The Million Dollar Question You'll Ask Yourself When You're in Your 20s

I have this weird quirk where once I start something I have to finish it. So, of course, after casually watching OG Toby Spider-Man for the first time in a few years, I had to watch every Spider-Man movie ever made to date.

I learned a lot during this binge experience since Peter Parker/Spider-Man as a character and a hero can teach us many things, but one thing stood out in particular.

In The Amazing Spider-Man, (Andrew Garfield version) there’s a brief scene where Peter’s English teacher says she believes every book as one storyline. 

Who am I? 

As an English Major, this peaked my interest so I began to reflect on novels I’ve read for academic purposes or for funsies. I had to pause the movie for a moment to think about it. I’m sure the screenwriter probably didn’t intend for anyone to really over analyze that line, but here I was listing novels and seeing if their plots can fit that loaded question.

The human experience is reliant on one big fat question: who am I?

And there isn’t really an easy answer. (Sorry)

From a Biblical perspective, you also may have asked yourself: what is my purpose?

I read a Christian book early into this summer that talked about how we need to find our spiritual gifts in order to fulfill our purpose in His name. While this book was good and all, it never told me how to find these gifts or how to answer the loaded question of finding my purpose that I apparently needed to live out.

I’ve complained about this multiple times in my Bible studies at my house, I’ve always felt disconnected from faith because I could never narrow down what my purpose was. I would meet people who would easily say, “My purpose is to help people. I know this because when I was seven, I rescued my neighbors daughter from choking on a quarter and that’s when I knew I was called to be a nurse. Now, I’m in nursing school, top of my class and I have an job lined up at the top hospital in the state for when I graduate.”

Cool story bro, when do I get my life changing ah-ha moment? Did I already miss it? I am weirdly good at a few card games, does that mean I should be a professional card player?

Probably not.

In actuality, if you’re like me, and you’re surrounded by people who seem to have it all figured out for them, you’re not alone in thinking maybe you’re the only one who doesn’t have a clue.

In my humble opinion, I believe we can figure out who we are in different ways. Maybe you were bitten by a radioactive spider and aspire to spend your days being a friendly neighborhood hero in NYC (kudos to you). Or maybe you’re like me, and you’re just trying to figure it out one day at time.

The worst part about the “who am I” question, is the only person who can answer it is yourself. You can read all the lifestyle books or take a bunch of classes, but the answer of who you are, and who you want to be, lies from within. Kinda lame, right? It’s so much easier when you can just Google things and find answers instantly.

So, sadly, this blog post didn’t hold the answer to the million dollar question and more admitted that I spent a good couple of days watching a bunch of Spider-Man movies, but here’s what we do know…

As mentioned earlier, I’ve been hosting a Bible study at my house with my friends. We sit around my kitchen table with some fresh baked cookies, talk about our faith and sometimes we get off topic and talk about how long we think we could last on The Bachelor. We have different family lives, different experiences, different goals, ambitions and opinions on The Bachelor, but we ask ourselves the same questions. We struggle with the same insecurities. Those who seem to have it all figured out are wrestling with the same worries I am and it turns out, they’re as lost as I feel, too.

From our favorite heroes to iconic literary characters, humanity seems to have one thing in common. We’re just trying to figure things out, answering that big question, who am I?

I’ll let you know when I figure that out, too.