Throughout my day I am constantly questioning my thought processes. I’m not really sure if this is a positive or negative thing. I’m always wondering if my thinking is aligning with my values or if I actually believe what I’m coming across as. For instance, I recently chose to become an English major this semester and that’s something I strongly feel makes sense because I consider myself an expressive person with words as my main tool. I’ve always been fond of writing, from essays to poetry. However, there is still a part of me that wonders if these things are inherently part of me or just predisposed notions that I have about my identity. How many things that I think I know about myself are just things that I have heavily linked with myself and how many things are truly “me”.
I’ve always told myself that writing is my “calling” but could that be because I once wrote something considered “well-written” in my youth and then was praised for it by an authoritative? I must have felt really good about it, which causes me to enjoy that thing, and then reinforces the notion that I am “good” at something because enjoying it means that I will put more time into it. People want to feel good. People generally follow that trail. Am I just following that trail? This theory is prevalent not just in this personal metacognitive issue, but also in the areas of philosophy and in the literary world itself. For instance, “one of the principal aims of theory is the questioning of interpretations of the world that are usually taken for granted” (Moran 75). This can be applied in the sciences and in the humanities, yet it also can be applied to my internal inquiry. I have taken for granted that the English language might come more naturally to me than other fields of study but this might mean that I have not taken to the time to see if other fields of study might also “fit my identity”. We take a lot of things so concretely about ourselves and I think it might be important to reassess and always question that.