How does one identify him or herself as an individual? At first the answer seems readily obvious. As if I should know the answer right away with some laundry list of descriptors, biography, interests, hangups and falling-in-love stories. But as I think about it more I'm struggling with it all.

Inside my network of relationships I am someone different at every particular spoke. To my mother I am one thing and to my best friend I'm another. To my boss I am what I show him, and to an attractive girl it's the same, but both versions of me are completely different. Is it possible then to evaluate my identity based on my relationships when there is no standard version of me true to all of them?

I got thinking about this because I have a friend who is always reminding people to be themselves. He'll say 'just do you right now' or else 'I just gotta do me for a minute.' What he is saying is to take a breath and feel yourself out in the moment. What are you feeling like in this instant and is there any reason you're not all about that right now? He'll say 'Just be you right now' and I have to stop and think, I try to feel me out and then figure out how to make myself even more me.

Even though I mean, and genuinely am, something different to all those relationships I listed above, somehow into all of them I am infusing one universal identity. And that universal, I think, has to do with the spoke in the absolute middle of my social network, my relationship with myself. The more genuine (real) I'm being in all of these relationships has to do directly with how real I'm being with myself.

As I see it the key to identifying myself as a single individual has to do with the removing of societal masks. The ones we all put on when we meet someone new. The ones that may be only an extra layer of make-up or else a thin plastic encasing or even a goblin mask. It's natural and okay to mean different things to different people, but shouldn't we at least mean one thing to ourselves? It's not a laundry list I think, those are for facebook profiles and other people's eyes, afterall we already know all the things listed by heart. I think the answer to my original question is hidden in my friend's advice, 'just do you.' At any given moment tell yourself that and then breathe and figure it out. Every time you come up with an answer you'll smudge off just a bit of that extra make up on your face. The make-up that is lathered on by a society which forces you to look a little bit different to everyone you meet.