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 be even able to understand or 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 have been transported from me to you, i.e., the person who is receiving this communication, you, in essence, have changed your mind in a way to understand what those words represent. Whether or not you like it, your mind has been changed by those words such that the way that you see the world now includes the existence of those types of 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 the language was time agnostic, meaning they don't conjugate verbs at all and it's also a gender-neutral language and what's interesting about Mandarin is that, if someone who speaks Mandarin is not a native English speaker they say funny things like “I going to the store today” because they don't conjugate verbs, so the notion that you would apply time to an act of doing is very foreign to somebody who's not a native English speaker and especially to somebody who's Chinese.
Now I mention this because if we attach a state of time to the facility of language and if almost every single sentence that you utter, speak, write, or read, has something to do with time, then you would expect that the culture itself that speaks that language in particular, has a very strong association with time, and that's very true when it comes to English.
So here's the thing, if one of your main facilities of communication with other human beings is through either reading, writing, or spoken words and every single sentence has some notion of time attached to it, then no wonder so many people come out and make statements such as “why is this process not happening fast enough?” or “why am I not becoming the person that I want to be faster?”.
This leads to an inherent conflict within a particular person to note that time is not necessarily on their side and they think that no matter what, things are not happening fast enough because such an emphasis has been placed on time in almost everything that they do, including the way that they communicate with others.
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. Despite my skepticism, I decided to test this hypothesis during a casual conversation about superstition. To my surprise, Anya validated every detail my friend’s mother had deduced from her face, let alone a random picture.
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. Despite all this, my friend’s mother’s face-reading foresight proved accurate — Anya rapidly ascended the corporate ladder in her late 30s. Every six months, she secured a new promotion, now holding a vice-president position in her early 40s.
The lesson here is profound. 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. The superstitious predictions based on her face, while initially met with skepticism, turned out to be an uncanny reflection of her past.
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 a 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 the same thing, and when everyone else around you is thinking the same way, you become a product of what that is.
I didn't quite understand it until now when I fully realized that people are not self-aware until they realize that had they been born in a different time and in a different place, they would be a different person, in every 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 one might consider that these ideas may not inherently matter, and individuals might not truly own them. If these people were born in a different time or place, these ideas might not be significant for them. It raises the question of whose ideas these really are as if they are borrowed from someone else, probably, these aren't truly the originators' ideas either.
When it comes down to it, the person that you want to be is only a figment of your imagination and is a product of all of your experiences and how you've interpreted those experiences at that current point in time, because when it comes to being the person that you want to be, who you want to be is 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 and because of that, 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 as a whole would be a completely different person.
Your physical aspect is one part of you, but the ideas that would have been embodied in you based on how you were brought up at a certain point in time would have been completely different.
Some people take an assault on their ideas personally but there's no reason for them to take it personally, there's no reason for the anger behind any assault on anybody's ideas because remember, had you been born in a different place and a different time you would not be you.