A friend sent me a post he had written about becoming athletic in his thirties. He had spent most of his twenties building a career and had decided somewhere along the way, without examining the decision, that sport was simply not who he was. He carried that assumption for a decade without once testing whether it was true.
I wrote back with something my grandmother used to say, or the closest I can get to it in English, that identity is not a fixed inheritance but a horizon.
Sometimes the versions of ourselves we have not met yet are waiting for us to become curious enough to go looking for them. I have returned to that exchange since, because we do this constantly and rarely catch ourselves at it, reducing ourselves and each other to whatever quality is most visible from the outside: the ambitious one, the creative one, the scientist, the parent, the environmentalist. The labels are rarely wrong in themselves; the difficulty begins when a description hardens into a boundary.
Take the word environmentalist, around which we have built an archetype. We picture someone who recycles religiously, avoids plastic, knows their carbon footprint and can explain exactly why the cup in your hand is a problem. Consequently, anyone who does not recognise themselves in that picture concludes, reasonably enough, that environmental responsibility belongs to somebody else. Caring about the environment has never required adopting a particular identity, and someone can love fashion, travel, and good food and still care deeply about the planet.
The part I find hardest to sit with is that we rarely choose these categories at all. Most were assigned to us early, by families deciding which child was practical and which the dreamer, by schools sorting us into sciences or arts at 15, and by workplaces that reward the one thing we already do well and have little use for the rest. We then spend our adult lives defending conclusions reached by people who no longer remember reaching them, mistaking conditioning for character.
Human beings are more layered than that. We are contradictory and adaptive creatures; we can be rational and spiritual, comfortable in a boardroom and happiest halfway up a mountain, and none of those discoveries makes an earlier version of us less real. Interestingly, the pressure to become legible only increases with age, until we begin demanding the same certainty of ourselves that everyone else does. I suspect "I am not that kind of person" is one of the most consequential sentences we tell ourselves, because it closes a door before we have looked at what is behind it.
What I want instead is a combination we rarely attempt, which is to be entirely unapologetic about what we already are and still curious about what we might also be. Certainty without curiosity closes a person down, and curiosity without conviction never settles long enough to become anything. So perhaps it is time I reintroduced myself. Hi, I am Rumaitha, and I am a multipotentialite. I love science and writing, climate and adventure, energy and football, and the pleasure of being a complete beginner at something I know nothing about, and I have stopped needing to make any of them more legitimate than the rest. The woman who told me identity was not an inheritance is the person I inherited the thought from, a contradiction I am happy to leave standing. Which leaves me with the question I have been putting to myself, and now to you: what have you decided is not you, without ever finding out?
Rumaitha al Busaidi
The writer is an environmental strategist and advocate for sustainable development.
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