If identity wasn’t complicated enough, throw in a pandemic.

In the last few years, culture has become increasingly fluid and people have become not just multi-cultural, but multi-dimensional. From the family we were born into to the ones we make ourselves. From Standoms to the labels of foodie and fashionista. From our orientation to our overachieving tendencies. This is what we at the community now call the “Hyphenated Self”: the tendency of people to identify with and embrace a multitude of selves, all of which make up their own personal “brand.”

The community was founded as a multicultural agency, so we’ve always been hyper aware of how self-identity influences our perception of outside forces and how those forces can in turn shift how we self-identify. As our world has been shaken up in the last few months by COVID-19, we continue to see change permeate not just in culture as we know it, but the evolution and expression of identity. 

Because of that we set out to study, to learn about it from the mouths of regular people in order to truly understand how our identity is shaping the way we perceive this “new abnormal.”