Building an identity

Recently I’ve been feeling the urge to buy some merch from my favorite musicians, Jeremy Zucker and dodie. This was a bit odd for me because I usually only buy things that are strictly functional, not because I’m a lifeless husk but because I feel like I have a better use for that money. I’m also the kind of person who tends to have much stronger emotional connections with abstract things (e.g. conversations I’ve had with a friend) than with anything concrete, like a postcard or other memorabilia. To remind me of memorable experiences, occasionally I will buy small souvenirs -

coaster

– but usually what I’ll do instead is record the experience in my plethora of Google Drive documents and spreadsheets. I’ll write another post about them later, since there’s at least 8 years full of lists and logs to unpack.

But back to the urge to buy merch. Possibly what’s going on is that I’ve already exhausted the amount of “musician commitment” that I can express in the abstract/virtual space: I’ve already listened to their songs a bajillion times, created documents about my favorite songs, transcribed their chord progressions, and watched so many music videos and interviews (and dodie’s ridiculous number of vlogs on her second YouTube channel, doddlevloggle). I should mention here that it’s quite rare for me to become this interested in a single musician; more on why I like them so much at the end of the post.

What’s the point of expressing commitment though? I think it might not be commitment I’m after exactly, but rather giving these musicians a little concrete piece of my identity. That’s why I titled this post “building an identity” (maybe a little reference to dodie’s new album?). I want to display to the world that this is the kind of music I like in order to spread these musicians’ influence and also hopefully find other people who also appreciate them. Not only that, though – I think there is some hope in me that if I have a poster up on my wall and remind myself every day of what is meaningful to me, I can understand myself better and become more like the person I want to be.

jzuck-poster

Jeremy Zucker’s love is not dying poster, sold out :(

dodie-poster

dodie’s tour poster! I think it also just sold out :(

It’s interesting that an identity is something that you build not only by yourself, but also through your interactions with other people and with the world. After all, things don’t make sense without context. I certainly feel like I’ve built a lot of my identity myself because I tend to spend a lot of time exploring my interests on my own. When I was little, almost everything I knew I learned from books – I still do teach myself a lot, although my classes are beating me to it now. But I have been thinking that in order to fully explore the more emotional side of me, I must also seek to find my identity in the people that I surround myself by, including in some sense musical artists like Jeremy Zucker and dodie. This certainly isn’t new to me, but it’s important for me to reflect on finding a good balance between these two sides of my identity.

Especially because I’m at such an academically interesting and challenging university, it’s been easy for me to get sucked into my academic interests. Which is great, honestly, because I’m learning so quickly and getting so much hands-on exposure to practical problems. But there’s definitely still a lot about the interpersonal aspects of myself that I would like to understand better. Although I get along with people pretty well (and since I have a lot of interests, it’s not too hard to find common ground), it’s taking some time for me to find people who share my deep love of analytical subjects, my rampant interests, my desire to understand different perspectives, and my goal to make a broad and efficient social impact. In particular, I really wish I could find people to work on projects with outside of formal classes and research programs. I’m thinking that maybe I’m not searching hard enough, or maybe I don’t understand myself well enough, because I did change quite dramatically (in my opinion) after coming to college. All of this interpersonal identity mumbo-jumbo is pretty interesting and productive to think about, and I definitely should be reflecting these thoughts off of my friends more often to better understand myself and them.

grandma-dodie

The thumbnail for one of my favorite dodie videos (not a representative video, but it is funny).

Maybe the reason why I have been obsessed with dodie so much recently is that I find her music and her personality very interesting, in the sense that she represents an aspect of being human that I would like to understand better. The same goes for Jeremy Zucker, back when I had that phase last year where I would exclusively listen to his music. I think it’s something to do with their sincerity and lyricism that speaks to me on a level that most musicians don’t reach, and that, to some extent, I may be struggling to reach in myself. As a small example, I am very intrigued by the concept of relationships, how they can be tricky and confusing and awful and beautiful, and I’ve been through quite a few experiences myself, but I’ve clearly been through nothing compared to either Jeremy or dodie. And my own understanding of the things that happened has definitely been supplemented significantly by their lyrics. I wish I could be more specific, but this would get too personal.

Ultimately, I think I want to buy merch and put a poster on my wall to remind myself of the deeper emotional and interpersonal aspects of my identity that these musicians helped me discover.