Personal Narrative: What Makes Me Who I Am

A long way gone by Ishmael Beah, attempts to evoke a powerful response from the leader, by using vivid descriptions to show how he has become emotionally traumatized by the acts of violence in the war. The reader then sympathizes with Ishmael and begins to understand the lasting and deep, emotional pain that Ishmael deals with on a daily basis.

Identity is a very in depth topic that explores someone’s inner self, simply putting it; identity is what makes you the way that you are. I have honestly never pondered this question in such depth. So receiving this essay, it was bittersweet, I have never pondered this question before, but on the other hand, being the age that I am it is important to understand my identity so this is a good opportunity to do so. While pondering this question, I have found that my identity consists of different elements that contribute to who I am. These elements include my religion, my character traits, talents, environment, and my aspirations and my passions. These elements influence the choices I make that strengthen and broaden my identity.

STRETCH!!!! In this personal narrative I will be talking about what made me well...ME! I will be talking about gymnastics and why I think it made me, me. The three reasons why I think it made me who I am today is because, I am more flexile, I have a better pain tolerance, and I am more patient with myself and others. This why I think gymnastics has made me, me.

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.

My Identity connects to my culture because it describes the way I look and the point of view I have on certain topics. My culture is the Native American tribe, Wampanoag and I am also Mexican. I have some facial features and body structures from both sides of the family like: most of my family has brown or black hair, we are taller than the average human, and our faces have an oval shape. Some topics that my family has taught me from both sides of the family is, family always sticks together and always comes first, and If you see bad things going on in the world, always try to help and do whats right. From my Dad’s side of the family, I learned tons about survival skills and on my Mom’s side I learned a lot about traditions. An example from

My identity product is the card that was put in my baby’s bassinet when she was born. It is pink, it has hearts and stickers my daughter’s and I demographics.

I live in Chicago but I belong to New York. Ever since I moved to Chicago at the beginning of my freshman year, I’ve always wanted to revisit New York. I still talk to my friends back at home and enlighten them about my school and life in Chicago. Although I want to revisit New York, I’m also beginning to welcome and appreciate my new life in Chicago.

This is the stage when you form your own individual identity and separate from the oppression based system of hierarchy. This is the stage I developed through the help of my mother. Even when I was bad she would install the power of knowledge in me. She always installed on me that I had to go to college. I went through this stage when I stopped associating with my high school friends. I notice that they had nothing going on with their lives and were dragging me down with bad influence. Once I decided to go to college I stopped all contact with them. Going to college changed my perception on life. I know that with the proper education I can be anybody I want to be and I can have an equal chance in society. I stopped feeling like I was oppressed

On paper, my life may appear to be an average, uneventful life with no real experiences to shape who I am as a person. However, I can firmly say that while I may still be young, high school has taught me many life lessons and helped form me to be who I am today. High school has been a series of highs and lows, with many successes and some failures. Before I reached high school, failure was a foreign concept to me, I had never truly experienced what it meant to not succeed at something in the first attempt. This was a hard lesson for me to learn and accept, but I can now see late in my senior year that these failures helped me grow into who I am today. Along with the growth brought on by failure, I also began to treasure my successes more, and feel a sense of accomplishment in my achievements.

“The strengths for me are adaptability, restoration, individualization, empathy, and relator. Adaptability is easy for me because I don’t like confrontation. I try to just go with whatever as long as it doesn’t threaten my children or myself. Growing up I just learned to avoid bad situations. If an environment is good I deal with it. If a situation is bad I deal with that as well. Restoration is what I’m dealing with now. I need to work on restoration for myself. I do seem to have good advice for others but I lack that in some parts of my life. I need restoration with my finances. So I plan on reading books on financial planning. I have always just wanted to spend money and not save my plan is to educate myself and restore my financial situation.” (Clifton, 2006)

Throughout my life, I have encountered many tough circumstances that have altered me into the person I am today.

Finding who I am. It was one of the most confusing processes ever, but one of the most important. It helped give me insight into not just myself, but others too. My beliefs give me guidelines on how to live my life and how I treat others, but it wasn’t always that easy and straightforward. It took a lot of trial and error for me to find who I really am, but those trials helped me form my belief process and they hold a lot of importance to me.

One question I ask myself every once in awhile is, “What makes me... me?”. The first things that come to mind when I think of myself is a hard working, dedicated individual who has an inquisitiveness for sports, technology, and helping others. The root for these self interests is my active personality. As a child, I was always occupied; from playing with a ball to messing up something in my mother's bathroom. I never liked sitting down or watching as much as going outside and hanging with my friends. These actions just carried over into my teenage life and matured over to make myself who I am today.

' what makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages and several cultural traditions' (Maalouf , A, 2000), which emphasise my identity and how this is an essential part to my identity. For example, I am an Indian, who wears salwar kameez ( traditional Asian clothes), who loves eating Asian curries with hand, who speaks Hindi and Punjabi with my parents and relatives (the most common languages spoken by an Indian), I am an Indian because I was born in India, an Indian who prays and visits the Gurdware (Sikh temple) every Sunday ,and lastly ' visiting others' such as cousins and relatives are considered a very important part of an Indian culture (Kenner et al, 2004).

Some people have things that make them special or different from others, which their lives would be incomplete without it. The things that make me myself are the facts that I am a multiple sport athlete, intelligent, and also the fact that I love anything medical. These things make me who I am for in my life, this is all I do. All my time is filled with sporting events, whether it is my own games or other sporting teams from my school. My job even consists of sports; I am a volleyball official. Whether I am volunteering or taking classes in high school, I am constantly trying to learn about anything medical.