Opinions don't define you

When you haven’t fully met yourself, you start borrowing your identity from everyone else. Their words become your labels. Their descriptions become your mirror. That isn’t inherently wrong, and seeing yourself through someone else’s eyes can teach you something. The conflict starts when you try to become every label at once.

So who are you, really?

The self is built from experience: everything we’ve lived and every perception we’ve collected along the way. Those perceptions become the story we tell others and the story we tell ourselves. But the self is also split. There’s who you think you are. Then there’s who everyone else thinks you are, and that version shifts depending on who’s looking.

Here’s the part that changed everything for me. You get to decide who you are. How you see yourself is just that, a perspective. Experience shapes it, your awareness at the time filters it, and it keeps evolving. And if that’s true for you, it’s true for everyone else. Every opinion someone holds about you passes through two filters: how they see themselves, and how they relate to the world around them. Their read on you says as much about them as it does about you. Sometimes more. That’s exactly why no single person gets to define you. Take in the perspectives. Keep what’s useful. Then decide for yourself how you want to be described. Identity is personal, but it’s also built in relation to the people around us. Both things can be true.

What changes when curiosity replaces fear?

You stop scrambling to live up to every expectation. You start engaging with people, and with life, on your own terms. I didn’t always know this. For a long time, I tried to satisfy every opinion anyone had of me. I wanted to please everyone. But the version of me that worked for one person didn’t work for the next, and I kept getting stuck in this inner duality. Who am I supposed to be right now? How am I supposed to act?

My parents were the clearest example. Each of them expected, and experienced, a specific version of me. After they divorced, the divide got sharper. I was caught between two people pulling in opposite directions, and somewhere in that tug-of-war, I lost track of where I stood. Of course I did. I was too busy trying to please both of them. And at the time, pleasing both meant abandoning myself.

What finally shifted it was realizing that each of their interpretations of me also reflected them. Once I saw that, I could step back. I could understand where each of them was coming from without taking it on as my truth. And I could finally see that being one version of myself with one parent and another with the other didn’t mean I had to abandon myself. It meant the opposite: Stay true to yourself. Show up the way you see fit.

For most of us, it starts with our parents. For the first chapters of our lives, we only know ourselves through their eyes. Something that helped me understand this was accepting that this life isn’t theirs, but mine. Deciding who I am is my job, not theirs. That’s another article I’ll write, but for now, I’ll leave you with this.

If you’re in a season of discovering who you are, are you letting other people’s opinions dictate how you live? Or can you see yourself clearly without needing validation for the version you think you’re supposed to be?

Z.