I used to try, when I was much younger to try and find a group. My mother was Serbian, so for a lot of the time I identified as such, even attempting to learn Serbian. When I got to High School, the early years still held this identification, until I met a bunch of Serbians who were complete dicks.
These, were your stereotypical Serbian teenagers. Aggressive, ignorant and acted disgustingly toward women. I know that's not how all Serbian men act but I got to thinking that I may have been peering into a mirror. If I wanted to end up like them, all I had to do was continue down the path I was on.
I realise this line of thinking was completely irrational, but I still couldn't shake it. So I gave up trying to be Serbian, and just became me. I started to realise that the notion of identity was one that was fluid in a postmodern context.
It's an outdated standard, the identity. When the internet became big, and one day you could be a woman, another a man, the old labels start to fray just so around the edges. For something that is supposedly solid and set in stone to be played with like a tub of play-doh means perhaps these old restrictions, the binds which hold us to our own identities are meant to be broken.
Perhaps in the post-identity world black, white, hispanic, jew, Indian shall be obsolete. It's my hope that this is the case anyhow, but unfortunately we have the media to remind us of the ties that bind us to our past and block our vision of the future.
'Because you are black, you must act in this fashion and speak this particular discourse'
How can something, upon being examined appearing to be so flimsy hold us to our mindsets? It is said that everything in our past informs our current identity and personalities, and we are born with a clean slate. From there, we are told how to feel, how to act and how to present one selves in society with only our personal baggage informing us to our individuality.
I say it is time to stop being told what to wear, what to say, what to act. When I cast off my identity of 'Serbian', I became myself. I became a person whose identity was only informed by my own perceived reality, not some external set of standards.
That's all I've got to say about that.
