Identity Crisis If I were to put myself back in high school I probably could not have answered the question "Who am I?". My identity crisis started towards the end of high school. While most students were worried about college and picking careers; I was not. As a teenager I was fairly off-beat. I never belonged to many crowds and the entirety of my high school career I floated from group to group. Some might say I just never quite belonged. So I found many excuses to prolong the inevitable decisions that followed high school. This was due to the fact that I could not imagine myself anywhere other than the place I currently was. I mostly felt that I just did not belong in the adult world. I could not see myself going to college much less being …show more content…
Instead of going to college or picking a future career; I continued working a dead end job at a shoe store called Payless. While also wasting a majority of my time playing online video games. All my spare time was spent on the computer. Though it did not make much sense for me to continue working at payless due to the very low wage which was unlivable. I did so because it left me more time to play games and avoid the real world. At this time I was struggling to even get up and go to work. This part of my identity crisis was quick to enter and leave. My family quickly stepped in and decided that I needed to do good work. I needed to do work that in their eyes mattered and would make me a wholesome member of society. I began my decent into foreclosure and moratorium when my family decided that it was time I took up work in the family business. This was mostly because my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all worked in the healthcare field. Ranging from Nurse Practitioners to Engineers there was not anyone who really strayed far from the field of healthcare. My aunt got me an entry level job at the hospital, where she felt I should be working as a young adult who was a year post high school. I took the job, but to me it did not matter I was not really concerned with the job that I had. Though my family is passionate about healthcare I did not connect with the ideas that my family had for my future. My aunt wanted me to go to nursing school and do good things. She even suggested that since I was not married or dating that I should study abroad and work internationally or anything really, as long as it connected with what she believed I should be doing. Since I was disconnected from myself I blindly went along with what she was saying convinced that my aunt was right. Upon her word, I could not waste my life the way I was, so by my second year post high school I went back for my CNA, but that
Identity is defined as being oneself and not acting or being something else. The identity that one forms throughout their life time is a slow and tedious process, each and every event in one’s life whether it’s larger or small scale has an effect on developing ones overall identity. In the play Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth by Drew Hayden Taylor, Janice it caught between two identities and struggles to find a happy medium. Being adopted into a white family at a young age, Janice has become accustom to many of the white traditions and ways. Janice’s native family has recently gotten in touch with her and has put a great deal of pressure on her to regain some of the native culture she was born into. With pressure building Janice begins to question her identity and begins to show signs that she wants nothing to do with her native roots. Drew Hayden Taylor does an excellent job in this play showing how stereotypes and pre-conceived notions affect ones identity and their relationships within society. Each character within the play shows how their identity has been shaped through the relationships they have acquired throughout their lives; Tonto’s identity is heavily influenced by his father and best friend Rodney, Barb is influenced by the customs and traditional ways of her mother, and Janice after being adopted at a young age has formed an identity revolving around that of her adopted parents but she faces a great deal of pressure from her native birth family.
The difference between Rodriguez’s struggle between identity and Angelou’s struggle is that, Angelou’s identity’s center of focus is her name, while Rodriguez’s identity seems to revolve around his “complexion”. Although they both wrote about the struggle with their own identity, the views and attitude of the two authors differ. In Richard Rodriguez’s essay “Complexion” and Maya Angelou’s essay “Mary” both authors illustrate some hardships they faced during their life, such as their experience with racism and prejudice. In spite of the fact that they are both faced with similar situations, the actuality that sets apart their characters is how they dealt with each of their situations.
“I just want to be someone, mean something to anyone, I want to be the real ME”, by Charlotte Eriksson. The quest of my journey is to discover my real purpose, my real goal but most importantly, find my real identity. This is known as the “Identity versus Role Confusion Stage” or as described by psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, the fifth stage of the Eight Stages of Man. It occurs between the ages of 12 to 18, where every person battles to establish a certain roll or skill that provides one with a sense of a sturdy foundation in the adult society. I too am currently going through this stage of life, dodging many obstacles in order to seek out my identity. The hardest obstacle- my attempt to fit in with my peers, but the extremes I took to find it, may have scared me for life. Nonetheless, it showed me a piece of my real identity and helped me figure out how to grow through it and better myself; it showed me the real me. In the past as well as today’s society, individuality is vital. Each teen wants to create a unique identity for ones’ self, and the start to creating that identity is in high school.
There was also a moment when I was changing my major few times. I had some counseling but clearly not well enough for me to figure out what I wanted.
Imagine comparing a person to a language. It would be so tricky and overwhelming: finding grammatical structures that would fit into a person’s personality, verb tenses related to life experiences etc. However, there are two main things which make a person and a language highly comparable: form and content. What are form and content? How are they related to each other? In his essay “Devoid of Content”, scholar Stanley Fish argues that when considering a language, we should leave content outside and just focus on form, because form eventually leads to content. David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, in “How to Write (the Perfect) Email”, point out the importance of form as it leads to a better content in writing emails. But is it really only about form? How many things do we know that only rely on form as a key to content? Although Fish, Shipley and Schwalbe put emphasis on form as a way to content, Gogol, the main character of Jumpha Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, shows that a person can never be “devoid of content” or a “perfect grammatical” structure because form and content are indeed equivalent and they reflect that person’s identity. Gogol actually swims across a medium of overlapping forms and contents which define his life and sense of belonging.
There are many aspects of identity in the poem “Sex without Love,” by Sharon Olds. I can relate my own thoughts to how the author views the subject that she talks about in this poem. There has been a situation in my own life where I was thinking to myself, just as the author was, “How do they do it, the ones who make love without love?” (Olds 740). Having been raised as a well-rounded and disciplined person, as well as religious, I know the discouragement of having premarital sex. It’s not just the immorality that these characters are experiencing that the author is talking about, but they probably have personal issues that have to do with a their self worth and identity. These characters think they know what love is, but the truth is that they are in denial of what they are really doing.
The stable identity and closeness with parents of these first 8 years of school becomes unstable during the teen period with major growth spurts and hormonal changes. Teens become less close to parents through some form of separation or independence from parental guidance replaced by the influence of peers and the media. Teens are intensely attracted to the opposite gender for intimacy needs but nothing but physical intimacy is possible without a stable identity and closeness. Without the needed boundaries, closeness becomes the anxious“fusion” of two people who don’t know their identities. The big question is “who am I?” The “individuation” process of separating from parental values
You go three years of high school preparing for college and at the same time having fun. Until you are in your senior year of high school that’s when you realize and start asking your self what college do I want to go to? Or what college career I want to pursue? That’s when you notice you have but so little time to answer these questions. Me I’m in my last year of high school and I though I already knew what career I wanted to pursue, but its now that I notice that not even I know what I’m going to do with my life? All I’m sure of its that I’m going to graduate out of high school with a diploma and that I’m going to college. But what happens after that? What major did I study? Or where did I go to accomplish my goal?
Am I Yaman Hussayni or a Syrian? A question that has been stuck in the halls of my brain for the past week. As it seems to be the issue of identity is a complicated one. Do we choose our identity or it chooses us? And what is identity exactly? According to common idea in society identity is a very general word as it has several branches, cultural identity, personal identity, or even educational one are only some of them. To me, identity is the state of mind by which someone is directly recognized as character in public. It is the fragments of our life that will always remain with us, the permanently unchanging parts of us. Our looks, our beliefs, our culture, the places and things
Introduction: Throughout life, many people never come to the conclusion of who they are or what their purpose in life might be. I personally know this from experience. I never quite knew what type of personality I had or what “clique” I should belong to: the jocks, the preps, or just the quiet kids in the background. I was always worried about what others thought of me and tried my hardest to just fit in where I was welcomed. But one event occurred to me when I was fifteen
An identity can be infused with family, place of origin, and surroundings. This causes a person to have conflicts with their identities. Work by authors can show how protagonist struggles to find the identity and from an identity. Some of these works would be “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” by Junot Diaz, “Gots Is What You Got” by W. S. Di Piero, and “The Loudest Voice” by Grace Paley. These works shows how there are main characters that have influences, from their family’s as well as countries of origin that makes it hard to have an identity.
Within my fifteen and a half years of living, I have experienced many heart wrenching moments that have changed who I am, so many that I stopped trying to keep count long ago. Like most teenagers, the past couple of years have been some of the most confusing, hectic years of my life. I'm at that age I'm trying to figure out who I am, as well as who I want to become. As indecisive as I am, I will more than likely change my mind a time or two, but right now at this very moment, I've finally come to terms with who I really am, and what I would like to do for the rest of my life.
I had a vague understanding of myself when I left high school, and an even vaguer understanding of why I didn’t succeed like I felt I could have. This is a fairly common predicament, if not the standard. I felt that I wouldn’t succeed if I moved on to college, so I waited.
Zora Neal Hurston’s book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, reveals one of life’s most relevant purposes that stretches across cultures and relates to every aspect of enlightenment. The novel examines the life of the strong-willed Janie Crawford, as she goes down the path of self-discovery by way of her past relationships. Ideas regarding the path of liberation date all the way back to the teachings of Siddhartha. Yet, its concept is still recycled in the twenty-first century, as it inspires all humanity to look beyond the “horizon,” as Janie explains. Self-identification, or self-fulfillment, is a theme that persists throughout the book, remaining a quest for Janie Crawford to discover, from the time she begins to tell the story to her best friend, Pheoby Watson. Hurston makes a point at the beginning of the novel to separate the male and female identities from one another. This is important for the reader to note. The theme for identity, as it relates to Janie, carefully unfolds as the story goes on to expand the depths of the female interior.
According to Erikson, when adolescents are unable to find ownership of an identity, their lives can spiral off in several directions. In some ways they will reverse the role of their desire, slipping into a socially unacceptable role or a role that does not match who they wish to become (Feldman, 2012). Other teenagers will forego social interactions, leaving them to feel sad and alone in the world (Feldman, 2012). Teenagers thrive off of finding an identity to center themselves around, and when they fail to identify one, the adolescent crisis ensues (Feldman, 2012). There are several factors that can distract an adolescent from identifying a personal identity and pursuing a life of well-being...