People Are What They Choose To Be

It's pretty difficult to describe a person.  We are complex individuals, full of thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, carrying the emotional baggage of their own history, which gets another day heavier every day.  There is too much to cover to give a full picture of a person, so we tend to describe the key descriptors of a person.

But what are the key descriptors of a person?  Is it their heritage?  Their job?  Their schooling?  Their taste in music?  Their marital status?  They might all be useful.  They might also be useless.  What is key depends on the individual.

People like to label themselves.  They may have one label or they may have a hundred.  If you live, breathe, eat, and sleep dancing, then you are a dancer, pure and simple.  If you love dancing, but you also love playing football, watching action movies, and doing stand-up comedy, then those are the ways you'll describe yourself and it is mostly how people will know you.

The catch to this, though, is that people will look at you based on what they think matters.  If you have a job that pays the bills and you don't care much about it, it will not be part of what you are.  But if your friend really cares about his job and considers it a key fact, then he will describe you based on your job.

Ultimately, you will always be the combination of things you identify your life by.  And you will always be seen as the combination of things that others identify their lives by.  This can make for some interesting relationships to toy with.

Find a combination of people who could not be more different from one another, then put them in a room together.  Have them try to explain who they are and what they enjoy in life.  Then, when the dismissing attitudes arrive (because they are so different from each other), have them explain why those things matter and why they are so defining to those characters.