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The things that make people who they are can be very complicated, being built from many experiences and events. People like to say things about how the past is just the past and it doesn't affect them now, or about how they do not have any regrets. Regrets are a necessary part of becoming a better person. The regrets and events of our life are what make us, us. We wouldn't be the same person if we lived in a vacuum with no outside forces acting upon it. We are based on events and those events define who we are. How we react to trauma, how we choose to stand once we fall make us who we are, and the idea that events in your life don't affect who you are as a person is incredibly naive. Think about how childhood traumas still affect people well into adulthood. The idea of having no regrets is the ideal, but God only knows I have regrets. I would be a completely different person if I went to a different high school or elementary school. Even the little things shape who I am as a person like whether or not I am friends with someone.

There are many moments I regret, believe me. One regretful memory that stands out is my first girlfriend all the way back in 5th grade. As with all 5th grade romances, it was the end all be all of human creation, we were destined for each other, clearly the universe served no other purpose than to put us together that fateful class. We were disgusting, braces filled, balls of pre-pubescence, and man was it vile looking back. In the moment it was pretty good, but the standards weren’t that high. I took this girl out on our first date and we went to dinner, then a movie, a classic, nothing could go wrong. I was wrong about that. We first went to dinner with a parental escort, which was as painfully awkward as it sounds. After our meal had arrived, I devoured it with extreme incompetence. How do you improperly eat one may ask? I am not exactly sure myself, but I am certain that I was missing the prime objective of landing food in my mouth. I then proceeded into the bathroom and spent way too much time in there defiling it. We then went to the movie, we watched some romantic comedy with Channing Tatum. Several times during the movie I tried to slide my hand over her shoulder with the classic yawn technique, and boy that didn’t work. We eventually took a very awkward car ride home, I spent the whole time wallowing in my failure and awkwardness. Getting out of the car and entering my house was such sweet relief. I thought I was gonna regret that day for the rest of my life because of how awkward I was. I did end up regretting that evening in many ways after, but not because of how I acted, but because who I was with. The girl I was with turned out to be crazy, and not in the way that's manageable or funny. She thought that the Earth was 6000 years old, that Alaska was a Country,  and that evolution wasn’t real. Regret never works out the way you think it will.

Last year in World History we learned a lot about various religions and faiths, we read texts from beliefs. This quote stood out to me, even looking back a year later. “And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.” -Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha  The author is very good at describing how the bad and good make up people, and how regrets and bad emotions are necessary. We feel all these emotions and they make us who we are. Regret is an important part of our lives. This quote opts for a ying and yang style where you need both light and dark, good and bad. We need both to not only survive, but to thrive. In most high schools it is becoming a running joke how much you regret who you were in middle school, or even as a freshman. We acknowledge our regret in a healthy comedic way. We understand regret is important in this way, we know things were bad and that things are getting better.

In this essay, I discuss what I think it means to belong and what I think it means to explore ones identity. I focus on what makes us different and the same when forming our identities. I use my past experience in a new environment with not much diversity to discuss the common themes that build bonds and friendships, as well as what is used to build a sense of belonging.

If we look through the evolution of movies that take place in the high school setting we always see a common thing, cliques. The students mentally divide ourselves into these groups from how we identify ourselves. However in the movie, there is always those few students who still feel they are alone even though they are surrounded by people “like” them. Many would argue that the problem with cliques is we separate based off of one or two common interest that can be instantly be seen and shown. What then becomes an issue later is that they feel like they aren’t like them, and most likely they are right. Instead of finding similarities such as viewpoints and personality. That is not the proper way to make friends and create groups of people to interact with.

“Embracing otherness… Well, embracing otherness is embracing myself. And the journey to that place of understanding and acceptance has been an interesting one for me, and it's given me an insight into the whole notion of self.” These are words of Thandie Newton’s when she did a TED Talk called “Embracing Other, Embracing Myself”. I believe this quote relates a lot to during my summer of 2015. I went to Virginia for a writing program and lived on Sweet Briar campus for 2 weeks. I was eager to be in a new place to help me form my identity, I hoped to do so by exploring different environments with different people in diverse groups.

The first 5 days out of the 15, I just observed everyone in silence. I noticed patterns, personalities, just different and new people in general. From my observations, I noticed a connection. They were all divided in non diverse groups. No one was really trying to separate. At first everyone stayed with their Houses when we had free time or during lunch. In those Houses, there were at least 1 person in each class but the diversity of that was by chance. By the 8th day I started seeing groups of white people sitting next to each other, Asians sitting next to each other, and the other 4 African Americans in the program scattered against that. These cliques were a cliché to me. Somehow by day 7, I made friends with a girl named McKenna. I like the diversity of the friendship because she was in Poetry and I was in Screen & Playwriting, her being white and me being African American, and just how different our personalities are. She would hang out with the people in her House. In her house, there were all Songwriters and Poetry students. They were mainly white and there was one Asian. I instantly judged them, thinking that they were only friends because of their common class the Songwriters, their House, and their race but after a few more days I began to see that they were connected by similarities that were not instantly seen. The main people I talked to in that group besides McKenna was Savanah, Songwriter and white, and Miranda, Poetry student and Asian. They all played sports and all of their personalities were similar but had outlier differences keeping them different people. I remember during the last day of the program when I was saying my last goodbyes to my new friends, I began to think about all the different things about them and how we were really good friends making the 2 weeks feel like years.

There are times where I could be surrounded by many people but feel as if I’m alone. Isolation is the main feeling I am have when I step out my house. Everyone has this sense where they do not belong because we identify ourselves as someone different from others.

Finding yourself vs. Creating yourself.

I often hear people say “Throughout childhood you spend most of your time trying to find yourself.” They say this is the reason that childhood is so hard, but to that I disagree. To me, the idea of finding yourself is synonymous with a having a destiny. I believe that you spend your life creating yourself and your future, it is not found, and you are not born with specific purpose. There is no short cuts in doing that because creating and molding the person you want to be takes hard work. Naturally you are born with a certain amount of personality and talent through genetics, but success is created after you are born, not before. The search for real self is fiction, your personality is not waiting to be stumbled upon one day. If the search for true self was reality, when it is finally found you would become static, without any real reason to be ambitious, because anything out of that comfort zone would be considered “Not being yourself.” Although having your own opinions are unique to the specific person, having a destiny is not real. Everyday you create yourself with thoughts, actions, and dreams. It is a life experiment to mold what you like and what you don’t like. The rest is up to the person, and the people who influence that person. The people that influence you play a extremely vital role in creating yourself. What is considered as finding yourself, is misconstrued with having society’s restrictions define you. The influence that society has on a person's spirit is stronger than anyone would like to admit, and even the broadest categorization of humans are made by our society. This is shown in the article from The New York Times "Race and Racial Identity Are Social Constructs.” The article states that:

Race is not biological. It is a social construct. There is no gene or cluster of genes common to all blacks or all whites. Were race “real” in the genetic sense, racial classifications for individuals would remain constant across boundaries. Yet, a person who could be categorized as black in the United States might be considered white in Brazil or colored in South Africa.

This proves the idea that society has created broad guidelines for people's lives. I believe that these constrictions make people afraid to overstep boundaries for fear of “not being yourself.”

Finding your personal identity, and your belonging in this world, are composed of different factors. Realizing who you are, and all the things that you feel are not just random. It’s who you are, and there's something very important that makes you who you are. The important aspect of building your identity I want to focus on is how your past experiences shaped who you are today. From everything you have done, and what you have gone through, you have learned from, and sometimes benefited from, has built who you are. I want to go into deep research, and discover why a person is that person based from their past. Or in better terms, “Declan’s Attempt at Psychology.”

In The Great Gatsby, the author did a terrific job with building the identities and personalities of his beloved, and hated characters. Jay Gatsby, the man who has lived it all. He’s one fancy talker, a complete class act, and a very persistent man. But why? It all came from his past. At a young age he was poor, but he had a glimpse at the society of the socially elite and fell in love. He attempted everything he could to reach that society once again. He was taught how to speak like one of them, and he was taught how to act like one of them. This all came from that one life changing experience in his past where he saw the glamorous lifestyle, and it has altered his life in the most grand way. When Scott Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby, he had to think about a few things when designing his characters. Their intentions, motivations, preferences, and their personality. All of those things are formed from what you have experienced in the past, and how you dealt with those situations.

According to Drake Baer from Business Insider, that we are indeed affected by what's happened in our childhood which turns you into the adult you are today. “Tons of research shows that our adult behavior stems from what we experienced as kids.” An article on paradoxical.wordpress.com, a writer speaks on how your past experiences shaped who you are. “Our response to situations, and events in our lives are all shaped by our experiences. Your thought process, our mind set, attitude, aspirations, expectations, and social behaviour are all altered or shaped by our experiences.” This is what Maaher Sayeed said about how are past has changed us. “Most of us feel anxious or experience irrational thoughts from time to time. Often there is a relatively simple background or explanation to why we are acting or thinking in an anxious or irrational way – this may for example be because of certain events in our childhood which make us sensitive in particular situations or it may be because of recent events, or a mixture of the two.” This what David Bonham-Carter had to say about the connection of your past affecting your life in the present. Writers, filmmakers, and other variants of story tellers all have to think about who their characters are, and why they are that way. I have noticed in any form of storytelling, the author/creator will give us either a brief or a long story about their past and why they make decisions like they do now because of the past.

  My goals from writing this passage was to include as many primary sources because I feel like this topic that I am writing about has the potential to be very descriptive if primary sources are used to support it. I felt like I did a good job on gathering sources and analyzing it to put in my passage. Something I can do better at is, improving my transitions from paragraph to paragraph. Although, I did made an attempt on doing it, but I think it would be better if I let a teacher read over it beforehand.

I was four years old when I first stepped foot in the United States. I remembered that my mother told me that I was crying for the whole plane ride, and I did not stop until a couple of days later. My parents and I settled down in Kensington, in North Philadelphia. Other than going to school, I was not able to go outside because it was a really dangerous neighborhood. I struggled through Kindergarten because of my lack of English. There was no such thing as an ESOL program in that school. I did not learn to read until 4th grade in a different school. My teacher developed my interest in reading and writing and that is when I started improving. I remembered that I was one of those kids that was pulled out of class to take a separate class that was much more basic. I was lucky to be part of a school with an ESOL program because I know that not all immigrant kids are able to get this opportunity.

As of 2013, it is recorded that around 41.3 million immigrants lived in the United States. Immigrants made up a lot of what is America today. For example, back in the 1800s, Chinese immigrants were exploited to the west of the United States to build the transcontinental railroad. Without that innovation, it would be hard to say that we would have functioning transportation. Immigrants were involved in many more creations to America, but as of today, they are not getting the credit they should be getting.

A lot of the immigrants here today are not able to receive full benefits from the states because they are undocumented. In the video (on the second link of the bibliography), Jong Min, a undocumented immigrant said that it was hard for him to fit in with his friends because some of the things they were doing was not applicable to him because of his status in America. In some states, undocumented immigrants are not able to get a driver’s license, get a certain job, go to college, etc. Jong Min said that it is like living in an invisible prison along with your family.

In the same video, Pedro is also an undocumented immigrant in America. He was told that he is undocumented by his brother in second grade; at first, he did not know what that meant, but overtime he understood and slowly became a little more wary about his future everyday. His fear for his future is a feeling that most undocumented immigrants get. No matter how hard you work to get a good education or a job, it is unlikely to happen because you are simply not documented. Luckily, he was able to get an education at Cornell University. He was on the bus to the university, one day, and was stopped by a police officer. Everyone in the bus was asked to come out, and they were all checked to see if they have citizenship. Pedro told the truth saying that he was an undocumented immigrant; he was then handcuffed and sent to prison. He was asked to perform a finger scan and strip his current clothing, so he can put on the jail suit. He said that he was really lonely in the jail cage, he was not able to contact his family or have access to almost anything; he was also not able to receive basic health checkups.

In my advanced essay #3 my goal was to explore the question of constructing your own identity and how your awareness of who you are eliminates the idea of wanting to belong. With every advanced essay I've been seeing a development of my writing and descriptive skills. In my advance essay I not only wanted to create a mental image in my readers mind but I wanted to leave an impression on the readers mind.

While watching a Ted Talk given by Thandie Newton in my English 3 class, I was captivated by her accent that I never knew she possessed. Her words caressed my ears and massaged my brain, losing the nerves and allowing my thoughts to flow down into my heart. I went home and later that night I watched the video again. The silence in my room allowed me to analyze every word that rolled off her tongue. Newton confessed her struggle with finding her identity. She spoke on an idea that she assumed most of us believed. She said “We start to believe that belonging confirms our self existence.” I do agree, some believe this idea and they make it a part of their lives. But I have also came to the conclusion that when we become aware of our internal differences, the craving of belonging no longer exists. Even if our desire is to fit in, once we know we don’t belong or fit into society’s norms  we will never be able to do so.

Children’s laughter fills the warm house. The sound of little feet kiss the ground passionately as they play around in the house. The children's mother sits at a large brown wooden circle. On top of the wooden circle sits a sewing machine. She looks up occasionally from the fabric that is being pierced by a needle. The doorbell rings and a small brown girl stops her laughter and approaches the door slowly. She looks back quickly before opening the door for her mother's permission. She opens the door and closes it, “Ahhhhhhh, Help! Help! It’s a black man!” The tall dark figure waiting behind the door looks down at the small brown child puzzled but slowly filling with anger. The mother gathers her robe and rushes to the door just to see it is the husband of her friend. He is coming to pick up the garment the mother has made for his wife.

My mother describes this moment just as she lived it.  This was the first black man she seen that came to the door. She had heard bad things about them on the T.V. She didn’t know she was black until her first encounter with racism at the age of 8. Her mother was a caramel color and her father was Puerto Rican, light and pale. He spoke broken english but he was the only man she was taught to call daddy. My mom grew up in a household full of diversity. She lived and was raised in a predominantly white neighborhood. She had three brothers and four sisters; Victor, Mario, Angelo, Santa, Ava, Vida, and Terria. All of their names were from Spanish origin except for hers. They were all yellow-toned and her brown soiled skin made her stick out like sore thumb. Her hair was a thick wild bush of coils and it took a hot comb warmed by fireplace to get it straight.

My mother was the only child with an African American dad. My grandmother’s first child’s, Terria, father was Jamaican and Chinese. Her second child Vida’s dad was Brazilian. Her last children Mario, Angelo, Ava, Victor, and Santa were born to Puerto rican men.

Part of our job as human beings involves mimicking. It’s hardwired into our bodies from evolution. This simple trait, or rather ability, allows us as infants to watch our parents and people around us talk and walk. Once we begin to learn how to talk and speak a language, our mouths just spew out all of the words we know; or for some only saying a few different words to mean various things. When we finally have passed our early stages of communication, we’re able to formulate and keep track of thoughts. And although each human is there own person, these thoughts aren’t really our thoughts. Like how we learn to walk and talk, our thoughts come from our family and reflect what they believe because most of us at that age have yet to understand who we are and what we think. According to a test performed by the University of Michigan, family influences the adolescent

My mother Angela Allen grew up in Plainfield IN, a town with very little diversity - religious, racial, political etc. She recalls a time when she was nine years old where her and her family are riding in their car from my mother’s hometown to where her Grandparents live in Clinton, IN. Angela sat in the back of the car next to her sister while their father was driving and their mother sat in the passenger. Angela noticed the daily newspaper that rested between the two front seats, the paper was the Indiana Star, one of the two newspaper businesses in the state. When my mother’s family arrived in Clinton, they first stopped at a family friend’s house. Here Angela played with her sister and her friend Mary Anne in the backyard while adults talked on the patio. Angela overheard the adults discussing political events. Angela was familiar with the topic and excitedly said “I know about that. I saw it in the Indiana Star!” All of the adults looked over at Angela and one of them chuckled and said “Only Republicans read the Indiana Star!” Angela was still very new to the world of politics and from her understanding, everyone in her, family was a Republican. Angela said “My grandfather reads it, he’s a Republican.” and to this the same adult responded “Paul Chilton, a republican?!” the adults then all laughed, including Angela’s parents. Angela was confused and it was here where she first realized that people do not have to have the same political opinions.

When we are young, all of our thoughts and beliefs from our family are our thoughts and beliefs. Until we become teenagers. Not always but usually at the age of 12 or 13, sometimes earlier sometimes later, kids start to create their own opinions. At this point most kids have already made their opinions on simple things like their favorite color and what music they like, but when tweens become teens they begin to form deeper beliefs especially about who they are. Later on in Angela’s life she began to think differently from her parents, especially her father who was a bigoted man and held prejudice against many minority groups. Angela recalls sympathizing with the groups of people her father spoke negatively about and she says that her interactions with her father “relate to what my morals and political opinions are today.”

Rationale

We have made certain choices when we did our project, and here is an explanation for these choices.

We decided to make the illustration on the front cover of a broken chain to symbolize the Chain of Being. The Chain of Being is the hierarchical structure of all matter and life, according to people of the Elizabethan era. According to legend, an attempt to break the Chain causes disorder and chaos. The play, Macbeth, reflects on William Shakespeare's belief in the Chain of Being. On the front, we will also include the word “Playbill” in bold, in order for it to stand out and catch attention. We will also add “Macbeth” so that when the reader looks into our Playbill, they are aware of who we are talking about from the play. We will also add the words, ¨Chain of Being,¨ over the Chain itself to make it clear that the Chain symbolizes the Chain of Being. At the top, we will also add something about our stage being on Broadway.

Early on in the play, Macbeth, who is a Scottish thane and a soldier, murders King Duncan. As a result, numerous strange things began to happen, such as the sky looking like it is night time when it is actually the middle of the day, a mousing owl attacking and killing a falcon, and King Duncan´s royal horses going wild. These strange events are an effect of the Chain of Being getting broken.

We decided to show the play on a Broadway stage and include Broadway actors as the roles because Broadway is a very appropriate place to show the play. Broadway is a dramatic setting and will be able to capture all of the details of the scenes. Broadway is also an extremely popular play company. Numerous famous plays, like The Book Of Mormon, Les Misérables, Wicked, and The Phantom Of The Opera, were performed on a Broadway stage. We think that Broadway performance would be the most fitting for a Shakespeare play.

We also decided to include a picture of the theater and a description of the parts of the theater to provide an analysis of the things that affect the play. The music and lighting have a huge effect on the mood of the play. The music sets the mood for the play. Dramatic, suspenseful music adds suspense for a suspenseful scene, and upbeat music adds an extra good feeling to a happy scene.

The lighting also affects the mood of the play. Lack of lighting creates an ominous mood, and a lot of lighting provides an upbeat, happy mood. Lighting can also be used to show whether or not it is daytime or nighttime in a play, and whether the characters are in a dark room or not.

In conclusion, these are the explanations for the choices we made in our project. We included an explanation for the cover, the stage, the choice of actors, and the stage description in our playbill.  We tried to think of a good explanation for each of our choices. We think that these explanations turned out good, and we hope that they did turn out good.

We have chosen a video for our proposal because it demonstrates the scene of Macbeth killing King Duncan vividly. For example, before Macbeth kills the king, he goes through psychological thoughts in his head and he suffered some kind of psychosis or hallucination because of it. In addition to the distress Macbeth had to face, a video would depict it in a realistic way. Furthermore, when King Duncan stares at Macbeth with his last minutes of his life, it could show the audience the terror from his tone of voice and facial expression. In conclusion, we chose to do a video as an option simply because the scene can depict Macbeth as someone who is struggling on which decision to make that anyone could relate to some part of their life.

The project we plan to complete is we are doing the video depiction and we are planning on completing it by following our to-do list, and the calendar we made. We also have a due date for each of the things we need to complete, like for example, what day we should have the costumes for the video, what day we are going to need to film,  etc. Also, we are going to use other people from the other streams to help us film during lunch. That’s how we plan on completing our project.

My goal for this essay was to understand the idea of loss and how it influencias people does this shape their identity, and for those who are influenced by this how does it shape them and what gives them the drive to come out of all this bad that happens to make something good. I think by the end of this I can understand that people who have gone through great loss and have come out okay in the end better then they were before have truly experienced a lot.

How do we think of the things that make us who we are when we are older what shapes us to becoming the men , and women that we will one day become. Is it our family the people we associate ourselves with our is it possible that we are the ones that decided who we become like when we reach adulthood. This is the question have you ever thought about it ? If not then why not consider the idea that we are shaped by what we lose in our lives not by what we gain, If we were given everything we were ever asked for would it be taken for granted or could we understand the significant value that it has or  would it just cause us to ask for more. I think people that have a better understanding of what they want to be when they get older if they have significant loss in their life that tends to help them see of form the person who they want to become later on the reason that this is possible is because the people have have lost what's precious that tends to make people spiral.   

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”

This quote makes me feel like the idea that once you have lost an important person to you then you tend to feel as if that is the worst feeling you will feel like a gaping hole has been made into your world which feels like nothing well ever get better again. It also means that you have to find the strength to pull yourself out of that hole through doing this will you be stronger for it but you will also help you have a better idea of what kind of person that you want to be later in life. When I was around 10 years old my best friend had lost his younger brother it was what you would call the normal drunk driver situation my friend was so shocked that there was this dark time in his life were he felt that there was nothing that he could do to handle it he then chose to let himself go into his emotions and let that dark time consume him he ended up getting into a lot of fights with people, and started missing school to the point where he did not show up anymore.

I lost touch with that person as time went on , and one day out of the blue I had found out that he had committed suicide. It felt like it was something that you hear about not something that you would expect to happen to someone you knew it hit you out of the blue and it make it seems like it was a sick joke but there was not punchline, you weight and weight and you think that he was going to come out with a punch line but he never does. I just had to expect that he was gone he was in a dark place he had experienced loss but he was not one of the few that could handle it.

“The master says it’s a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it’s a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there’s anyone in the world who would like us to live. My brothers are dead and my sister is dead and I wonder if they died for Ireland or the Faith. Dad says they were too young to die for anything.  Mam says it was disease and starvation and him never having a job.  Dad says, Och, Angela, puts on his cap and goes for a long walk.” (113)

Introduction:

My larger idea in this paper was to develop ideas about how I felt in my school community. My objective in writing this paper was to come to an understanding of where my place was in SLA and if I truly belonged there. I never thought about my identity in school or anywhere really. So exploring along this topics with 3 specific questions for investigation; I think I found a great conclusion.

Final Paper:

I’ve always felt like a small flower transitioning to blossom but I never felt like I was able to blossom as fast as the other flowers. My experiences at different schools have challenged me to either become creative or more constructive. Starting in a montessori for 1st-3rd then transiting into a private school from 4th-8th, I was open to creativity and then slightly told to part from it. The structure of a more strict environment had a toll on me; I felt restricted. Then my first year of high school came and it was different than what I thought it would be. I was used to seeing faces like mine or little to the spectrum of diversity. Transitioning to a community where all general ethnicities were represented was fairly new to me. However, it wasn’t shocking because I understood that the world wasn’t just white and black. Nevertheless just Asian or Latino. It reminded me of a quote by Ani DiFranco “I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort, where we overlap.” Yet, based off what I saw from other kids I instantly began to think that I didn’t belong there. I didn’t feel limited to only associating with kids that looked like me but I noticed that I spent less time with those who didn’t. I didn’t open my boundaries or experience new cultures right away because I was scared that I had change who I was.

When I arrived, I felt like there was only a connection because my brother was an alum. I let my past experiences construct my idea of who I should be and where I belonged. My connection to this community didn’t feel like it was genuine, as if I wasn’t here for myself. I knew it would look good for my college applications and sound nice from word-of-mouth to say, “I’m a student at a Philadelphia magnet school called Science Leadership Academy located downtown.” It sounds so sophisticated from the full lips of a black girl. Another girl looked at from the world as loud, rude or aggressive and labeled. I didn’t want to fit in this stereotype so I finally developed my own reason for coming to SLA: To make the standards of a black teenager from the city less cliche-ridden but instead a head turner. Before achieving this I had to tackle the challenges that came with it. So I began to construct my mind in the likeness that in order to achieve success, I must form an identity that belongs here.

From the beginning of this journey all I could feel was intimidation. Trying to associate with a few kids who I might usually see during passing time that hold the door for me. Even the girl in the bathroom who is putting on the same mascara as me by coincidence. Besides the small conversations that started, I didn’t feel like I spoke “SLA’s language.” As if there was heavy dialect that only some could pull off by being shrewd, sarcastic and nevertheless having a love for satire. Yet, I just couldn’t pronounce it or understand it. All my ears heard were the long formulas that seemed to have been pulled from memories like flash cards. While all I saw was the intense ability to solve quadratic functions under 3 minutes. The speed amazed me and my desire to belong began to grow. I felt like I needed to change myself in order to fit into this community.

My peers had an advanced large vocabulary, such as verisimilitude. Compared to my average choice of realism, granted it did mean the same thing but what I thought mattered was the amount of letters in the word.  My mindset was that if I changed myself I automatically didn’t have to identity as the black girl trying the defy the odds of a stereotype or the one conforming to it. Instead I wouldn’t be in that category at all so I could make myself belong somewhere else. Yet, I didn’t know what belonging should even feel like; just having friends? Being “smarter”?  Solving problems and answering questions quickly? Quoted from the book titled The Great Gatsby, “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” (Chapter 2)  In this community, the only way that I could feel less intimidated but instead inspiring to grow to survive was to relate to my peers.

          Some of my peers I found a connection with also said that they didn’t know if they belonged here. By the time I finally began to understand this all better, I was entering 11th grade. Truthfully, when I was writing this paper. I’ve thought about how different ways to develop the idea of belonging relates to myself. In a result, if we are all so different and the only similarity we have is being different, what is belonging? I don’t think that belonging exists, but nobody really belongs. We all rely on each other to accept one another, and since we make up the community it shouldn’t be conformed to a standard. Yet, I do think identity and self-identity does exist. In addition, it takes courage to not conform to standards so you can really think hard about who you are. I still can’t confidently say that I know who I am; barely what I even like. Plus it takes time to identify yourself.

So I am very comfortable in the idea of not knowing myself yet. Thus, beginning a part of myself in devotion to further question who I am and where I belong.  So far, I know that I could beat the label of a black teenage girl in our society without conforming to an code-switching identity. While also knowing that I belong at SLA with my own ideas, vocabulary list and achievements all fit enough to be attributed. In conclusion, I don’t know much else about myself but I’m willing to learn and experience more to let my true identity blossom.

In English class we are doing a project on Macbeth. My partner Sharron and I have decided to do a playbill on Macbeth the play. We are choosing to make a Theatrical Playbill with a mask of symbolic representation of Macbeth. We are choosing to do this because we want to show the play an artist's point of view. We also want the play to stick out by what people see and read. We also liked to be the second people to create a playbill, we like to be different.Our playbill is centered around the play Macbeth; therefore we decide to have a theme for our playbill. For our playbill we have decided to have Shakespeare an anniversary of all his most famous plays. The ads will be of: Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. We chose those plays because it includes death and love in its purest form. Most of Shakespeare's plays have a hate or love or disruption of some kind.In Macbeth it has lots of hate of oneself and disruption of nature, and in our playbill we wanted to reflect on that a lot.

As you know for every playbill, the cover is everything. We decided for our cover that we wanted to have a metaphor for what you see isn't, what you get. With that saying, we decided to also use a quote from the book. We chose Lady Macbeth and Macbeth to be the metaphor, because those characters changed the most. Lady Macbeth is a lady and ladies back then were supposed to be innocent, but she wasn't after they killed Macduff. We wanted her to look the most out of ordinary. One side has all her makeup and she looks perfect. Then the other side shows her true self, she is crying and broken. Macbeth was a tough person before he killed all his friends and people he was supposed to guard, so he has less going on on his face. One side has a mark that's gray and the other side looks like he is going threw war. We wanted our cover to reflect the metaphor of the whole play.

We watched Digital Nation, it was about the internet. The show gave stories on both sides of the internet, people who dislike it and people who enjoy it. The most memorable thing about this show was when the boy, Ryan, was cyber bullied. He ended committing suicide. This really just made me think about how dangerous the internet can be. It is important to watch shows like this so you don't just feel one way about the internet. Yes, the internet may be a scary place, but it can also be a place to play games and get helpful information. Talking to your parents is very important because they can keep you from the scary depths of the internet. For the parents that don't know how to keep their kids safe, I have some advice for you. Monitor your childrens activities, but don't tell them.