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WHEN you were born, your parents gave you a name. Something that you will be known as for the rest of your life.
However, although this may be your official title, as you go through life a little tagline or slogan usually gets added on. This is what people consider to be your defining factor and it is what they will use to describe you to others.
This can vary immensely depending on who you are talking to. It can range from something as bog-standard as “your cousin’s neighbour friend” to something a little more logical.
Well, I’m not sure if logic always comes into it, as some people are ‘defined’ as something they did once in primary school, or perhaps something they did ‘under the influence’, so to speak.
What am I defined as you may ask? Well, it definitely varies. For anyone who is over 40, I am ‘Orla Diffily’s daughter’ or perhaps I am ‘that TraleeToday columnist’ to a lot of others. Among my own age group, I am ‘that YouTuber girl’. To strangers, I am ‘that blonde’.
I definitely don’t have the ability to sum myself up in a few words, and I doubt that you do either. I don’t expect people to refer to my life’s biography when they want to mention me in a sentence, but it can feel oddly belittling to hear how people describe you.
From a personal level, whenever someone defines me as that YouTuber girl, I want to crawl into a very large hole and bury myself there for a little while. I guess that may just be a typical teenager embarrassment phase, but it got me wondering, how do people want to be defined?
None of us could plausibly agree to what the priest will read as our eulogy, and no one wants the words of our greatest critics to be scrawled across our tombstone either.
It’s like how Kim Kardashian will forever be known for her sex tape, how Ariana Grande will always be the one who licked that doughnut and how Taylor Swift is known as a snake; people like to put others in boxes, and this is where these celebrities fall.
You can’t blame people for wanting to put you in a category. It’s a natural human instinct, we like to label things and file them away in neat little boxes for safekeeping. I suppose you just have to take it as a compliment because people just can’t process your level of extraordinary brilliance and originality. (At least that’s what I tell myself when the teenage “delete all your accounts and move to Yemen” mode kicks in…)
Trying to change your tagline just for the sake of the sad few is a futile arrangement. You can’t choose it, and you can’t control it, but I guess you can deal with it.
I guess you could also go for the nuclear option of heading off and marrying someone famous and forever being known as ‘someone’s wife/husband’…I hear Brad Pitt’s available.
Liezi, Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living:
“Some people think they can find satisfaction in good food, fine clothes, lively music, and sexual pleasure. However, when they have all these things, they are not satisfied. They realize happiness is not simply having their material needs met. Thus, society has set up a system of rewards that go beyond material goods. These include titles, social recognition, status, and political power, all wrapped up in a package called self-fulfilment. Attracted by these prizes and goaded on by social pressure, people spend their short lives tiring body and mind to chase after these goals. Perhaps this gives them the feeling that they have achieved something in their lives, but in reality they have sacrificed a lot in life. They can no longer see, hear, act, feel, or think from their hearts. Everything they do is dictated by whether it can get them social gains. In the end, they’ve spent their lives following other people’s demands and never lived a life of their own. How different is this from the life of a slave or a prisoner?”