helps you explore different aspects of your identity. So it is all a process that goes hand in hand. While Chee portrays to his readers how he had to succumb to his comfort zone of dressing up as a drag to find his true self, Anzaldua and Hurston had to go out of their comfort zone to embrace each other aspect of their identity and culture. My path to self-discovery was the career path that required me to go out of my comfort zone which helped me realize that regardless of what scenario I am in, whether I am surrounded by Indians or Vocal Performance majors, being a minority is who I am. This is why I express the many identities that I have with my Indian or Vocal Performance friends at NYU when I feel fit, without having to feel that one side is more “fake” than the other because it is all a part of my identity.

Society has been controversial in the past on whether we control our self-identity or if our experiences shape our identity. Experiences have control over our identity because we learn from our experiences and that presents us to different parts of our personalities that we have never explored before. Some believe that the lessons learned from life experiences are temporary and do not hold a lifelong value. An article titled “How Travel Affects Self-Identity” states “personal experiences have the power to change the way a person sees themselves and the world around them. Psychologically, there are five dominant personality characteristics-openness, agreeableness, extroversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.”(Stone, Ally). Experiences that prompt a person to go out of their comfort zone and interact with people that have different backgrounds than them encourage “extroversion” and “openness” and this will have a lifelong impact on that person.

If people truly believed that they had complete control over their self-identity and that experiences have no factor whatsoever in shaping them, then the entire human population would be roaming around without a purpose and in a state of confusion, because in actuality life itself is an experience, in which each person has a specific goal or purpose that they want to fulfill for themselves. While doing that they have many experiences they encounter in which they acquire traits over time that eventually help them shape their identity. As in my case, I don’t think that I have changed as a person, but I have just integrated my cultural self with my musical self which helped me further discover my identity. I haven’t completely defined myself yet, but there will be more experiences that are thrown my way allowing me to dig deeper into who I am.