Who Are We?

There's a song in the musical 'Les Miserables' sung by Jean Val Jean where he says, "Who am I?...I'm Jean Val Jean!" The song then rises to a crescendo to finish with him singing "Who am I? 24601!" Thus declaring to Inspector Javert and the rest of the world that he can no longer hide and he must face who he is and his criminal past. When done well this song is one of the highlights of the musical and if you've not heard it then you are missing out, even if you don't like musicals.

However I didn't want to discuss the relative merits of 'Les Miserables', I wanted to talk about that line in the song, asking, "Who am I?" Mainly because it has been running through my head all day and I've been whistling it a lot, but it has caused me to think.

I seem to ask that question of myself an awful lot but haven't ever really come up with a definitive answer. I haven't found my crescendo yet, if you see what I mean. My problem with this is that I've lived for almost 19 years and have no idea who I am and am only just beginning to be able to answer that question.

I'm sure I'm not the only one either. People say you go to University to discover who you are and that's fair enough because it's a good place where you can finally be yourself and relax. However I don't think this should be the case, we should be able to find out who we are a lot earlier than that. I know that humans take a really long time to reach maturity anyway but I don't think that we should be finding out who we are just as we set out into the world on our own.

From my experience the problem lies in trying too hard to fit in and being afraid of people and I don't know as to whether there's anything that can actually be done to change this so that future generations aren't as stuck. There probably are many fortunate people though who are born confident and unafraid who can look straight at the world and know where they want to be in it. Good for them to be honest, maybe more people should be like that. Maybe more people are like that than I'm actually aware of. I wouldn't know I'm still sort of afraid of people.

As for that question, "Who am I?" I'll continue to ask myself and continue to slowly discover as I move through life. I hope that you reading this are able to answer that question for yourself and if you're any younger than 18 and can answer that question, you're one of the fortunate confident ones, congratulations.