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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.