This post originally appeared on Teen Vogue.
In a new Instagram post, Dove Cameron opened up about identity, saying she's struggling to figure out how who she is on the inside fits with what people see on the outside.
Cameron posted four pictures of her with teary, red eyes, along with two text slides talking about “the concept of self."
“I've been struggling lately with the concept of self, my inner relationship to who I know myself to be and my outer perceivable self who I feel I have never known, but other people seem to,” Cameron wrote. "I've been covering mirrors lately. I've been feeling wrong in clothing that used to make me feel beautiful lately. i've been crying a lot lately, sometimes terrorized by my identity and image, sometimes in absolute flow with something new and peripheral and joyous to me."
She also said that “sexuality and performative gender norms" are throwing her for a loop. Cameron came out as queer in 2020, but said that she always knew she wasn't straight. Now, Cameron talks in her new Instagram post never having stopped to consider her identity at large, something she acknowledged some people never need to do, while others find themselves exploring unknown parts of themselves.
“What I am choosing to say is I am in process, I'm investigating. I'm struggling more than half of the time and I'm trying to maintain a quiet, non-judgmental curiosity, rather than punish myself for not knowing what I'm feeling or where I'm going,” she wrote.
In the caption of her post, Cameron said that “more days than not,” she feels no identity at all. “I feel most natural as something imperceivable to myself, an energy and a presence.”
Ultimately, Cameron said she posted all of this without a solid answer so that other people struggling with their identity don't feel alone.
“I share this without conclusion because I don't have answers from myself yet, and because I have a feeling it's a very intrinsically (modern) human conversation, and I never want you to feel alone in a sea of what seems like humans who are comfortable in their identity," she wrote. In her caption, she continued: “I'm feeling it out, and if you are too, we can do it together. The longer I'm alive, the more I realize these inner dialogues are actually pretty universal.”
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