We are little more than a kaleidoscope. As individuals, our identity is purely comprised of different shades and tones, habits and principles, that we derive from each other. We are each a distinct color derived from the artist that is divine benevolence.
There is a room you live in before you live anywhere else. It has no walls you can touch, no door you can see, and yet its dimensions determine everything: how far you’re willing to reach, how much space you believe you deserve, how tall you allow yourself to stand. It’s built entirely of self-imposed adjectives.
I have too many accounts across the internet, profiles on platforms I barely remember signing up for. Each demands a bio. I often leave these blank, or collapse them into a link to my personal website, sometimes adding a dash of interests or niches. I tell myself it’s to maintain some aura of mysteriousness, but the truth is simpler and more uncomfortable: I have not a clue what to put in that box but a collection of oft repeated words. Student. Builder. Curious. The adjectives feel both too reductive and uncomfortably definitive.
In both of these notions – of our identity and how we portray it to others – there is a process of casting introspection into language. The kaleidoscope contains multitudes: every shade we’ve absorbed from the people we’ve known, every principle we’ve tested and kept, every habit formed through repetition and circumstance. In recognizing this, we realize we are made up of so much. But in attempting to describe it, we discover that we cannot enumerate it. The colors are too numerous, the patterns too complex. So we reduce. We select a few adjectives and pretend they capture the whole.
The problem isn’t that these words are wrong. It’s that saying them makes them true in ways I didn’t intend. Language has a gravitational pull.
1.
Imagine someone who calls themselves an introvert. I’m a shy person, pretty anxious too. Not as a complaint, just as fact. The way you would say you are left-handed or that you have brown eyes. Two simple adjectives, spoken so often they calcify into something that feels biological, immutable.
Because they believe it, they live it.This idea resembles manifestation, but working in reverse. Manifestation has become TikTok mainstream now, but I think it’s simply us recognizing this phenomenon of self-imposed beliefs. What we analyze ourselves to be is what we converge into becoming. Every social interaction becomes a data point to be catalogued. The party where they stayed quiet becomes proof. The meeting where they didn’t speak up becomes confirmation. The moments they did engage – moments of genuine connection, of ease, of forgetting themselves entirely – these get filtered out, forgotten, deemed exceptions to the rule. Anomalies in an otherwise consistent dataset.
It forms a negative feedback loop of remarkable elegance. Our identities crave consistency above all else. We want to be coherent to ourselves, to others, to the narrative we’ve constructed about who we are. So we filter. We select. We highlight every moment that confirms the adjective and discard every moment that contradicts it. The kaleidoscope, which once displayed infinite arrangements, begins to favor certain patterns. Certain colors. The adjectives preserve themselves through this careful curation. The room shrinks, imperceptibly at first, and then all at once. And we call it home.
Now consider institutional adjectives. An undergraduate who declares themselves a chemist isn’t merely selecting a major. They are installing a perceptual filter through which every piece of information that enters their awareness must pass. Is this relevant to chemistry? No? Then it’s not for me. The filter is efficient. It conserves attention. It creates the conditions for depth.
There is obvious power in this kind of focus. Specialization begets excellence. You cannot master everything, and the person who tries to master everything masters nothing. The chemist who spends their evenings reading philosophy and their weekends studying art history might be interesting at dinner parties, but they will not be the one who makes the breakthrough in their field. Or so the logic goes.
But there is also a quiet violence in forgetting that you are more than your work. The kaleidoscope narrows to a single dominant hue. This is why I find LinkedIn unsettling. Not the platform itself – platforms are neutral, they simply reveal what we choose to emphasize – but rather the people who seem to exist only as their titles. Product Manager. Founder. Ex-Google. The institutional adjectives stacked like credentials, like proof of existence. As if removing the affiliation would leave nothing behind but empty space where a person should be.
I watch people introduce themselves at conferences, at networking events, at parties that feel too much like networking events. “I’m a software engineer at Meta.” Not “I’m someone who loves solving puzzles” or “I’m someone who can’t stop thinking about systems.” The institution comes first, and the self – if it appears at all – comes as an afterthought.
I think about doctoral programs differently, though perhaps this is naïve. Completing a PhD, especially in applied sciences, requires exposure to countless adjacent fields. It demands foundational skills that transcend any single discipline: writing that clarifies rather than obscures, reading that extracts signal from noise, analysis that holds complexity without collapsing it. These skills round a person into something more than their specialty. The best academics I’ve encountered are deeply, almost embarrassingly curious about domains far outside their expertise. They ask questions that reveal they’ve been thinking about your field in their spare time, for no reason except that it interested them. Their institutional adjective is a home base, not a cage.
2.
If adjectives can constrain us, it follows that they can also be chosen deliberately. We can, in theory, reverse-engineer the feedback loop. We can select the words we want to become true and let them exert their gravitational pull in our favor. We can rotate the kaleidoscope intentionally, favoring patterns that serve us rather than patterns we inherited.
The problem is that most self-imposed adjectives are inherited rather than chosen. From parents who meant well, from peers who didn’t know any better, from the first time someone told us what we were good at or bad at and we believed them because we had no reason not to. You’re the smart one. You’re not athletic. You’re a natural leader. We absorb these assessments before we have the language to question them, before we understand that an observation is not a prophecy.
By the time we’re old enough to interrogate these labels, they’ve already done their work. The smart one has stopped trying in gym class. The non-athletic one has learned to dread physical challenges. The natural leader has internalized that their value lies in their ability to direct others. The adjectives have become self-fulfilling, not because they were true to begin with, but because believing them made them true.
Choosing your adjectives, then, means first interrogating the ones you already carry. You have to ask whether something is actually true or whether you’ve just collected enough evidence to make it feel true. The evidence is always there if you’re looking for it. Confirmation bias is remarkably efficient, and the mind is excellent at pattern recognition even when no pattern exists.
I’ve started trying something. When I catch myself saying “I’m not a [blank] person,” I try to pause and notice whether that’s a description or a prescription. Not a morning person, not a math person, not someone who’s good at small talk. Am I observing a pattern in my behavior, or am I creating a boundary around what I’m willing to attempt?
The distinction matters enormously. Patterns can be changed through deliberate practice, through exposure, through the simple act of trying again and noticing when the old pattern doesn’t hold. Prescriptions feel permanent. They carry the weight of identity, of truth, of something fundamental about who you are. And that weight makes them immovable.
3.
There’s a deeper question underneath all of this, one that makes me uncomfortable every time I approach it. What remains when you strip away all the adjectives? If I am not a student, not a builder, not curious or ambitious or introverted, what’s left?
The answer might be: not much. Or at least, not much that’s easy to articulate. We are, in some sense, nothing more than the accumulation of our habits and tendencies and the stories we tell about them. Remove the adjectives and you remove the coherent narrative that makes a person recognizable, to themselves and to others.
But I don’t think that’s quite right either. There’s something underneath the adjectives that persists even as the descriptors change. Call it a core, call it a self, call it consciousness or soul or whatever metaphysical framework feels true to you. The person who was “shy” at fourteen and “outgoing” at twenty-four is still, in some fundamental way, the same person. The adjectives were always provisional. They described a state, not an essence.
This is where the kaleidoscope metaphor returns, where it reveals its full meaning. We are composed of the same fundamental elements – the same capacity for thought, for emotion, for connection – but these elements arrange themselves differently depending on context, on circumstance, on which adjectives we’ve given permission to define us. The shades and tones remain constant: the kindness absorbed from a friend, the determination learned from failure, the curiosity that has always been there. But the pattern they form shifts with each rotation, with each new adjective we choose or discard. The colors remain the same. The patterns shift.
The healthiest relationship with identity, then, is to hold it loosely. To use adjectives as tools rather than truths. To let them be descriptive of where you are, not prescriptive of where you can go. The room you live in should have doors you can open and walls you can move. It should be a place of temporary shelter, not permanent confinement.
This is, of course, easier to say than to practice. I still catch myself defaulting to old adjectives, still feel the gravitational pull of familiar self-descriptions. The words are comfortable in their familiarity. They make me predictable, which makes me legible to others and to myself. There’s a kind of safety in being able to say “I’m not that kind of person” and having it be true.
But the words I use about myself are not neutral. They’re not just reflecting reality. They’re shaping it, slowly, with every repetition. Each time I tell myself I’m not a morning person, I give myself permission to hit snooze. Each time I introduce myself through an institution, I reinforce the idea that my value is tied to my affiliation. The adjectives are not observations. They are instructions.
The question, then, is not whether you will have adjectives. You will. Language demands categories, and identity demands language. The question is whether you will choose them deliberately, with awareness of their power and their limitations, or whether you will let them choose you. Whether you will let inherited assessments become permanent truths, or whether you will treat them as provisional, subject to revision, open to renegotiation.
The room has no walls you can touch. But you can still decide how far you’re willing to reach.
Speak it into existance! Credited to Matilda Wong.