• "Myself is just a story that I tell to myself that is like any other story: subjective, and incomplete, and at least a little bit of a lie. I got my way of seeing the world, I got my values, I got the stuff that I care about, the people I care about.
• All those things, they're important, they're real. But where do they come from? Certainly not things that I was born with. I am me right now. I have not always been this me. Throughout my life, who I am has been largely dependent upon what people expect of me...
• I crave consistency in myself but myself denies me that simplicity. So we look to books and Buzzfeed quizzes and personality tests and horoscopes to tell us who we might be. To see what others might think, to tell us we are doing a good job on becoming the kind of person we want to be. And to tell us that it's okay to be the kind of person that you are but all of these things are such pale reflections of the indescribably weird and complex thing that is the self.
• Identity is important to try to define, but there isn't some perfect, platonic ideal of what you are buried beneath all of the gunk. Figuring out who you are, at least at this particular moment, is all about trying to tease out which bits are you, trying to fill other people's expectations for your whole life, what bits you want to change to make yourself better, and what bits you cherish as vital to your you-ness.
• But people who are like, "Be yourself," and they expect that to mean something. That is not advice, that's an existential crisis waiting to happen. These tools that we use to help us define ourselves, to help us figure out who we are, they are fine as tools. But they are not walls to box ourselves in with.
• You will wake up one day, and you will not be the you you once were. And that will keep happening to you until you die, which is kind of wonderful. Why live life as just one person, when you can be so many different people? A little scarier perhaps, but as with a lot of things that scare me, turns out, also pretty fun."

- Hank Green