Advanced Essay #3: The Fluidity of Self

My goal for the paper was to explain my train of thought when it comes to identity and belonging. There were a few sources we went over in class that I knew I wanted to include, so I started to develop a solid thesis based on that. One area that I think I have to improve on is the transitions between topics because it’s a bit choppy at parts. Overall, I’m proud of what I’ve written.

Essay:

Our sense of belonging shapes who we are and how we view ourselves. As babies, we don’t have our own identity, we just exist in relation to other people. Thandie Newton explains this in her TEDTalk, Embracing Otherness, Embracing Myself, she said, “... the self is a projection based on other people's projections.” We are first defined by other people’s ideals and preconceptions about who we are. We can simplify the major influences of belonging to three sections: friends, family, and social media. The way we act within these three groups are usually very different, self is fluid.

Our friends are who we choose to associate with and relate to. This is how other people view you. When you are in a friend group, the way that group is defined is the way you will likely be labeled. Most don’t notice that they do it, but it’s very detrimental. Grouping people and making assumptions about their personality based on it is limiting and can lead to someone being afraid to do something outside of what their friend group typically does.

The next section is family, which, depending on the situation, can be how we view ourselves. It’s the first indication we have of our own identities since the people in your family are the first people you’re close to. This section can be similar to friends in that when a family thinks a certain way, it’s hard for one individual to break that. There are things people keep secret for their entire lives because they’re afraid of the reaction their family will have. Both friends and family have good and bad parts. On one hand, they offer companionship, giving us something to hold onto. On the other hand, there can be an unacceptance to change that puts a limitation on who we can be.

The last piece is social media, which is how we portray ourselves. The growing popularity of social media has sparked a change in the way we think. Due to the huge impact social media has on us, we often think of it first. The first thing we do in the morning is check our phones to go on Instagram or Snapchat. Online, we can post virtually anything we want, so we can be anything we want. According to Psychology Today, “We come to see our identities as those we would like to have or that we want people to see rather than who we really are.”  There is a pressure in today’s society to have a perfect, aesthetic life and teenagers fall victim to this, thinking that they aren’t as good because they aren’t popular on social media.

When I was a kid, I didn’t have a ‘group’. I was part of them all, which ended up with me not actually being part of any of them. This left me in identity limbo, I didn’t know who I was. Eventually, I learned to be my own person; I figured out who I was to myself, not to others. Now, I still have more than one group, but I genuinely fit into each of them, they all matter. I’ve thought about this a lot, trying to understand why I didn’t fit in, but I realized that it wasn’t just me, it’s really the way people view friendships. Someone’s friends shouldn’t be what defines them, they are their people with individual thoughts and interests. Although there are a lot of negative effects on our identities because of social media, personally, I was benefited. Social media helped me to discover who I was. It allowed me to post and express myself in whatever way I wanted. Family also played a big part in this, they support me constantly.

Identity and self are fluid, they change. People see us in different ways and we act differently around them, this forms our identities. Erving Goffman, one of the most influential sociologists in history, has a theory about self that essentially states that there is no one true self. He thinks that humans just display a series of masks to control how we appear. This theory has been seen and adapted many times, Newton even mentioned a form of it in her TEDTalk, stating that the self she tried to use in the world was rejected so many times that it began adapting to the rejection.

Overall, how we belong has the biggest impact on our identity. A part of it is how people view us, but we choose how they see us. We can manipulate people’s insight to our lives and only show what we think they should see. This ties together all the pieces of belonging, family to first shape our identity, friends to help us find it, and social media to help us change and show it.