The first impression you give someone feels simple.
A glance, a phrase, the slight tilt of your voice as it tries to decide whether to sound confident or careful. But beneath that moment sits a truth most people never notice. It may be easy forget that others never gain awareness of the full architecture you are. Rather, a moment of awareness is simply one frame in a long sequence, and your brain rushes to stitch these frames together so you can believe there is a solid self living behind your eyes.
Identity is not what we think. I understand it as a continuity the brain desperately creates from separate moments to make sense of the movement of our lives. Neuroscientist Anil Seth calls this a controlled hallucination. The mind fills the gaps so you do not feel the gaps. It connects the flicker of one second to another until the whole thing seems unbroken, like a film reel running just fast enough to appear real.
We like to believe we are consistent people. Yet the research on memory says otherwise. We are creatures of reconstruction. Every remembered version of yourself is edited, packaged for memory, and rearranged. The brain rewrites the story so you can wake up each morning and believe today follows yesterday. This introduces a unique conundrum. Rather than storing identity, we regenerate it every day.
So when someone asks what first impression you want to give, the real question is much, much stranger, and it sounds something like this:
Which version of yourself do you choose to step into the next moment of your life? Which frame do you choose as the doorway?
This is where things shift from science to philosophy. Time feels like a flowing river, but psychologists who study chronostasis suggest that much of time is perception layered on top of uncertainty. The brain inserts its own continuity to prevent us from feeling the world as a collection of tiny, isolated pulses. If we experienced pure discontinuity, we would lose our sense of self within days.
Identity is the story your brain tells so you can stay afloat.
And yet there is something quite beautiful in that. If the self is an invention, it means you are not trapped by whatever story you once believed. You have a say in how the next frame develops. The first impression you offer someone is a creative act rather than a performance. It is the moment you decide which what stays, and what goes.
The poet Ocean Vuong once wrote that memory is a story we carry in order to survive. I think identity is similar. A living thing. An ongoing choice. A narrative held together not by perfect accuracy but by the desire to be understood.
So when someone meets you for the first time, they encounter a glimpse. A soft outline of a self that is always shifting. You might wish people could see the fuller version of you, the one that carries all your experiences and contradictions and small private joys. But this gentle incompleteness is part of what makes human connection meaningful. We meet one another through keyholes. We will never know the full interior, so we stay curious, listening. We keep evolving our impression of each other.
The mind protects us from the terror of a fractured reality by mashing together all the sense-datum we receive each day into something that seems continuous. Our task is just to participate in that creation with care and to let ourselves change while accepting that others will only ever see fragments.
Identity behaves a little like starlight. From a distance you see a single shimmer and assume it is the whole story. If you could travel closer, you would find a roaring furnace made of collisions, and pressure, and centuries of change. The light you see from afar, while seemingly false, is simply the only version that can cross the distance. It gives you a place to aim your attention.
A first impression works the same way. It is the part of you that travels. The part that reaches others first. The person you are is not the glow but the whole constellation of experiences that shaped it. And the self beneath all of that, the one even you struggle to map, is the vast system of forces and history that the mind is still learning to name.
The good thing about all this is that identity does not need to be solved. You do not have to know exactly who you are to live as someone real. You can be in motion, gathering pieces, setting others down, changing shape without warning. For you were never meant to be a statue.
Even scientists who study memory admit that the brain edits and revises and rearranges our story. If the mind keeps rewriting you, then you are allowed to participate in that creation. You are allowed to change your mind about yourself. You are allowed to hold uncertainty without feeling lost.
There is nothing weak about that. There is nothing broken about being unfinished.
Identity is a conversation between what made you and what you choose next. It is a bridge you are always building, even when the blueprint is unclear. The gaps are not failures. The gaps are invitations. They ask you to imagine, to choose, to become.
And maybe that is the real beauty. We are not defined by the parts we cannot explain. Instead, we are defined by the meaning we learn to create from them. Every time you step forward, you add a piece to your ever-growing puzzle. It does not matter if you don’t see the full picture yet, because, truth is, life wasn’t made to make sense from the inside.
So if you feel unfinished, good. It means there is space to grow toward a self that feels honest. It means you still have room for new light. It means the story is unfolding and you are awake inside it.
You are allowed to be a work in progress. You are allowed to be a constellation still forming. You are allowed to discover who you are by living, not by knowing.
And that is enough.
Written by Mason Lai, a California high schooler.
Mason Lai 