Why Am I

No one can deny that what we’re born with is part of our identity. Our gender, skin color and our heritage are all part of who we become. But our cultural experiences, during our childhood, have the greatest influence in forming our lifelong identities. With maturity comes the realization that we can make choices to change who we are and how others perceive us. These choices allow us to modify our behavior and personality, therefore modifying our identity. Even though we have a personal choice in how we negotiate our identities, cultural experiences play the major role in forming our core identity.

Culture encompasses the shared ideas, beliefs, practices, traditions, and values of a group and how they connect us together. These areas not only connect us but they define the group as well. The commonness in each group is where we come up with the concept of what “normal” is. When we start talking about cultural experiences we are describing how we interact with these groups and to what effect the dynamics of these interactions have on us. My experience with the fire service provides an example of this. For the most part, firefighters tend to be males with type “A” personalities. Some of the attributes are seen in Table 1-1 in the essay, Alpha Male Syndrome (229). Dominant, confident, aggressive, competitive, determined and having a strong appetite for change are all “Alpha” attributes. People with these attributes are attracted to the fire service because the work will challenge them and they’ll fit in with the group. Once they identify with the group and go through the rigors of being accepted, the group gives them a new identity, brother. The identity that the public gives them as a result of being a part of this group is hero, either way it’s a new identity.

As we develop, there comes a point in life where we become aware of where we fit into the big picture. The age I’m referring to is different for all of us but it’s close to 10 years old and takes us through our high school years. We start to compare ourselves with others and begin to associate with the things we like and avoid those we don’t. These cultural experiences are those interactions in life that point out how we are similar or different and unique, comparatively speaking. The differences that contrast the most with the norm, or that impact us negatively, have the biggest effect on us. When a person fits into a group it’s usually no big deal, it’s taken for granted. Take that same person and reject them from a group and they’ll start to wonder what’s wrong with them and why they don’t fit in. Teenagers are notorious for doing this. We see an example of this in the essay, Masks. In the story, Lucy Grealy is in the 6th grade and is trick-or-treating on Halloween. She is out with friends and feeling more confident than usual because she is wearing a mask, which hides her disfigured face, and at one point remembers thinking, “I hadn’t realized just how meek I’d become, how self conscious I was about my face until now that it was obscured” (67). She identifies herself as meek and self conscious. These identifiers are the result of her negative experiences with her classmates when they made fun of her for being different. She even takes it a step further when she identifies herself as unlovable, “And besides, I thought to myself, the world of love wanted nothing to do with me” (69). And again describing herself as ugly, “….I definitely identified the source of my unhappiness as being ugly” (70). These identifiers were all the result of a young girl and her experiences of being rejected by her culture.

With maturity we realize a large part of our identity is only a reaction to the survival of growing up, and it’s at this point we can start making personal choices to steer our identity in the direction we want it to go. Examples of this might look like: plastic surgery to modify our looks, moving to a different community to better fit in, raising our socio-economic status, or getting an advanced degree. It could be as simple as deciding to change a part of your personality you don’t like. We see this in Gloria Anzaldua’s, How to Tame a Wild Tongue, where she writes, “I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing” (82). Here she decides she will no longer be ashamed of her language based on what other people think, and it’s a decision to change her identity. Whatever the personal choice, it’s a conscious decision to improve, or change, the identity you already have.

In closing it’s important to note that what we’re born with, our cultural experiences and our personal choices all have an impact on our identities. The things that we’re born with are with us forever and usually can’t be changed. Our cultural experiences play a major role when growing up and identify where we fit in. And personal choices allow us to negotiate the identities we form, and give us the freedom to change.