“If everyone is just a product of their environment” I used to ask myself “what then, is me?”. A person born with a silver spoon, for example, would never have the same entitlement as one born not as fortunate. The evils that reside in few may not have permeated if they had someone to look out for them, care for them, and value them as human.
Circumstances, in life, play a huge role in shaping each person. Their family, friends, relationships, opportunities, mishaps—all are lego bricks that form a part of a never finished sculpture. John Locke said our mind is a tabula rasa or blank slate; no one is born of innate ideas, instead, one forms them as we humans are perceptive creatures, we emulate, we mix and match the extant in ways that may be unique but never not existing in the world. I agree, perhaps we are of a blank slate at birth—our environment, then, controls the brush, painting cryptics that will never be, in its entirety, intelligible maybe until the brush falls. Sometimes, within its colossal mural, our subconscious may take sight of a small, full picture that's a part of it, and think that it knows itself as a whole but that is never the case.
This perpetual effect of the external makes the question inevitable. “Who am I?" not in the usual sense but, instead, who am I when my name, age, hobbies, interests, passions are stripped away? What then is left of “me” ?
When I pose this question to myself, I tend to start talking about how I think, what my core values and beliefs are, but then again what are they if they are not things that I came up with as a result of forming opinions from my experiences? This infinite loop of questions and dissecting is bound to make anyone's head hurt and you reach this stage, this weird state of mind, similar to when you try to think of space as infinite, or the idea of nothingness, this feeling of empty that I can't quite find the words to describe—a mix of awe, smallness, emptiness, ache—it consumes me. This simple question of “who are you?” is as complex as trying to reify emotions and feelings such as love and happiness.
Time, another abstract concept, brings change to biology and the self. To compare an adult to their teenage self is a huge leap from a naive understanding of a small world to a big one, and even then some stay naive about certain things. A person is bound to grow each day on both counts because not each day is the same as the next and each new experience is finding a new color of paint for the brush to make an even vivid abstraction of your consciousness.
To answer this question of identity I like to think of myself as a river. A river flows down its channel, some may say its path is determined but with a little hard work its possible for the stream to change course, the water represents the mind, for the waves in the river are always changing from one point to another, the ripples are caused due to the the wind and rain, the same ripple may occur twice but perhaps each time its caused due to something else, at a different time. Pebbles and rocks fall in, so do broken branches but none of which changes what we call the river. The name “river” is just a label given to an ever changing substance. Because maybe some things on earth are stationary to be named and stereotyped but we humans are polar to what we are used to on the outside. It would be unfair to limit the obscurity of human nature to a simple term. Our nature out laws definition.