A Wallet Full of Odds and Ends

I've been carrying around the same bright blue, sparkly wallet for about the past three years. I chose the obnoxious case because i was certain that with a color so unique, it's be pretty tough to lose track of. Yet somehow I managed it last year. For the two days that my wallet was M.I.A., I believed i had lost my entire life. I couldn't purchase anything without my debit card, and I certainly couldn't drive without my license. When I found my glittering wallet buried beneath clothes in my closet, a weight was lifted off my shoulders. I could resume my daily life, and in a sense I regained my identity.

But what would have happened if I hadn't simply misplaced my wallet in my mess of a bedroom? If I had dropped my wallet on the street, and someone had picked it up, what would they have concluded by taking a gander inside the blinding, blue case? They would have to shuffle through the ridiculous amounts of receipts and sort through the many different identification cards, all of which would assumingly belong to a cluttered, albeit, busy person.

The stranger who recovered my wallet may assume that the heaps of receipts, along with a Macy's credit card, mean I am a sport-shopper. A girl who can't save a dime for a day. But looking closer at the receipts, they'll notice that none of the items purchased were frivolous. Gas to get to and from school, books for my classes, food for lunches for the entire week. While it is easy to jump to conclusions when pay stubs spill out on to the floor everytime i open my wallet, it's read these things that provide a true insight into who I am.

While sorting through the jumbled mess, one would happen upon a ticket stub, to a rap concert from 2009. The item is merely a momento and holds no significance to my current life, but some people are quick to typecast people who listen to that particular genre of music. Inside my wallet is also the business card for a tattoo shop. This stranger may quickly typecast me as perhaps a hard-edged person, when in fact, I'm often described by others as the exact opposite.

Looking back on the period in which i was wallet-less, I realize that what makes up my identity is far too complex to be written on scraps of paper or credit cards. The chaos in our back pockets and purses are merely odds and ends, not the sum of  our parts. In order to know someone's true identity, you need to know much more than where they've been and where they are going.