When in your life have you gone through a massive shift in identity? Are you undergoing one right now, like me?

Today is the first day of the last week of being a “highschooler”. In t-minus 4 days-minus 2 hours, I will be sitting in the graduation rows of my school gymnasium. Add those two hours back, and I will likely be on the way to Pizza Express to celebrate the true end of my highschool experience.

It’s an exciting time; it is a scary time; it is a fulcrum point.

What do I mean by that? What do I mean when I say “fulcrum point”?

(Truth be told, it’s some dramatic language I picked up from playing to the end of Deus Ex: Human Revolution twice over.)

A “fulcrum point” is what I see in my mind: the point where a scale balances, or where a see-saw… see-saws.

Up to now, I have played a balancing act: I have juggled my occupation as a highschool student as the counterbalance to my hopes, dreams and aspirations; it has been the counterbalance to the person who I have seen – and continue to see – myself becoming.

When I reach that fulcrum point, I will be letting go of an identity. A reluctant identity, but an identity nonetheless. I am offsetting the scales and sending them all the way onto one side: that of my unrestrained hopes, dreams and aspirations.

Amazing, right?

Well… turns out, in my mind, it’s much more complicated than that. I now see much more to my almost-former-identity than I previously realised: I see the structure that it provided me. Even while I protested against it, even while I mourned how it limited my creativity and stole time away from my hopes, dreams and aspirations, it gave me a means to manage my time – albeit poorly – and, more massively, an excuse.

“I can’t work on my website right now, I’ve got to write this lab report on calculating the moles of sodium hydroxide reacted with 100cm3 of 1 mole of hydrochloric acid.”

“After I finish my school work, I just want to relax and play games; it’s using all my energy to work.”

“I’ll get down to business after exams. I’ll have no issues with getting things done once school is out of the way.”

Yet, did I consider that there is more to my ability and capacity to work aside from what currently occupies my time? Did I consider that once my school work was over, I wouldn’t be able to use my excuses to justify my actions – or inaction – to myself?

Honest answer? I did.

I did – I just hoped that they wouldn’t matter when the time was upon me.

My Old World

So, where does this leave me now? It leaves me with an awareness that I now have challenges to overcome that I previously ran from.

I lived in a world of structure and order.

What I wrote had a predetermined structure. The presentations I gave had a predetermined structure. The analyses I did had a predetermined structure. Hell, I write in triptychs because it’s a structure I learned in 9th grade – and the first three sentences I wrote just used the same structure thrice over for dramatic effect.

I lived in a world of defined outcomes.

Everything I did – or was asked to do – involved knowledge of what was asked of me. IB Psychology? I had around 13 learning outcomes for 3 levels of analysis and 2 areas of psychological development and abnormality. IB Chemistry? As long as I knew to specify that the “standard enthalpy of so-and-so” involved one mole of gaseous atoms, I was golden. English? PEAA; point, evidence, analysis, and more analysis, no matter what question was thrown at me.

I lived in a world of predictability: structure ordered the outcomes I had to know to get by.

My New World

So, where does this leave me now? It leaves me with an understanding that I have now challenges to overcome that I previously ran from.

My world is no longer structured nor ordered.

I have no predetermined structure. I can learn them from websites, seminars and trainers, but it is up to me to use them and put them into action. There is nothing to tell me where I should use what, where or when: that is at my discretion. And where I do, I need to beware that it does not mute my voice: I am a man of emotion, empathy and passion with a mind that projects text of unemotional, un-impactful, logical arguments which give me 7s in exams and a click away in the browser tab.

In this new world, I now realise something. Previously, there was a structure I knew well, and content I knew well. It is why I can write what I do now in my own, genuine voice in a stream of consciousness with a sense of flow and structure. Where am I going now? To a place where my heart resides, but without the intuitive structure to share it. I may very well know how to frame your fears and desires into an appealing exposition to get your attention, but only in theory. When I put it into practice, it is too cognitive to allow my heart to speak. When I speak on stage, I think so hard about what I “should” say that I don’t speak what I should say.

My world has no defined outcomes.

This realm has no rubric; it has no mark scheme; it has no puppeteering direction. If I am to be an entrepreneur, I cannot maintain the illusion that every one of my decisions will be of informed certainty. I am in the real world now – a real world where not only is my success not predestined, but a world where people ask what they want and not what they need: where I come from, there is no distinction; what they want for those

[2] points is what they need to see to give me those [2] points.

How do your experiences compare?

Whether you are graduating from highschool like me, are still in the midst of it, or left it behind long ago, we all have to deal with transitions in life.

Isn’t it funny how knowing that it’s coming sometimes makes it no less challenging than change that’s just sprung upon you?

When in your life have you gone through a massive shift in identity? Are you undergoing one right now, like me?

What challenges did it bring? What new freedoms and benefits emerged? 

What did you learn that helped you, and how can it help others?

 I invite you to share your thoughts in the comments!