Prompt – Trying on Identities
Identity was never a fixed address. Like moving to a new air base, my identity could shift without warning. If one piece of me did not work at this base, I could always try something new at the next one. New school. New hallway. New version of myself walking in before I even knew who I was supposed to be there. Each new place offered another identity, or at least another mask that helped me survive long enough to figure things out.
Some identities arrived assigned and had little to do with my choice. The smart kid. The quiet kid. The redheaded kid. The husky kid. Labels handed out like Oprah handed out cars. I wore them because they were already waiting for me when I showed up. Other identities were experiments. I tried on invisibility first. It felt safe, like maybe shit would hurt less if I stayed small and unnoticed. That identity lasted longer than most and followed me well into adulthood. But invisibility came with a cost. It protected me from harm, yet it also kept me from being fully seen, even by myself.
College was the first time I realized identity could be rewritten on purpose. I remember writing a paper about it, splitting myself into two voices. Rodney was the rule follower, the kid who survived by staying small and predictable. Lj was the observer, the writer, the one willing to question things even when it pissed people off. I did not know it then, but that paper was less about names and more about giving myself permission to exist in more than one way at the same time.
I tried on other identities too. The class clown. The artist. The writer. The badass. The observer. Each version carried risk. Writing meant stepping out of hiding and leaving proof behind. Observing meant noticing patterns that others preferred to ignore. Being the badass let me channel anger that had nowhere else to go, but there was too much anger for everyone, including me.
Looking back, trying on identities was never about pretending to be someone else. It was a quiet form of survival, a way to test the edges of who I could become without losing the parts of me that refused to disappear through all the moves. Some identities were armor. Some were escape routes. Some were honest attempts at becoming whole. But none of them were wasted. They were breadcrumbs left by a younger version of me who did not yet have the experience to know what the hell I was searching for. I do not see those versions as mistakes. They were thresholds. Thin places where one version of me ended and another began, often without ceremony. Identity was never a single choice. It was a slow accumulation of selves, layered over time, until the noise faded enough for me to recognize the one voice that had been there all along, steady and patient, waiting for me to stop trying to become someone else and finally allow myself to arrive.
Muddled Soma 