Advanced Essay #3 : The compromise for Identity

When assigned this essay, I wanted to take a step back from descriptive scenes. I also began to wonder “Does society destroy your sense of self in compromise of your belonging?” since none of our driving questions exactly touched on this, which is why I named this ” The compromise for Identity”. I hope that my point gets across without being repetitive, and I also hope my comparisons of being a part of a bigger picture tied well into the piece.

              The compromise for Identity

Society makes you choose between a high sense of self and the sense of belonging, for a compromise of both. In this I can see that one will construct their own self for it to be rejected, because their self won’t let them belong, striving to be too different can cause you to be an outcast in a community or in all communities said people/person strive to belong to. Everyone has an identity but society makes you choose what it is tied to. Being your true self limits you from being in communities; Interchangeably, one must have both, belonging and sense of self; however generally gives more than the other in exchange.Trying to be yourself and being vetoed by the community, teaches one that they must compromise compromise the two thing’s tied to identity for the other. This theory is proven that one lies atop the other, when someone asks about identity “I am…” one will either describe their self or ]describe something they are a part of, either “I am puerto rican puerto rican” or “I am an optimistic optimistic person”. In most cases, people will identify as either “I belong” or “myself is”, though you can have both people tend to battle the other. Though they both contribute to your identity, we tend to either choose sense of self or belonging, when it comes down to answering answering the question “Who am i?”. Am I from SLA? Am I a writer in a high school English class? Am I a Woman? Am I brilliant? Am I Puerto-rican? Am I optimistic? The answers to all of these are yes.

Shaping identity is dependent on self perception. The things that you tell yourself about your identity become your self along with the belonging that you can help and the belonging you can’t help for example being born into a community and joining a community(social belonging). These thing’s that you tell yourself become a piece of you along with the pieces you gain from belonging.

  The kind  of belonging you can't help seems to be held to a higher importance than societal belonging( the one you can help) as demonstrated in,  Mark Hugo Lopez’ Hispanic and Latino Identity Is Changing, he stated “Hispanics prefer to identify themselves with terms of nationality rather than pan-ethnic monikers .” This emphasizes the idea that, some people in particular groups of culturally similar ethnicities prefer to tie themselves to a specific culture within this subgroup of people. They tie identities to their nationality due to the different cultures within the group of ‘Hispanic or latino’, the reason this is a basis of offense to these cultures being lumped in one because their identity is belonging to these groups, such as Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban, Dominican and much more which society wants to lump together - though similar; their identity doesn’t seem to matter without their originating environment. They can't help this sense of belonging because they were born into it, so since it will forever be their identity they prefer identifying with nationalities, with their communities cultured prevented from being blurred with others- who just don’t cooperate in the same manner. If they were to let every piece of their and pan-ethnic names used to assimilate these “related groups” they would have a piece of them that really didn’t belong- causing a wider assumption that all Hispanic and Latino traditions, foods and ways are the same.

   Coexistence  of self and belonging comes with  the compromise of the other. The demand of belonging in society or to somewhere will always outweigh self, since it is ever changing. However when explaining identity, people tend to interchange self and belonging, and by doing this you tend to compromise the other part of yourself to identify with one of the two. If one compromised their self to finish the sentence “I am…” you lose the other parts of yourself building the image with others by belonging. 

 On the other hand one has a high sense of self, you tend to spend time getting to know their self, for if they didn’t they wouldn’t be in touch and knowing of self. You can build and change yourself to the self you want to be. You are in charge of your self-identity. However, when you have a sense of belonging, you identify with somewhere someplace or someway, you believes it lives in you and that’s  what makes you, yourself. This idea was illustrated in Thandie Newton's TED Talk ‘Embracing Otherness, Embracing Myself’  when she touches on the interactions of ‘self’ and ‘the society/word” in which you’d essentially  be ‘belonging’ in, she elaborates that “The self that I[she] attempted to take out into the world was rejected over and over again. And my panic at not having a self that fit, and the confusion that came from myself being rejected, created anxiety, shame and hopelessness, which kind of defined me for a long time..” After you ‘shape’ your identity, you will see yourself getting accepted and/or rejected. Even if, that  identity is created by belonging,  and is not something you can change, such as a social belonging, you just must break yourself down into lesser parts and see which one of those pieces of yourself belong in something else. In this instance ‘being rejected’ simply means try again; some pieces obviously will fit but some have to be connected, broken and sculpted to fit; while these pieces look like nothing more than pieces they fit together to make the masterpiece of a mosaic, called Identity.

Lopez, Mark Hugo. “Hispanic and Latino Identity Is Changing.” Nytimes. NY times, 11 June 2015. Web. 19 Jan. 2017. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/16/how-fluid-is-racial-identity/hispanic-and-latino-identity-is-disappearing.

Newton, Thandie. “Embracing otherness, embracing myself.” Thandie Newton: Embracing otherness, embracing myself | TED Talk | TED.com. N.p., July 2011. Web. 19 Jan. 2017. https://www.ted.com/talks/thandie_newton_embracing_otherness_embracing_myself?language=en#t-560227.