Reflection Paper On Identity

Every year I look back on the previous and I see how much I have changed. I see the friends I have gained and lost. The heartbreak and the happiness. Despite how rough times have gotten, it has truly made me stronger. Everything has shaped who I am today, it has shaped my identity. Identity is a complex topic because it consists of changeable and unchangeable traits and outside internal influences; my own identity has been shaped by going from private to public school, young life camp, and my current friends.

Good morning/Afternoon, I’m Tarryn and today I’m going to talk to you about personal identity. Identity is what makes us who we are, everyone has a different identity. Without identity we wouldn’t be human because everyone needs one to exist. Our identity is changing as we progress through life and as we experience new and different things. The texts that I’ve looked at are “Frankenstein”, the graphic novel by Gris Grimly, published in 2013, is an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s original text, about a scientist who creates a ‘monster’ who he’s ashamed of and leaves the ‘monster’ with no knowledge of anything about himself or the world. My second text is “Edward Scissorhands”, a film directed by Tim Burton and released in 1990, which is about a man created by a scientist who dies before he can entirely finish his creation and must live his life with scissors as hands. From these texts, I am going to be talking about how our journey through life changes our identity and how others can affect our identity.

“’Identity has been increasingly used to refer to the social and historical make-up of a person, personality as a construct. Sometimes such identities are conceived narrowly psychological, individualist terms, as the cumulative result of personal experience and family history”

Interactions between people are never ending. The effects of one conversation could affect the outcome of that person’s life, consequently changing their identity completely. There comes a time, though, when dealing with others confident in their identities, where one must ask themselves the personal question of “who am I?”. No matter if you’ve just stumbled upon this question, in the process of discovering the answer, consistently changing your answer, or confident in your answer, the people around you are the ones you have to thank for molding your personal identity.

Humans are bound to make mistakes during these critical decisions that affect both relationships and them as individuals; as a result people are regretful about their identity. Sooner or later people arrive at a point in life where they want to reassess themselves, indicating the theme of Rethinking Identity that is associated with search for an identity, which

The public self is often times not the true self. This indication of a difference between the public and true self leads to the idea that the self and identity of an individual are different concepts. The self, is a person’s essential being that makes each individual unique compared to others; whereas the identity, is a person’s character that is essentially created to help the individual fit into society. These two concepts begin to form early in life through influences from society, family, and culture. However, as the individual beings to assimilate the world around them, their sense of identity transforms in order to adapt to the new environment, while their sense of self remains the same.

Throughout my life, certain identities have remained consist. And these identities have come to shape my perspectives and my needs and wants within American culture. Typically, my social

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.

I, Oscar, was born in the city of Santa Ana, El Salvador, the second of 5 children of a very poor family. I was raised in El Salvador up to the age of 15 years old. Due to a civil war that devastated the country and its people, I was forced to depart and try to find a better life in other horizons. I arrived in Los Angeles, California where I found myself in a different environment. Living in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood, where people spoke Spanish, but a lot of the words I could not understand because there were slang words from different Hispanic countries, and some other ones were a mix of Spanish and English. It was a mixture of cultures and languages. Soon after my arrival, I was enrolled at a white majority high school, Ulysses S. Grant High School from where I graduated in 1983. Then I married my wife Gladys, our wedding service took place in the oldest Catholic Mexican church in the city, and our reception took place in Chinatown. I already had my two daughters and was working full-time when I started to go to school at the Los Angeles City College, where I earned an Associate’s Degree in Liberal Studies.

beliefs. Sober uses the example of lightning. He points out that according to the Greeks,

My mother immigrated to Chicago with little money. She went outside her comfort zone so that she could work towards a better life than she had in China. She initially worked as a waitress full time in the United States and put herself through school while raising my younger sister and me. There were many obstacles in her road to get to where she is now, such as fatigue from her numerous responsibilities or the various times we lost our family savings from my father’s gambling addiction. By observing my mother’s experiences immigrating to the United States, I learned to never be afraid of pushing yourself outside of your comfort and to embrace new challenges.

Psychologists, sociologists, and other scholars have studied the process of developing and forming an individual identity in-depth. The use of psychosocial theories, defined as, “unified, systematic casual explanation of a diverse range of social phenomena”, assist in providing organized guidance in better understanding identity development (Patton, Renn, Guido, & Quaye, 2016, pg. 5). Psychosocial theory helps to serve as guiding points to understand development within individuals. They can provide insight into the journey of developing and establishing an identity. The purpose of this paper is examine my own journey by applying psychosocial identity theories to my collegiate experience.

As I walked down the hallway to my first class, I could feel myself getting butterflies in my stomach. In the back of my head, I did not know what to expect for my sixth grade year at Seven Springs Middle School because I have not seen or talked to these people that I was close with for more than a year. Moving back from being in Tampa, Florida for one year and a half made me get into different environments and meet culturally diverse people. Coming back to Trinity again, I had to rekindle all the friendships I used to have and start middle school which was pretty nerve-racking because this is when you really had to start focusing on your education and making the right decisions. Sixth grade became one of the most important years of my life in becoming confident and figuring out my own identity and who I am as a person.

In the book Letters from Young Activists, one of the letters by Guadalupe Salcedo, she says “[I]f I hadn’t struggled through my own process of reflection and growth in regards to my identity, I don’t think I would have learned so much about the world and why people are not only against similar issues but creating bridges between communities to overcome them” (86). The quote resonates so much with me because of my early stage as a developing young man who wants to be a positive addition to society. I am here at Brandeis University, an institution that wants to shape my form of thinking and provide me with innovative and useful skills for a future that I very much ignore at the moment, but that I am envisioning. The way I can envision is looking at what I think is wrong in the world, questioning how can I be part of the force that change the thing that is deemed as “wrong,” and how does my identity fit in all this?

As I look back on my journal from the first week of this class I notice how different yet the same my answers to the question “who are you” are. In the first week, I still talked about how I identify as a hard-working college student that strives to meet her goals. I think, still do this day I identify as that. However, now I like to go in-depth with that question. Not only am I hard working but I am hard working because I strive to get my homework done on time, ask questions when I am confused, and participate in class discussions when I have something to input instead of sitting quietly like I typically would. I think that after studying identity for a whole semester I can grasp and identify who I think I