Who Are You?
Are you who you think you are? Does it matter how long it takes you to become the person you want to be? I don't think so.
The language that you learn to speak first in your life has a profound impact on how you see the world.
Words are a funny thing because what we do is that we take an object, an emotion, a situation, or a person and put them into a series of syllables to produce a word so that we can make it portable from one human being to another to convey that object, emotion, situation or person to one another.
It’s rather strange because if you look at modern-day language, it's consistently changing very quickly, no matter the language you speak. I have some Korean friends and very often I'd go and show them a banner that I find from North Korea and I'd ask them, “Well what does this say?”, and an overwhelming majority of my friends would respond with “I don't understand what this is saying, I wouldn't be able to translate it for you because I don't know what some of these words mean.”
Now if you look at the English language, the same thing is happening in today's English. There exist words and phrases that people from our generation understand now but I guarantee you, twenty years ago, people wouldn't have understood.
Take for example, if I describe somebody as an intersectional vegan trans man, twenty years ago, a hundred percent of the people that I knew personally would not know what that meant and they wouldn't even be able to begin to comprehend what that means, but yet in today's world I'd say that there's a greater percentage of people who would know what I mean.
The fact that these ideas have now been conveyed into words and transported from me to you, i.e., the person who is receiving this communication, means that you can now understand what those words represent. Whether or not you like the ideas themselves, the way that you see the world now includes the existence of those ideas.
Time
Let’s go a little bit more basic than words and grammatical structure in English. What's strange about English that some other languages don't do is that we conjugate verbs as a function of time.
Let's give the example of the word “be” (a state of being). The present tense is I am, the past tense is I was, and in the future is I will be. It's interesting because am, was, and be are different words completely.
When I started to teach myself Mandarin, I discovered that the language does not conjugate verbs for tense in the same way English does. Time can instead be conveyed through context, aspect, or other words in the sentence. When someone who speaks Mandarin is not a native English speaker, you sometimes hear things like “I going to the store today,” because English requires grammatical distinctions that Mandarin does not make in quite the same way.
Now I mention this because language is one of the primary ways through which we organize and communicate our experience of the world. English constantly asks us to distinguish between what was, what is, and what will be. I don't think this means that English speakers experience time in some fundamentally different way from everybody else, but it is interesting that time is built so explicitly into the way that we communicate.
And perhaps that makes it particularly natural to frame our own lives in the same way.
Why is this process not happening fast enough?
Why am I not becoming the person that I want to be faster?
We take the person that we are now, imagine the person that we will be, and then place some distance of time between the two. Once you do that, it becomes very easy to feel as though you are late.
But late relative to what?
Anya
Travelling to Chennai in 2017 as a young musician introduced me to Anya (not her real name), a woman and fellow classical musician more than a decade my senior from California. In my eyes, she became a mentor and in some sense, a big sister figure. Our initial interaction at dinner after a rehearsal resulted in a fun picture, but little did I know it would spark an intriguing journey into superstitions.
My friend’s mother, steeped in Indian beliefs, who often treated me as one of her own, examined the photo and arbitrarily concluded that Anya had endured a difficult childhood, a tumultuous period in her 20s and 30s, and was supposed to marry in her early 30s.
I was skeptical.
So during a casual conversation about superstition, I decided to ask Anya about her life. To my surprise, an uncanny amount of what my friend’s mother had said seemed to correspond with what Anya told me.
Anya's upbringing was tumultuous, born from a one-night stand in a broken household. Her mom, twenty-two at the time, had a sister six years her senior. Chaos ensued, and they ended up homeless until a boyfriend threw them out. Anya’s dad, reluctantly, allowed them to sleep on his couch, but that arrangement never lasted. Consequently, Anya grew up with her dad, struggled through illness in high school, and battled a mild drug problem in college while working at a chemical company.
Anya's journey to a PhD was marked by humiliation. It took her a decade, and undergraduates finished before her. Her life had been a series of setbacks, including a canceled engagement due to violence.
And then something changed.
Anya rapidly ascended the corporate ladder in her late 30s. Every six months, she secured a new promotion, eventually holding a vice-president position in her early 40s.
Whether my friend’s mother actually saw something in that photograph, got extraordinarily lucky, or I simply remember the coincidences more vividly than the misses isn't really the important part of the story.
The important part is Anya.
Imagine looking at her life halfway through it.
A difficult childhood. Illness. Drugs. A PhD that took a decade. A failed engagement. People younger than her passing her by.
If you froze her life at that particular moment, it would have been very easy to construct a story about who she was and where she was going.
And it would have been wrong.
It doesn't matter how long it takes to achieve success or become the person you aspire to be. Anya’s tale exemplifies resilience and eventual triumph.
In the end, Anya's current success overshadows the difficulties she faced. Every new acquaintance she makes at her current vice-president level is blissfully unaware of the hardships she overcame.
Life
It doesn't matter how long it takes to become the person you want to be or how long it takes for you to accomplish something.
One of the things that my mom told me when I was very young was that there was a chance that I might have been born in France.
My mom grew up in 1970s India alongside her sister and my grandparents. My grandfather was a pilot for the Indian Air Force, and very early during his wildly successful career, around the early 90s, he was offered a job from Air France and the chance to permanently relocate to France. I remember my mother telling me that he almost took that job but was persuaded by the Air Force to stay in India.
Had my mother moved to 1990s France, that instance of her existence and her very being would have been vastly different.
I remember asking my mother if she thought she’d be a different person if she moved to France. Now the answer to this question seems fairly obvious, but the point was to try and assess the degree of difference in who she might have been that would have stemmed from having lived at a different place, at a different time. And I wanted to know if that difference would have mattered.
She thought it would have mattered because everybody around her would have been thinking differently, and when everyone else around you is thinking a certain way, you inevitably become a product of some of that.
I didn't quite understand it until I realized that had I been born in a different time and in a different place, I would be a different person in almost every meaningful sense.
In essence, you are not just the sum of your experiences, but you are also the interpretation of those experiences.
You see a lot of turmoil going on across the globe, particularly across the West, and people get very upset over ideas here and there.
However, what's interesting is that many of the ideas we consider fundamental to who we are are contingent on circumstances we never chose.
Had you been born a hundred years earlier, you would probably believe different things. Had you been born thousands of miles away, surrounded by different people, speaking another language, you would probably believe different things.
This doesn't mean that the ideas you have now aren't yours.
They are yours.
But they were not inevitable.
The person that you want to be is, in some sense, a figment of your imagination. It is a product of all the experiences that you've had in your life and how you've interpreted them at this current point in time.
Had you been born at a different place and at a different time, the person that you'd want to be would be different because you would be a different person.
Your physical aspect is one part of you, but the ideas embodied in you based on how you were brought up, the people around you, the language you speak, and the particular point in history in which you happened to exist would have been completely different.
That doesn't make those ideas meaningless. And it doesn't mean that nothing about you is really yours.
It means that you are neither some fixed person waiting to be discovered nor simply a product of everything that has happened to you.
You are also the person interpreting those things.
And that interpretation changes.
The person you think you ought to become at twenty may not be the person you want to become at thirty. The things that seem catastrophically late today may eventually become insignificant details in the story you tell about yourself.
Anya could have looked at the people finishing before her and concluded that she was behind. Years later, somebody meeting her as a vice-president would have no idea that there had ever been a race to begin with.
Maybe that's the mistake.
We imagine a person that we want to become, place that person somewhere in the future, and then punish ourselves for not arriving there quickly enough.
But the destination itself is changing because we are changing.
So it doesn't matter how long it takes to become the person you want to be.
By the time you get there, you may want to be somebody else.
And that's fine.
Had you been born in a different place and a different time, you would not be you.
The strange thing is that the same is true of time itself.
Had you arrived at your destination earlier, you might not have been the person capable of appreciating it once you got there.