“So, tell me about yourself.”
The dreaded question; the one I am asked at every job interview, first date, class ice breaker and party. Whenever I am asked this question, my mind tends to go utterly blank: how is one meant to condense their entire being into a few sentences? While I usually begin with some iteration of stating my name and what I study, I struggle to say anything beyond that. This struggle is not founded in a lack of knowledge about my own identity, but the contrary. This question is so difficult because there is too much to say; how do I decide what to express?
Despite its casual nature, this is an extremely layered question. Identity is complex: it is an amalgamation of experiences and interests developed over years of being alive in a particular time and place. However, if someone were to ask me about myself and I responded with that phrase, I would probably be stared at with pure confusion! The “yourself” in this context is not an invitation to hear your life story, but more so, hear the bullet points of one’s most biographical information. In return, I pose the question: Is this really an identity?
This concept is prevalent in interview culture, wherein employers anticipate a certain version of you, and responses that are too personal are seen as being too much or unprofessional. McGill even has a course on the subject in order to help students navigate the complex social sphere that is interview culture: Expressive Analysis. The course’s main focus is to aid students in developing a polished version of themselves for an interview. There is an implicit script the course suggests employers look for: outline your past, present, and future in a way that is coherent, impressive, and easy to digest. Identity, in this sense, is flattened into something strategic and marketable. The goal is not to be fully known, but to be efficiently understood. What emerges is not the complexity of a person, but a carefully edited version of them. This class helps in providing a clean, consolidated version of yourself that is marketable to employers, but is this version necessarily accurate? The answer being given is a performance of one’s own identity—a caricature of who you would be in a corporate setting. Therefore, one has to boil oneself down to a clean cut version of themselves that they find digestible, which feels strange, considering identity formation is a process that happens over the course of a lifetime, and is a constantly changing facet of being alive.
The goal is not to be fully known, but to be efficiently understood.
While I am a product of my most outward traits—I am 20 years old, I am a student and I live in Montreal—I am also a product of my most niche experiences. While those facts are true and have most certainly contributed to who I am in this very moment, they do not say much about me and describe about a third of just the McGill population. As much as my biographical information has made me who I am, so has my seemingly innate love for Victorian literature, the boyband phase I had at 14, the (unfortunate) decision to go blonde after high school, subsequently putting bright red dye over the blonde the next summer, watching La La Land for the first time, and lying in the grass at Jeanne Mance park at 2 am with all of my friends with cheap gas station wine talking about things I cannot even try to remember. Arguably, all of those experiences get closer to the core of who I am than just my age, but if I were to list all these moments when asked, the response would be one of sheer bafflement.
Reducing oneself to generic and biographical information in order to be easy to understand, or being brutally honest and vulnerable in answering this question, and perhaps bombarding the person asking with far too much information.
So really, which approach is the correct one? Reducing oneself to generic and biographical information in order to be easy to understand, or being brutally honest and vulnerable in answering this question, and perhaps bombarding the person asking with far too much information. This is the question I ask myself whenever someone asks me about myself, and after hundreds of deliberations on the topic, I do not think I have a complete answer.
For now, I end up somewhere in between, providing all that biographical information, while maybe including one small niche detail to affirm that I am a person with actual interests. Perhaps one day, when prompted, I will have the courage to delve into how my embarrassing boyband phase made me who I am without fear of confused stares.
