Self Reflection and Culture

Recently, I had the opportunity to create a self reflection about my identity using a video assignment. I have to admit that I started out quite optimistic, only to find myself later thinking that perhaps my self-reflection is quite boring or not that inspiring to other people. It's funny how my perspective changes when I try to see myself "from the outside", and perhaps the whole point of the exercise is to precisely see oneself "as though" one were meeting themselves for the first time. The idea is that in actively reflecting on your own identity, you start to create a cultural "artifact" and even participate in the process of making culture into an object that can be studied or approached as "study".
   The paradox about culture, it seems: when you are immersed in a culture, you are not able to see it as "culture" per se, because there is nothing to compare it to. On the other hand, as soon as culture becomes an object of research or study, it somehow ceases to be lived experience. In addition, there is something somewhat forced or even selective about the process of deciding what makes it in an identity and what is in fact left out. The tricky thing also about culture is that as soon as I make an observation about it, I am already changing its way of being.
     Knowing that culture is not a static object, there is no need to make a fetish out of it: it's not frozen in time, and I can't see myself in it. So why does one bother to study culture? Quite simply, it's because studying culture takes a person out of the delusion that they are operating exclusively from a psychology divorced from others or the environment. It helps one to realize that everything is interconnected with something else in some way, and how people live do have patterns. Finally, cultural studies might help to remind a person of the things that they value and what parts of themselves are operating from those values. In this way, becoming acquainted with one's culture can do a lot in shaping oneself.