Señorita Ruth on: Self-Identity

Tell me a lit­tle about your­self
I’m always hard-pressed to fill in an “About Me” blurb or make an effort to “Tell [you] about [my]rself.” It’s cer­tainly not an easy ques­tion to answer, and the more I think about it, the more com­pli­cated it gets. My reac­tion to such tasks is always the same: “Oh man. Where do I begin?”
Encom­pass­ing even some part, much less the entirety, of one’s being is chal­leng­ing for many rea­sons. Self-identity is an abstract that is often hard to artic­u­late suc­cess­fully. How we view our­selves is depen­dent on out­side fac­tors and vari­ables, many of which we have no con­trol over. We inter­nal­ize events around us, absorb­ing their effects on us and draw­ing con­clu­sions about our­selves based on those expe­ri­ences.
Self-identity is a com­plex mat­ter. Not only is the aver­age señorita plagued with ques­tions of body image and ade­quacy as a per­son and a woman, but she is also bom­barded with the meta con­ver­sa­tions regard­ing these issues. Whether or not I should be wor­ried about my weight, hair, the con­di­tion of my skin or how much money is in my wal­let; it can all get rather con­fus­ing with experts and the media also weigh­ing in. After all, the only way to get a good idea of who we might be is by look­ing at our reflec­tion on the mir­ror of soci­ety. But the images we receive as feed­back are often blurry, out of focus, or wholly ques­tion­able.
So, who or what are we?
Humans exist as a para­dox between being unique and being just like every­one else. Our indi­vid­u­al­ity is both pre­cious and com­mon­place, as it is the most impor­tant jour­ney we embark on, but only to our­selves. We talk about our­selves the most, we think about our own sit­u­a­tions more than any­one else’s, and we view the world in an ego-centric way, one that often seeks out the ben­e­fit to the self above all else.
Con­trast­ing with our self inter­est in the name of sur­vival, we’re also social crea­tures who depend on each other for many of our needs and wants. We’ve cre­ated count­less cul­tures and soci­eties to ful­fill needs that we can’t achieve on our own. Within these social groups we develop hier­ar­chies, social net­works, con­ven­tions, com­mon ground and shared expe­ri­ences, and many other indexes by which we iden­tify with oth­ers.
Lan­guage is a telling marker of iden­tity. We eval­u­ate oth­ers by their speech, and are in return also dis­sected by the things we say. Words and spe­cific ways of say­ing them announce to oth­ers where we’re from, our age group, our socio-economic sta­tus, and also betrays some of our world view. This rec­i­p­ro­cal index­ing occurs with nary a con­scious thought, most of the time, and we oper­ate in our day to day lives exact­ing very lit­tle effort to com­mu­ni­cate our needs and wants.
So, really, tell me about your­self
A quirky grad stu­dent in the busi­ness of mak­ing obser­va­tions about our lan­guage and cul­ture. An immi­grant with dual cit­i­zen­ship who’s been in the U.S. for over 15 years. A desert rat, born and bred all along the sands of north­ern Mex­ico and the south­west­ern U.S. A mother, sis­ter, daugh­ter. An aspir­ing writer inter­ested in art, music, pol­i­tics, and many other things.

This space is an expres­sion of all those things, an analy­sis of what makes you, you and me, me. If you know the com­plex­i­ties self-identity in the South­west, stick around, I’m hop­ing to unravel some of those intri­cate tapes­tries. If you don’t know what it’s like, stick around, and gain new insight into the peo­ple and places of this sig­nif­i­cant Amer­i­can region.