Por: Andrea González 
When Adele’s new song “Easy on Me” first came out, the first thing I noticed was how the song was focusing too much on herself, there’s a part in the song where she says “I changed who I was to put you both first but now I give up. This is basically saying that she pretended to be someone she was not, until she reached a boiling point and she had to walk away. But when you have kids, you can’t just walk out.

Another example of this in the media is the tv show “Scenes of a Marriage” on HBO. In this show you can see a married couple through many years and circumstances, but at a specific time in the relationship, the wife played by Jessica Chastain, decides overnight to leave the family to go to Israel to pursuit her own happiness. In this case, as well, the character settles for a life she didn’t really want. She lived this life until it became too much and she left.

Finding oneself, and getting to truly know yourself is, to me, one of the most important phases in a person’s life, the problem is, that the media is portraying that this phase can happen at any time in your life without consequences, which is not true. When it happens at a point of your life when no one depends on you, you can truly explore who you are without any sense of guilt or selfishness, but when you try to find yourself after you have married someone, or you have had a child, things change.

Being married and having a kid are two commitments that you make with the promise that they will last forever. In the former you give your heart to someone and your partner is supposed to give you his/ hers in return. In the latter you have created a new life and you have brought it into this world to protect and to provide for. But if you are currently dealing with identity issues you can’t truly love your partner nor provide for your child, because the focus is entirely on to you and your unhappiness.

The problem with the media portraying these characters and their “finding themselves” phases is that they seem to tell everybody that the most important thing is that you feel happy, and that you should fight for that happiness regardless of what you have to do or who you have to hurt to get it; which should not be the case. Once you have taken commitments with other people, you should respect them and try to find happiness while taking them into account. People need to start being responsible for their actions, and they need to know that everything has consequences, and the responsible and right thing to do is to try to find yourself when you can’t affect others. Once you have made life changing decisions, like having a kid, you can’t just walk away to find yourself.