Who Gets to Define Me?

Part of me feels like I don’t really know myself. Or maybe it’s not that simple. I’ve been placed in so many different roles, in so many different environments, that I’ve learned to adapt depending on where I am and who I’m around. If you asked ten different people who I am, you’d probably get ten different answers.

And none of them would be completely wrong. But none of them would be complete either.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone really knows me. Then I catch myself and ask:

Is that truth — or ego?

Is it honest to believe that I’m too complex to be understood? Or is that just another way of telling myself I’m different, special in a way that separates me from everyone else?

That question always leads me somewhere else. We live in a time where people are increasingly eager to define one another.

“Narcissist” is one of those words I hear constantly now.

It gets thrown around so casually that you’d think it applied to half the population. And I’m not saying narcissists don’t exist — they do. But the way the word is often used today, it feels less like a diagnosis and more like a weapon.

A shortcut. A way to reduce someone down to something easier to understand, easier to dismiss. Because once someone is labeled, you no longer have to wrestle with their complexity.

You don’t have to ask questions.

You don’t have to sit with discomfort.

You don’t have to consider the possibility that they might be more than the worst thing you’ve experienced from them.

The label does all the work for you. And maybe that’s the problem. People are rarely that simple. We’re layered. Contradictory. Capable of being thoughtful in one moment and selfish in another. We make mistakes. We grow. We regress. We try again.

But labels don’t leave much room for that.

They freeze people in place. And once someone is frozen, it becomes easier to judge them than to understand them. I’ve caught myself doing it too. Assigning meaning to someone before I’ve taken the time to really see them. Assuming I understood the whole story based on a single chapter.

It’s easier that way. But easier doesn’t mean accurate. Maybe we’re all just trying to make sense of one another with limited information. Maybe labels are the quickest way to do that. But quick understanding often comes at the cost of real understanding. And if I’m being honest, I don’t want to be reduced to a word.

I don’t want to be defined by a moment. Or a mistake. Or someone else’s interpretation of me.

So maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to do that to others. Maybe the work is harder than that. Maybe it requires patience. Maybe it requires curiosity. Maybe it requires grace. Maybe it requires us to accept that people are more complicated than we’d like them to be.

That every person we meet is carrying experiences we know nothing about. That no single label can fully capture a human life.

And maybe that includes me.

Maybe the goal isn’t to perfectly define ourselves or one another. Maybe the goal is simply to remain open enough to keep learning.

Because people change. People surprise us.

And sometimes the most honest thing we can say about another person is this:

There’s more to them than I know.

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This post was previously published on Kojo Addo’s blog.

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