How to Become a Noun

Astronauts, Archeologists, and Pirates

“You have to be an adjective everyday to become a noun.”

This is a quote I pulled from my random thoughts journal. I have no recollection of when I wrote it or how the idea came to be. It must have came to me sometime in the last two years because it’s an entry in the journal I started in 2021. I’m going to take this torch and run with it.

Being an adjective isn’t exactly the easiest task, however acting like one is the best way to start feeling like a noun. Everyone is familiar with the ‘fake it until you make it’ attitude and all of its copycats and cousins. My personal favorite is ‘walk like you own it.’ I learned the meaning of this when my dad taught me how to sneak into a movie theater without paying. Acting with confidence is a shortcut to being viewed as confident — provided that you are convincing enough.

In order to be a conclusive adjective, you have to act out the best representation of the adjective in question. We might be confidently walking towards a slippery slope. To find the best representation of confidence, look to those that you define as confident people. Your heroes and role models should keep you from slipping.

Having a good example can help, but it might not be the only path to our goal. Looking to activities that build confidence might yield the trait on its own. If I successfully sneak into the theater ten times, my confidence will most likely increase, but will this make me a confident person? I’m sure there must be another way without risking the movie mafia catching onto my schemes.

Choosing the right habits seems like a sure fire way to cultivate the adjectives you want to reflect, but how does one take it a step further and become a noun? The obvious answer to this question is through repetition. I can sneak into the theater everyday in hopes that my friends at the arcade will eventually see me as a confident movie theater con artist.

This gets us to a noun, but it seems we made an error. Being the con artist chipping away at Fandango’s profits might sound inspiring to the kids at the arcade, but I’m sure we can do better. Maybe a deductive method will suffice.

To begin, let’s pick the noun we want to be. When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut, an archeologist, or a pirate. While I prefer pirate, I think astronaut suits this exercise well. After all, astronauts are more or less space archeologists and the latin name directly translates to ‘star sailor.’

Next, we will determine what kind of traits astronauts tend to possess. Some psychologists define common personality traits of astronauts as: strong motivation, resiliency, adaptability, and high emotional stability. Now we can dissect these adjectives in hopes of adding them to the collection.

Strong motivation is the ability to delay immediate gratification in favor of focusing on long-term goals. Research in behavioral psychology shows that humans overvalue immediate rewards and undervalue delayed rewards. Overcoming this bias seems like a monumental task, but where there is knowledge, there is power. Abstaining from activities that produce instant gratification, like hitting the snooze button, can help you discover motivation.

If you have mastered motivation, you probably have resilience. Resilience is the ability to withstand and/or recover from difficulties. Nevertheless, resilience can be gained by building connections, fostering wellness, and finding purpose. In other words, stay in touch with your friends, take care of yourself, and help others to become resilient.

Adaptability is the quality of being able to adjust to new conditions. Change is inevitable. Like a flowing river, it punishes those who fight it and rewards those who embrace it. If you are reading this, you experienced the chaos that was 2020 and know adaptability too well. The inertia of those twelve months permeates through the new decade. The kicker is that a lot of people were expecting everything to switch back sooner or later.

If you didn't get a chance to be adaptable, try adjusting your negative thinking, behavior and emotions. Another word to describe this is neurosis. High emotional stability is how well an individual can cope with internal struggles. Those who suffer from anxiety and depression tend to experience neuroticism more than most. To cope with emotional imbalance and ultimately obtain high emotional stability: practice mindfulness, thought replacement, and emotional intelligence training.

Now that we have gathered all of our adjectives, we have the capacity to be an astronaut, but we aren’t exactly walking on the moon. Clearly, to be any of these adjectives one must master their constituents. Luckily, some of them share members and as you progress, your new adjectives will aid you in your adventure. Your character traits are the adjectives in question. You have them whether you like them or not, it’s what makes you a noun.

Like in any simple card game, you can pick up, trade, and discard them to create the hand you want. Unfortunately, life isn’t a card game with strict rules or winning conditions. You could be dealt a terrible hand and have no chips to gamble. Whether it was a good shuffle or not, your participation is necessary.

While our conditions might limit us, there is nothing stopping you from taking on the identity of your best self. You like to paint? Indulge yourself in artistic creation and paint. You did it! You’re an artist.

I spent my entire life writing without accepting myself as a writer. I always felt like once I considered myself a good writer, I could wear the name tag. The problem is that it kept me from writing and posting my work. Now that I have bestowed the title upon my shoulders, I have put myself in a position to prove it.

As a writer, I find it more difficult to find adjectives to describe the noun than finding the noun itself. I’m starting to think:

“Be the noun, the adjectives will come to you”

With that being said, maybe I’ll be a pirate.

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