Write About Your Identity

by Carlie Gausch

Write about your identity.

If you had asked me this a week ago, I would have described the person I was a year ago or maybe two years ago. Someone who is outgoing, enjoys talking to people, fills her day with friends, and is always ready to tell jokes. I would have described a person who wanted to be someone people knew on campus. A year ago, I was someone that faculty, students, really anybody, might know.

August 2019, Leadership Training in the Tompkins College Center Conference Room:

As part of our group leadership training, which brings together Resident Advisors, First Year Mentors, Admissions Ambassadors, Leadership Consultants, and Inclusion Advocates, we were asked to pick adjectives for one another to write on our name tags.

The room is packed, and we all sit in stiff black chairs lined up row by row to fit the sixty or so of us who are there. It’s early in the afternoon and the sun streams through a wall made of windows. I am so tired; I’ve been in this training since 9 am.

I am nineteen years old in this moment. My hair is brown-black and mid-length that goes a few inches past my shoulders. I’ve been growing it out. When it is long enough (and goes past about the middle of my back), I plan to bleach and dye it some fun color like a vibrant purple or blue. I did that once before during my junior year of high school. My hair was long then too. I’m pale. Despite coming in from the summer months, I never got much of a tan because I spent my days in an office as a content department intern.

In the Conference Center, I ask some of my fellow First Year Mentors, who I am becoming friends with, to pick some words to describe me. There were words already written down on my name tag, a white rectangle with a blue border, that I had chosen for myself: dedicated, outspoken, funny, but the point of the exercise is to have other people choose descriptors. My friend tells me I am “peppy,” and I’m surprised at this. No one has ever described me as peppy. Outgoing? Maybe. Spirited? Sometimes. But peppy? I was the falcon mascot at a pep rally once on campus. Could that have been what she meant? I cannot say. I take the word for myself, and I write it down in black sharpie on my name tag.

If you had asked me this five months ago, I would have described a person simply existing in a waiting period. Stuck in my house under quarantine and trying to connect with my friends and my (now ex) girlfriend through the screen of my phone. A person waiting for situations to change so she could be who she was one year ago, two years ago, the person who a friend called peppy.

May 2020, at home in Reading, PA, upstairs in the bedroom I have lived in since I was twelve:

The ceiling of my bedroom is slanted and painted blue; two halves meet in the middle at a thin strip where the ceiling becomes flat. Along the walls, wooden paneling caves in at the corners to form built-in bookshelves in three of four corners. I love this feature in my room, but I never appreciate it enough. I have been home for about two months now. Classes have only just ended.

I am twenty years old. I celebrated my birthday a month ago stuck inside these four walls as I stared at the pixelated faces of friends over Zoom. My hair is long and still growing, only now it’s completely black. I dyed it a few weeks into quarantine. I’ve lost weight in the past year. My sister Amanda complimented me on it, but that only made me feel uncomfortable. I wasn’t trying to lose weight, so why should I be congratulated? I’ve started to develop a tan. I spend most of my days in my parents’ pool and read.

Right now, though, I am upstairs. My ceiling light is off (it’s never very bright even when it's on), but I have a small Edison light that stands on the floor next to me and illuminates about a three-foot diameter. I sit on the floor cross-legged. Around me, lay cardboard with paint marks all over it, brushes sitting in scummy paint water that is days old, and a rectangular piece of cardboard that I am painting. I glue down handmade paper that I made my freshman year during a campus art workshop. I search for individual letters to make quotes from songs, books, anything that comes to mind at the time. I take my pick of images to cut out of magazines (the magazines my mom had on hand were a LEGO magazine, HGTV, and one on lighting fixtures so my choices were endless of course). The results are bright and chaotic, but at that time I can’t care to think things through. I don’t really like thinking right now. Thinking means facing how I feel, and how I feel...well, I try not to think about it. It’s cyclical.

I’ve gotten weird in quarantine, and all I can bring myself to make are odd collages. I have become weird in the sense that I listen to angry music too loudly. Weird in the sense that I cry in my car outside of my sister Nicole’s house when she refuses to give me a shag haircut that she has no idea how to cut. Weird isn’t the right word. I’ve become more emotional. More anxious. More isolated. My collages are odd in the sense that they come from no planning. Odd in the sense that one features a LEGO Chewbacca and an image of a pink patterned rug. Odd is the right word.

I’ve just fought with my girlfriend; it’s happened so many times recently I don’t bother counting. We’re not texting because, frankly, I can’t stand her right now. I’m listening to music by Frank Iero (lead guitarist of American rock band My Chemical Romance. I'm going through my emo phase in quarantine about seven years too late). There’s this one line that stands out in one of his songs: I’ve got time to burn. It’s almost laughable because it feels like that’s all I have. Time. But it’s not funny, it just fucking sucks.

I sit and pass time. I swim and pass time. I read and pass time. I fight with my loved ones and pass time. I am a person who passes time.

But you asked me this question today. I do not know who I am anymore. I am a person whose days have blurred together this month. A person who no longer recognizes herself. I cannot tell you who I am right now. Because the person I have been in the last year? I don’t want to be her. I have been a person who picks fights with her (now ex) girlfriend over nothing, a person who ignores her friends even though she knows that everyone is having a horrible time right now between being isolated and stuck on this campus for too long. I am a person who hasn’t had a good day in weeks. I am a person who is scared of when her next good day will be. I am a person who is scared that maybe she can’t have good days anymore.

Last month blurred together for me in a scary way.

October 2020, inside my dorm room:

Two twin beds pushed together to make one. Stuffed animals cover one side, I lay on the other. A pink, yellow, and purple tie-dyed tapestry has been put up to take up space. I lay in bed, taking up space. Walls hold photos of friends, family, and my girlfriend. I can see myself in the mirror when I twist my head around.

I am still twenty. My hair is shorter now. I cut it during an anxiety attack in my sister Amanda’s bathroom with crappy kid’s scissors. It is also an ugly fading green from when I bleached and dyed my hair a month ago. I have lost even more weight. That feels worse. I don’t like thinking about my body anymore. I don’t like thinking.

I feel waves of anxiety roll over me, and I focus on my worst thoughts like the book I borrowed from my girlfriend that I never finished. It was The God of Small Things. What I remember, and have been thinking about for months, is the line that says something about how hurtful words and actions make people love us a little less. I think of the moments I began to love her a little less. I think of the moments I know she started to love me a little less.

I think of the moments that make me love myself a little less. I want to stop thinking.

Every day is wake, work, eat (don’t eat from anxiety), class, eat (maybe), class, schoolwork, sleep. Wake. Repeat. Wake. Repeat.

Write about your identity.

I want you to ask me again in a week. Ask me again in two months. Ask me again in eight months, even better. Because it took me about the last eight months to completely lose touch with myself. It took me about eight months to wake up and realize I don’t want to lose people, don’t want my life to be at a standstill, don’t want to be so fucking miserable every day. I have to make a lot of changes, and I’m trying, but I know this takes time. I know becoming a person I’m happy with will take time. I do not know who that girl will be in a week, two months, eight months, but I know she will be me. There will be a me to rave about and brag about. I do not know who she is, but I know she will be amazing.

So, I don’t have an answer to give you about who I am. Not really. I can tell you who I was, who I’ve been. But ask me again. Ask me again.

Carlie Gausch is a senior English literature and American history double major from Reading, Pennsylvania. She is the senior editor of Pitch. She can be found in Hartzel Hall, the Marcia Walsh Alumnae Museum, or getting bubble tea.