When you look around it's hard not to come across people who work so hard to portray a certain image of themselves. I'm certainly guilty of the same thing as I find myself trying to explain to others what exactly it is I'm trying to achieve in my life. "What does that have to do with portraying an image of yourself" you may ask.... Well, as much as I'm quite certain of what I like and dislike about things that surround me I can't help but wonder if the actual expression of such likes and dislikes is a projection of my inner desire to create an "image" of myself to the outside world. I'm not saying that it's wrong to do so, I'm merely trying to understand if this is a natural part of character development or if it results from basic human insecurity (or possibly something completely different).

When I was a senior in college I went through a relatively long (6 months) phase of what I call "pursuing the image of a career-driven guy". Somebody who wears a suit, drinks coffee in the morning, takes lots of business trips, stays in nice hotels, works in a name-brand corporate firm destined for early retirment with a hefty sum of money. It seemed like the natural thing to do, it seemed like the right thing to do, and it certainly seemed liked the cool thing to do. I must have flown out every other week doing interviews and such and 90% of the destinations was the wall street on New York city. I wore a black Giorgio Armani suit and played my blend of business and technology side out as much as possible. The funny thing is the more interviews I did the more uncomfortable I got with the idea of doing the natural thing and becoming the suit-wearing "successful" career person. The more times I spent visualizing myself wearing a suit everyday and living the fancy corporate life the more lame it seemed. It happened so quickly I'm still not 100% sure why the whole phase came about.... Then times passed by, and it wasn't that I realized that I was chasing after an image rather than something that really resonated with my heart and soul, nor was it because I predicted I was going to fall in love with studying and doing research in the area of computer science either. Maybe it was out of fear of living a lie or something, but I started turning down interview trips and soon my job search came to a complete halt. It wasn't until a couple months later that I turned 180 degrees and started looking for a job in a completely different industry.

Of course I ask myself the same question these days wondering if the life I pursue now isn't another attempt at trying to portray a different image of myself. It could easily be that the image I'm going for now happens to be radically different from the one I had when I was a senior in college. I may actually be far from being "real", and I can only answer with a potentially false sense of certainty that I am being honest with myself. :) Well, there's at least one thing I'm sure of now and that's that this image I'm pursuing right now seems to be lasting quite a long time and I'm having a blast pursuing it. ;) I probably just think too much. :P