Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me on my exploration of the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.
Today’s episode: the concept of “rebranding” yourself and the blurred lines between outward identity and reality.
I know this sort of sounds like I’m thinking about rebranding myself or this podcast, and I’m not, the general concept is just on my mind this week. I’m not even sure what my brand is, so rebranding myself isn’t really on the table right now.
If you’ve been following trends on the internet for any extended amount of time, you’ve seen content creators come and go. You see people go viral for the latest big thing or challenge and then struggle to maintain relevance in the changing tides of the social internet. You see YouTube channels grow their audiences super fast and then run out of ideas as soon as they’ve reached the top. To keep up with changing trends, content creators have to rebrand themselves constantly, and some do it better than others.
But what does it mean to “rebrand?” To change your brand, to change your digital identity. The biggest advice big creators give to people just starting is to just “be yourself,” but what happens when “yourself” isn’t cool and important anymore? A successful content creator’s on-screen persona is almost never who they are in real life, and if it is, it’s because they allow their on-screen persona to change as they change. Content creators who struggle are the ones who put all their eggs in one basket, so to speak, the ones who create their whole identity based on one type of content or one personality trait. They struggle because they might grow and change as people and leave that identity behind, which makes it harder to uphold in content, or the social internet might decide it’s done with that kind of content and move on, leaving the creator stuck in their one brand with no room for movement.
It’s sort of a complicated subject, and I don’t know if I’ve explained it well, but I was thinking about it this week because I was thinking about how interesting it is that we think of ourselves as having a “brand.” We get told to describe ourselves in five words, to list three things our friends would say about us, to label our skills and growth areas, to break ourselves down to our most essential parts. Obviously, some form of self-description is necessary and useful. We want to know ourselves, we want to form social groups based on personality traits, we want to use those five words that describe us to assign us to a career. Humans are obsessed with self-discovery. We’re obsessed with labels.
I’m willing to bet that every single person listening to this has taken some sort of personality or IQ test at some point in their lives. I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs personality test in at least four different classes since I’ve been in high school, plus a couple of other tests too. Each test labels a different set of traits as the most important. Is it the way we make decisions? The way we communicate? How compassionate we are? How we act under stress? How we learn best? What the stars looked like when we were born? How we present ourselves outwardly? The core question, of course, is “Who are you?” and no acronym or list of traits or label is going to be able to answer that question. There are whole branches of psychology dedicated to personality. I mean, even from a very young age, when personality is super different from what you’ll grow up to be, we start getting labelled. Some babies are “easy” or “hard,” some toddlers get labelled “stubborn” or “sweet,” elementary school kids are told to make acrostic poems about themselves out of their names and are called “challenging” or “born leaders.” In middle school and high school, we take personality tests and career aptitude tests to sort us into pathways based on whether we think we might enjoy operating machines or filing papers at age 13.
I went through some old school papers about me to see how I was labelled by my teachers growing up, and what I think about them now. We’ll start with my file from kindergarten, 2008-2009. And because I know a good chunk of my audience is adults, I will give you the next few moments to realize that yes, I was in kindergarten in 2008, I was 5, mhm, I’m a child, okay, moving on. On this interim report from September 2008, so one month into the school year, my teacher said I seemed to “really enjoy making friends” and labelled me a “leader.” My friend group has managed to stay miraculously stable since kindergarten, so I suppose the friends part was true, but leader? Leadership is a skill I meticulously and consciously developed between the ages of 12 and 15, so I’m not sure what my teacher saw in a 5 year old that made her decide I was a leader, but hey, I’m not a kindergarten teacher. What do I know? Also, for some reason, my immunization record is in this file?? It’s incomplete but I feel like it’s important to keep around.
The next significant information I found was from third grade, within the results of an intelligence test we had to take. It was called the Cognitive Abilities Test, or CogAT, and it judged my abilities in verbal, nonverbal, and quantitative categories. I was interested to see the results because this is the test that got me sorted into the Academically and Intellectually Gifted classes, but more importantly, I actually remember a lot of how I perceived myself in third grade, and I was curious to see how these test results lined up with that. As far as I can remember, I’ve struggled with English classes and thrived in math. I always loved to read, but when it came to the kinds of analysis questions we were asked, I consistently felt lost and honestly still do. If anyone wonders why I fought tooth and nail to get out of AP Literature, it’s because of that. One of my self-descriptors has always been a math person. I’m a math person. I prefer math. I’m good at math. I remember telling my friends in second grade that I was good at math and that’s why I liked it. But in the results of this exam, my quantitative abilities, which were the math abilities, were apparently far, far below my verbal and nonverbal skills. Like, statistically speaking, I was well above the 90th percentile in the verbal and nonverbal sections, but smack-dab at the median in math. Assuming that this test accurately represented my actual ability, this data shows a disconnect between my brand, math person, and my actual personality. Oddly enough, these days I find myself gravitating much more towards writing and reading than math, which is probably a result of writing this podcast, but who knows, maybe it’s my third-grade CogAT scores becoming reality.
Of course, who knows what tests are accurate to young children. They change all the time, and a particular test might be just a bad measure. My third-grade math assessment scores are dated only two months after the CogAT scores, and apparently I scored a 97% on that one and only an 86% on the reading assessment, so who knows what was accurate. I think it’s interesting to see that this is something I decided was valuable to my brand, but my brand doesn’t appear to reflect reality very well. It’s also interesting to note that my third-grade teacher’s label for me was “hard-working,” and if you’ve listened to my episode on the Gifted-Kid mindset, you’ll know that my work ethic is mostly a result of a petrifying fear of failure, so good to know that was alive and kicking in third grade.
This next document I came across doesn’t have a date anywhere on it, and it was sort of just shoved into the box, not inside of a file, so I’m not sure how old I was here. It’s an art piece, and I think we did this when we were studying Rene Magritte’s The False Mirror, which is a surrealist painting of an eye in which the iris is a cloudy sky.
René Magritte’s The False Mirror, 1928
From what I can tell, our assignment was to draw an eye and then draw parts of our identity inside the iris. I did an assignment similar to this only a month ago where I had to put together images that I thought represented me into a collage, so good to know that things have changed. Anyway, this eye drawing I did told me who I thought I was in third grade, and it turns out that my entire identity was music. The drawing is full of music notes and features a stage with a microphone and speaker, and my little note attached to it talked about how I love to sing and I love music. It was clearly super important to me, and in all honesty, I haven’t thought about the role music has played in my life in a long time. I was never really one to listen to music regularly, not even now, or I’ll just listen to one band or a few songs until I get tired of them, which can take over a year to happen. But for a long time, I did sing a lot. Chorus classes all through middle school and a few musicals here and there. I do miss singing in a group. I stopped rather abruptly after a somewhat unpleasant experience in Chorus in freshman year, and I don’t actually think I’ve sung much since, even alone. Obviously, interests change a lot over the years, but come to think of it, my break from Chorus and essentially music altogether was the closest thing I think I’ve come to a rebrand.
Our identity is as much the story we tell about ourselves as it is who we actually think we are, and for as long as I can remember up until freshman year of high school, music and singing were a huge, huge part of the story I told about myself. I wanted to volunteer for every little elementary school solo, and I committed to taking year-long chorus classes all through middle school, even at the expense of other electives. I’ve sung and danced in musicals and got placed in the front of silly dance numbers because I was expressive. I love singing so much, but I gave it up, and I gave it up rather easily. Freshman chorus wasn’t terrible by any means, but I disagreed with the teacher’s obvious favoritism and decided to leave that environment before I got sucked in. And since then, I haven’t worked on another musical, I haven’t sung with another group, and I’ve sung by myself very little. It was an effective rebrand, I think. The part of my brand that was associated with music got put away and replaced by the personality trait of “I don’t really listen to music.” And it was easy! It’s easy to change the story you tell about yourself, but because I really miss it, I know it was a change in brand, not identity.
I don’t think it’s bad to have a brand. I don’t think it’s bad to have a few personality traits you know about yourself and your friends. We’re always on the hunt for meaning, to know more about ourselves, to find some reason why we are the way we are. And the stories we tell about ourselves aren’t entirely separate from our true selves either. I forget where I read this, but there’s a quote that says “you can only pretend to be something for so long before you become it,” and I think that in many cases, that’s true. It’s like the fake-it-till-you-make-it narrative, except instead of being about confidence, it’s about everything. For two years after I quit Chorus, I pretended to be the person who didn’t listen to music, and I became that person, only listening to talk radio when I drove home every night. I don’t remember it bothering me. Now, I’m more of a person who sometimes engages with music as a concept, and at that point, it’s time to throw the whole label away and just vibe. Because I’ve been doing less social interaction during the pandemic, the story I tell about myself has become shorter. You can’t have a brand if there’s no one to sell it to, you know? Fewer labels, more vibes. Sometimes, I feel like because I can’t describe myself as well anymore, it means I know myself less, but I don’t actually think that’s true. I think I know myself more, well enough to know that I can’t be defined by a few little words, or perhaps any words at all. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” Wait, no, that’s wrong, it was Walt Whitman. Regardless, it resonates with me. I contain multitudes, and perhaps it’s not important to know and categorize them all. Perhaps I can just be.
Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. You can follow this podcast to be sure you never miss a new episode, and follow me on Twitter @FastFactsPod for mid-week updates and notes. This is Callie, signing off.
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