Hello, there.
Lindsey's in Iceland for the week and we didn't want to leave you without some episodes, SO, lucky you, you get me! Yay! If you don't know who I am, my name is Nick Jenkins. I film and edit for Crash Course: Science and Sexplanations. If you like what you see here, great! If you don't, Linsday's back next week. Yay!

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I identify as a heterosexual cis male. Umm, probably a Kinsey zero, and I'm Welsh and Irish but I identify as American. From California originally, but I call myself a Montanan. Other ways I identify? Educator, filmmaker, graphic artist, musician, photographer. I N T J : introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging. Eros. Storge! Director, overweight, but I'm working on that, divorced,although I'm starting to identify more as just single. Teacher, son, brother, friend. Carnivore. Metalhead! Editor, Fight Fan, Whedonite, Whovian--the Tennant years. Nerd, nerdFIGHTER. Corgi owner, comic book nerd, former dancer. Just let that sink in for a minute. Camaro enthusiast, Kia owner. Stand up comedian connoisseur, writer, Elle Goulding fan! Guitarist, recovering co-dependent.  Liberal, gamer, horror movie expert. Sometimes deep, sometimes shallow.

Now, those are just a few of the ways I choose to identify myself, and it can depend on the situation, or the people that are around me, or it can just depend on how I feel. Sometimes I might identify as a victim of childhood bullying. Other times I identify as a survivor of childhood bullying. We arrive at identities in different ways. Some of them are taught to us or gifted to us--my parents gave me creative and talented, which was great; it gave me the opportunity to feel like I could actually make things in this world. Others, meehhhh, not so much. Uh, in grad-school I was labelled as tyrannical, both on-set and in class. This was a shock to me because I didn't feel like a tyrant--I certainly didn't feel mean--so I went about trying to figure out what tyrant even really meant. I looked it up. "One resembling an oppressive ruler in the harsh use of authority or power." First of all, whoever labelled me this probably didn't quite understand the meaning of the word "tyrant". I was never harsh, but I did use my authority as a director to control sets and even control conversation. And though being labelled this was kind of hurtful at the time, it did allow me to become introspective and think about me. It turns out, I like control and...that's okay. It allows me to do what I do. It serves me well. Now it becomes a challenge when there are things that I can't regulate, like, let's say there's a dog fight at Abby's daycare, and I don't know what to do about that because I don't have control over it. OR Lindsey doesn't give me a script until five in the morning before we're supposed to shoot. [WheezyWaiter style wink-ding]

So what does this mean to my identity? Eh. It depends on the circumstances. Much like Lindsey talks about intent and context. Sometimes parts of my identity, like my desire for control, can lead to TORRID EMOTIONS! Identity is a funny thing--it can be how we define ourselves, how we share ourselves with the world or sometimes how we protect ourselves. It can be a learning moment, a chance for us to reflect on how our actions can look to others at times. And it can be like a brand--something that we didn't ask for but was applied to us by a person or a group of people out of anger, fear, jealousy, possessiveness, or ignorance. Whatever your identity, however you present yourself and to whoever you present yourself, remember it's not your entire story. It's only one page, maybe even one paragraph, maybe just one sentence of the entire story that is your life. And just like you can't tell the entire story of a great novel in one sentence, you surely can't use one word or one phrase to describe everything there is to describe about something as complex and marvelous as you.

I'd totally love it if you loaded up the comments with your identifiers. Who's a Sexplaneteer? Stay curious.