Who Am I?

Instructions:

• Tell participants you would like them to respond in writing to 10 questions. 

• Then ask them 10 consecutive times to respond to the question "Who am I?" 

• At the end of the "quiz" ask them to cross off 3 of the items

• Then 3 more. 

• Process what types of responses they wrote for their identity (acknowledging that some may have hidden identities that they may not wish to share).

• How did it feel to cross items off? What types of responses were crossed off first/last (e.g. most negative, less important, etc.)? 

• What did you learn about how you see yourself?

Praxis (why + theory):

Like the self-portrait activity, Who Am I? Compelled us to contemplate and assess our self-understanding. We are confronted with myriad competing questions as we ponder: What about myself am I most proud of? What is true about myself versus what are actually the perceptions others hold of me? Who do we want to be versus who can we claim to be?

I like to use this exercise to facilitate an understanding of the ways in which we contain multitudes, and move people to reflect on the feelings that are evoked when we are forced to make ourselves small by obscuring creating hierarchies of our identities, obscuring aspects of ourselves, or erasing them altogether. This sort of narrowing is different from being honest with ourselves about our weaknesses and the areas that are still in development. 

It would be interesting to use this exercise as a pre- and post-survey for a semester-long course or lengthy workshop series. Just to witness how participants' perceptions change and identities evolve.