past, present, and future lives

learnings from investigating the convergence of all my identities

constantly rewriting the story of me | Visual Electric

It’s 10:41pm on New Years Eve. I’m sitting at my desk, in a race against time as I cut and paste bits and pieces of my aspirational life for my 2024 vision board. Although I know nothing tangibly will change whether I finish at 11:59 or 12:01, I still feel this pressure to be done before the clock strikes 12. So here I am, scrapping together these images in a desperate attempt to match what I don’t have currently (or what I have at a very minimal level) to what I wish to actively be involved with in the future. To manifest more moments like these.  

The first few weeks of the new year always buzzes with excitement in the air. We talk about our goals, what we hope to achieve in the year, what we want to make of ourselves. What we might want to prove to the world. In a way, a lot of it is wrapped up in the sort of identities we want to embody.

For me, this is conceptualized through the vision board I make every year. And every year, I stare blankly at the canvas before me, wondering what it is I actually want for myself. And if the things I’m striving for are what makes me, me.

I wonder what it means to call my identity mine, though I’m not sure if it can ever fully be my own. After all, I am simply an amalgamation of everyone I’ve ever loved and currently love¹. But what I do know, is that I’ve made big strides in the last two years to focus on what I truly value, and actualize my visions. 

For instance, every year I’ve spent a weekend on a “mini-retreat” banning myself from accessing internet² to really dig into myself, my identity, what I want for the future, etc. I recently sat down to look back on the docs from my first one a few years ago and am shocked at how much I had forgotten about how I had chosen to define myself at the time.

Some learnings: 

• So much of what I valued laid in titles, brand names, or generic subjects that i’m pretty sure was just riding the wave of tech crowds without truly knowing what I valued, or how I see and experience the world through my lived experiences.

  • So much of it was an attempt to signal status. Looking at people whom I had put on pedestal, seeing what they’re interested in, and trying to get interested in those topics myself. By affiliation, I thought it would give me a social boost.

• I also feel I tied up too much of my identity to labels rather than articulating why I do what I do. This led me to feel extreme dissonance if I deviated from it, so much that if there was any disconnect between the label and what I did in real life, it felt like I was breaking down as a person. Like I didn’t have integrity; as if I were a fraud. 

  • e.g. I recently started eating meat again after spending 8 years living as a vegetarian. Honestly, a good chunk of these years existed because I was afraid of how people would react when I was no longer vegetarian, that my morals and values would be questioned for my choices. When I stopped attaching myself to this label and focused more on my intentions behind what I eat and why, it was freeing and has been much better for my health.

• The reality is, priorities change. To have integrity does not mean that you never deviate from what you once advocated for pursuing before. It means that at each step of the way, you are true to how you feel. To have integrity is to accept you no longer care for something in the way that you once did. 

• Travel has shaped so much more of my identity today than I ever could have imagined. ​​How was I supposed to know who I was when I barely went out in the world? When I rarely observed what I liked, disliked? So much of what I thought was my identity laid in what I did in the past rather than what I actively do now and what I look towards in the future. When I speak about actualizing my visions now, this means an actual attempt in my day-to-day to work towards my aspirational futures.³

• Partially, I also think I was interested in what I was because it felt comfortable. It was familiar. It was within my domain of expertise. But when it came to topics I was actually more curious about, but afraid to work on, I didn’t adopt it as my ‘identity.’ I sometimes feel this barrier of incompetence, that I’m not smart enough to explore this deeper, that there’s so many people out there working on it that know better than I do. I remember at some point starting to explore some ideas and keeping a list of them, but never actually tinkering/building anything out. Or, that I haven’t proved to myself that I’m someone who should be working on it. Or I’m afraid I don’t have good enough ideas. I know none of this should stop me, but it did at the time. 

• Lastly, a lot of it was also related to work. It has taken me a while to learn how to detach my sense of self worth and identity from my work, but I do think that parts of me only exist because of what I do for work. I could not begin to fathom who I am if I never did design, because so much of how I interact with and see the world flows from what I know about design. I can’t even play a game without thinking about the onboarding flow or the subtle design signals to nudge me in wayfinding. It’s a balance for sure.

Moving forward, I would like to continue speaking about my identity as an entity that is active and evolving. I find myself gravitating towards identifying with my motivations and what I actively practice instead of specific labels. Talking about myself with words that reflect what I do and am interested in in the present, as well as what I look towards in the future. Everything else I consider to be a past life⁴. Instead of “I’m a community leader,” it’s “I’m excited about fostering spaces for community and collaboration.” While the former is still true, the latter feels more genuine! There’s still so much nuance and exploration I’m grappling with, but is something I accept will inevitably continue for the rest of my life.

In this way, these thoughts tie closely to how I feel my social media platforms are essentially crossing points; intersections for all the people I’ve ever encountered in my life. How I present myself online, is in some way shape or form influenced by who’s watching. The audience I’ve built up on the internet becomes the convergence of all my past lives, my present lives, and the lives I yearn for for the future. In these worlds, the layers of me unveil themselves like onion skins. A central hub for these diverse mix of interests. But in the cultivation of such an environment, there is no focus. This context collapse is why many people create smaller, more focused accounts dedicated to different parts of them. What sides of me do I show online? What parts do I hide? To whom, in what situations? I’d like to explore this further in a future piece. 

“We shape our tools, and in turn, our tools shape us.” ~Marshall McLuhan

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some updates

• i am moving to toronto! in yearning for permanence I write about not knowing where to go when the people I love are everywhere. I have decided to just choose and see where it takes me. growing up in vancouver but attending undergrad in london (ontario), toronto happens to be a place where many of the people I care about exist, and I feel strongly about its possibilities and potential for me.

• some visions of mine for 2024: volleyball arc, a consistent writing presence (especially through this blog, thanks to 30+ of you folks reading!), prototyping ideas > overthinking them, building and participating in communities that feel like home, growing my freelance business, exploring more mixed-media art

• current k-drama: twinkling watermelon

• current site i’m obsessed with: https://kidsuper.world/

• published some small updates to my portfolio, with an about page that feels more like me as a result of all my findings mentioned from this piece

1

Almost always, even through mere contact or presence, you change another person and they change you irrevocably. I still have the books, the ideas, the mindsets, I adopted from people in my life across time and space even if our time together is sealed into the past. We are all just collections of everyone we’ve ever loved.
~ Starting From Nix, in “all these things that I’ve done”

2. What this looks like is really just messaging people related to commitments I have that I won’t be available for an entire weekend, but if it’s an emergency to call/text. This might seem normal for some people but as someone who is chronically online and is known as a responsive friend and leader (i.e. when I was running clubs/orgs and people needed to contact me about tasks, etc.), it feels necessary. This also just helps absolve guilt and worry over if someone needs me or not (and oftentimes, I return and everything is absolutely fine!). I do this to limit distraction and rely on self-intuition.

3. A recent way I’ve enjoyed framing doing this, is thinking about all the attainable fantasies I can achieve.

jess

writes about how she wanted specific chairs that were sold but then decided to make them herself, or how she has always wanted to make friends with the Granny next door then just did it. It makes me realize there is so much I want for myself that I could just simply do or get started with, now. Aspirational to me feels too idealized with no action. Whereas ‘attainable’ framing makes me hopeful. When I think about life in this way, I also realize my aspirational futures are really just closeted attainable fantasies.

4. Some past lives: avid coffee house performer, ultimate-frisbee player, gamer. These lives may resurface themselves later in life, but is just not my present reality and it feels off to talk about them as if I identify with it currently.