No they're not. Who you are is present tense. Who you want to be is future tense.

This is ridiculous.

Keep going!

What you aspire to be in the future defines who you are and what you do to achieve those aspirations in the present.

Clearly the goal of freshman composition assignments is to bear your soul and speak the truth and nothing but the truth, especially in response to abstract and ambiguous prompts...

And as Byron (erm, CommanderByron) is writing poems in the present, this is off the point as it is.

He's writing poems, he wants to write poems, he's a poet.

"I might want to be an astronaut. But I don't reply to questions about who I am by saying I'm an astronaut."

Was going to write this exact thing after reading obi's post. +1

This can't seriously be going on this long. I took the vague question : how do I see myself as a writer and chose to interpret it differently. I interpreted that question to ask me what type of writing I enjoyed and was good at and bad at. Yea I can bust out an analytical 20 page report but I don't enjoy it. I enjoy poetry and wrote poetry for the enjoyment. I don't fancy myself a Dickinson have no aspiration for that. I wrote the poetry because it clears my mind. Now back to the critism on my IR major. I chose IR for the gray areas and problem solving. I am also in ROTC if I should remind people so my IR education is going directly towards the military. Hands on. Which is what I like. I hate concrete things. Now Putin as an IR major yourself I'm sure you know that there are many gray areas in the field. I chose IR for the messiness. The fact is here I was asking simple help on some English assignment for a college class I already got the credit for in high school. Simply put when I said I saw myself as a poet I meant in the way I enjoy writing. Sorry if your vision of life doesn't have any enjoyment or pleasure but mine does. Now can we all just drop this topic seriously. It's really not that big of a deal. Like beating dead horses

I suppose it's a good thing that military people are taking IR seriously. Take that Petraeus.

I don't know of that was sarcastic or not. So I'll just say how seriously I take what I plan to do. You want a definition of me. I'm a cadet, a student, and I have dreams; those include being a soldier, an officer, and a diplomat. I take the idea that one day I can command a unit in some foreign country and instruct my subordinates to help some local kids build a Futbol field or help the town men dig a well very seriously because it's little things like that that are overlooked by many generals and officers and those things go a long way to building bonds and progressing a war effort. So yes I take IR very seriously because it will help me learn how the big politics of the world works so I can better help the little guys.

Actually Petraeus is not the one I should have said that about, it's Ralph Peters who thinks academia is useless for the military. Petraeus actually values academics very much.

Ah. Yeah, I am in the camp that believes academics can help the military perform better. Especially political science for infantry soldiers, helps to expose soldiers to broad concepts and helps them to understand the people they are fighting or helping.

You're welcome.

Petraeus also values disciplines like anthropology which I think, the military could use a lot more work in.