What Defines You?

If you ask me who I am, I will tell you that I am Tiffany, my parents’ daughter, native of Albany, GA. If you ask me what kind of person I am, I will tell you that I’m fun-loving, sometimes silly, passionate, ambitious, loyal, and a lot of other things. If you ask me what I would consider to be a huge compliment from someone who knows me, it would be that they consider me to be a good person who treats everyone with kindness and respect. When trying to figure out how a person defines themselves, these are the type of questions that you ask. From my answers, I hope you can see that I define myself by the way that I act, the way that I treat people, and the people and experiences that have contributed to the woman that I have become. In short, I define myself by my character, and because that’s how I define myself, it’s also how I define other people.

There are people in this world who define themselves by the amount of money they have, the things that they own, or the level of success that they have achieved. There are several problems with this line of thinking. The first problem is that defining yourself by exterior things is that those things can be taken away, so if you lose your money, your job, or your materials, you lose who you are. The second problem is that it lets you off the hook for being responsible for your actions. If all it takes to make you a good person is for you to obtain success and money, then it doesn’t matter how you acted along the way. That’s the wrong line of thinking. The final (and biggest) problem that I have with the idea of defining one’s self by exterior factors is that you will define others the same way. That means that you will think less of those who have less. It also means that you will think less of yourself when comparing yourself to someone who has more. That ain’t cool.

Define yourself by things like the way that you treat people and how you act in the face of adversity. That’s much more important than how much money you have. It is a personal goal of mine to have a positive effect on every person that I encounter. I think that the way to do this is to try to be a positive person who defines myself by positive character traits. Being kind, humble, and caring will have a heavier impact on the world than wearing the most popular brands. I want people to see the good in me, and I want to see the good in people…not the good on them. That’s why I define myself by my character. I hope you will, too.

-Tiffany Vicks