An Emotional Roller Coaster Plus a Final Result (Agent of Change)

If you’ve been following my project you would know that I am studying and learning about Masculinity and Self-Esteem. In my studies, I have discovered in my first study Masculinity is “The possession of qualities, traditionally associated with men.”  The only problem with this is that people of the world today take this meaning way too far and just use it as almost an emotional weapon. They take what these “possessions of a man” are supposed to have and apply them to every male that they encounter. If the person that they meet does not have these possessions or live up to the expectation they are immediately judged and set as an outcast towards the rest of a group or society.

For my second part of research I did a survey with a series of questions that asked people’s opinions on Gender Roles today.

The things that people are doing nowadays are helpful but few. They advise and plan trips for people with disorders as such, involving Low Self-Esteem. There are also organizations such as Good Therapy who do Psychotherapy for people with these type of issues. Like I said, the ways that they are using to help establish change are ways that will surely help but there are some problems with them. First of all, in my opinion, I think there should way more ideas that people should have came up with by now to help people. Secondly, What if there are people who can not afford things such as Therapy and vacations? Will there be a way to help them for free?

Being only, a freshman at SLA there wasn’t much that I could do like planning vacations or having Therapists. So, I did what I thought would be best. I made posters somewhat like flyers and posted them around my community and my school. On them there were quotes about gender roles and confidence, along with words of encouragement. The posters also allowed the people who saw them to write questions and comments on them. This idea originally came from me seeing something like it around the school but they all promoted their own causes and clubs. So, I thought that if they could do it, why couldn’t I? Although it was a really late decision it was pretty easy to create these posters. Thanks to Canva. To be honest, the experience wasn’t really that exciting. Although, I did get some friends to help me put up the posters where I thought they would serve their purpose best. The effect of change was half good, half okay turn out. The posters that were posted at my school didn’t get quite the reaction that I was expecting. I think that may have been part of my mistake on where I put them. Considering that the stairwell and fifth floor aren’t exactly the most used areas of the school. But when it came to outside the school, my flyers seemed to be good help to people around the neighborhood. Although, some people who told me in person that they saw my posters said that they didn’t feel comfortable with sharing their feelings and opinions.

With this combined with all the other work and projects that I had to have done all at the same time it was extremely stressful for me when doing this project. I learned something about myself, which is that, when it comes to helping the people I care about and love I usually don’t let my emotions get to me. There were many times that I almost gave up on this whole thing, but then, I remembered the people I was doing this for and that this should be about more than just a grade and that’s it. I also learned that not everything isn’t going to just come along right away, You always have to be willing to be patient and wait for a success to be fulfilled. The one thing that I could’ve done way better was having management over my time. It took me way too long to get this done and I was not putting things that mattered the most first and kept putting other things on the backburner.

To see all of my resources and sites I used check out my Annotated Bibliography here.