I thought I’d write something a little introspective about who I am, and what that question even really means in the first place.

If you don’t know me, my name’s Ash. My go-to description is “I’m a student living in Bangor, Wales”, but obviously there’s more to me than that. I study Modern Languages BA, and I’ve dedicated a lot of my life to trying to understand language and culture. I’m autistic, so the understanding most people automatically have of the world around them never spawned into my head, so I’ve spent my entire life learning what people mean when they say things.

I’m originally from Cannock, Staffordshire, just to the north of Birmingham – a city that defines me profoundly. I grew up in and around Brum, and being a Brummie is an important part of my identity. I adore and detest my city to no end, it raised me without judgement or othering but I’ve been the victim of so much there too. It’s a city that looks out for you, sometimes. It’s really difficult to explain how I feel about Birmingham – you have to have lived there to understand what I mean.

I’m more than where I’m from, though. I live in Gwynedd, the most Welsh-speaking place on Earth, and I live and breathe for the language. I’m proud to be learning it, I’m proud that this community has accepted me so openly despite the history between our nations, and I’m proud to live here.

One of the things I’ve never been able to get close to defining is “what I do”. I’m a musician, a writer, a programmer, a traveller, a photographer, all at once, and yet none to a professional level. I make, I tinker, I build things by nature, but never anything good enough to turn into a career. Everything I do, though, is geared towards learning. I’ve never been satisfied not being able to do something, so I’ve spent my whole life learning how to do a little bit of everything.

A lot of people define themselves on personality, but I don’t even know where to start with that. I’m almost a different person around every one of my friends and acquaintances, I absorb and adapt the way others act so automatically that I’m not even sure what’s underneath it all anymore. I suppose in a way we’re all the sum of the parts that others give us, but there’s not really a “self” here to look in on.

Something that is a strong aspect of my identity, one of the only strong aspects of my identity, is that I care – intensely, deeply, to a fault, almost, about the things that I do and the people I meet. I’m driven by justice and fairness above all, by the opinion that no-one deserves to suffer the consequences of someone else’s actions.

There’s no clean answer to who I am, in the same way there’s no clean answer to who anyone is. We’re all a collection of so many facets, none of which can approximate the whole. Adjective soup won’t get us to an answer; humans are complicated, I guess.

If you expected a clean answer, come back in 60 years.