My Identity

Need a hook In this essay I will be talking about 3 major aspects that make up me. The 3 key aspects of my identity are running and art which are my abilities and reading which is one of my values.

My identity can be defined by moments in my life. Moving to Canada, learning English and going to high school are three major moments in my life. Going through these experiences have changed the person in me and made me more confident, stronger, better in everything.

There are many factors that shape us into who we are, and who we will become. Some of these factors we can control, while others we cannot. While we are born into many traits of our identities, much of our other behavior is learned. My identity, for example, is “based not only on responses to the question ‘Who am I?’ but also on responses to the question ‘Who am I in relation to others?’” (Allen, 2011, p. 11). My identity and the question of who I am, are both influenced by many aspects of my life, including my hometown, my family, my friends, and my beliefs and moral values.

Individual Identity: Every year my family tries to take a trip back to China in order to see family. On trip back played a big role in shaping my identity. In the summer of 2012 I had the daunting task of travelling alone China. This consisted of mastering the Chinese phrases needed to guide me along the way and some way of figuring out how to transfer flights. Surprisingly the hardest part was not finding my way it was merely being alone I found that I got very lonely in the long 14 hour trip and I needed to find a way to occupy myself in order to avoid loneliness. The things I learned from being lonely help form my identity. I found that the more I tried to push away the loneliness the more it just came

My social identity plays a huge part in shaping and defining my role as a leader. The way I view myself combined with the way that others view me frames the narrative of my opportunities to be a leader in many ways. Of my various social identity characteristics, the two that play the largest part in my life are my gender and appearance as a woman and my economic standing as lower middle class.

Dr. Wendy Ostroff’s lecture on identity was taken on a more psychological and developmental science perspective. Rather than having a powerpoint, she demonstrated pictures and the stories behind them, more about the type of research behind each. By the end of the lecture, she presented an animated video with a general view. The main point of Dr. Ostroff’s lecture was that we are not fixed on our identity, we are changing every single day and we are still learning about ourselves.

Many people around the world have different types of identity and everyone is different. I’m going to be talking about different ways these essays deal with questions of identity. Identity is very important. Our identity is based on who we are, who we've been, and who we think we will become. It might take a struggle to realize who you really are but it’s worth it.

I am truly proud of my background and how it has formed my identity. My background consists of me being Portuguese. I could not be any more thankful for how greatly my background has impacted my life into what it is now. It has helped me gain many friends that I am still very close to and gain interests that have started since I was a child. Simply experiencing my family’s numerous customs and traditions is why I love to express that I am Portuguese. It has given me the opportunity to visit Portugal every year during each summer where I fall in love with the country each time. Being Portuguese has taught me many lessons throughout life that I will continue to pass on for future generations of my family.

Identity is the idiosyncrasies, backgrounds, and character traits that separate people from one another. Self-discipline and mental toughness are just two of the many characteristics I’ve had to develop throughout my life success in school, sports, and life in general rely greatly on these traits. I always hated driving to my Grandmas but this one trip tested my abilities greatly. From preparing for, committing, and carrying out the road trip, I was tested every step of the journey.

All throughout our lives, we wrestle with the question of who am I and what do I want in life? However, it is usually during the adolescent years that this issue really comes to a head and we begin a more earnest search into finding ourselves and deciding the direction we want to take with our lives. One of the theorists who studied this idea of identity formation was James Marcia. Marcia proposed that there were four different stages or statuses in the development of identity which he labeled Identity Diffusion, Identity Foreclosure, Identity Moratorium, and Identity Achievement. In this essay, we will briefly summarize his four different stages and then apply his theory to my own identity development during the adolescent years.

My purpose is to show my individuality and to express myself. This is for others including myself, to see and to remind us that our identity is very complex.

Everybody has an identity, it makes them individual and unique, and it defines who you are as a person. This project about my identity showed me what makes me unique. I would have never known how much my friends mean to me or how my identities connect with each other. I have three identities that make me who I am, cultural, personal, and social. A specific quality that covers my cultural identity is being Czechoslovakian. Both sides of my family have at least a part of Czech in them. My great-grandparents are from Czech Republic and my grandpa was the first generation in America, he was born in Ohio. This is very important because I have always identified as Czech and it is a big part of me, as I am so interested in ancestry. For my personal identity, the biggest part is my personality, being loud and outgoing, has always been important to me. The reason being, it is how people view me. A lot of people know me as the loud person or the person who talks a lot. That is meaningful to me considering I like people to view me in a certain way The last identity, social, is one of the most important to me because it involves my friends, and through this project, I learned how vital they really are to my social identity. I realized that I have a good amount of friends in this project. It is nice to have people as a support system and to relate with. These qualities show that I value being loud and outgoing. It also says that I value my family and they are a big part of life. The last one, social, ties in with the first one because it shows I am outgoing and friendly.

Who am I? This question has been coming up a lot since the start of my sophomore year, and I have done a lot of thinking about this question. Throughout our unit on identity construction, I have learned how multiple factors play a role in constructing one’s identity and how they vary from person to person. For me, my factors that have helped construct my identity include my family, my dream, and my positivity. Without these factors, I wouldn’t be the person I am today because all of these factors have shaped who I am today. As a result of our identity construction unit I have learned more about how these factors have shaped me, and why they are so important to who I am.

Beginning high school changed a lot of aspects of myself, which made the Identity Unit a new chance for me me look inward to how issues affect both me and others my age. This resurfaced again when we read Romeo and Juliet and looked at how different expectations and aspects of identity affect me and others around me in relation to how we view ourselves and others. I used the activities about different parts of our identity, Romeo and Juliet, as well as the debates and assignments focused on how the outside world views and changes us with things such as gender roles and labels.

Foremost, my path has been one of many adversities and trivialities. I have battled with my gender identity for quite some time now, so when pursuing a college or university this was a primary thing I looked for: A place that can be of a safe-haven for me so that I will not feel shunned by fellow classmates and can openly thrive to be myself, and prosper on with my education. Within my family, they lack understanding of who I am and why I express myself the way I do. Furthermore, I identify as non-binary, but having to discuss this concept with them terrifies me that they will deem me as confused, as they did my sexuality when I came out as queer. From experiencing this, I would like to be in an environment where I feel able to discuss these topics with fellow classmates, teachers, and other people. As a result, Mills College has an environment that has shown perfectly capable of that with being in a city, let alone state, that has been the epitome of LGBT+ acceptance and rights.