Discovering My Looking-Glass Self
Discovering my looking-glass self has been a difficult experience. When I was young I went to a smaller branch of a larger school district so integrating into the main branch during junior high was tough. I had to figure out the different norms and social statuses of the new environment. After discovering the norms I thought I had to change my self-image to fit into the school. Soon I didn’t enjoy acting the way I did, for it wasn’t who I was. After a few years I decided to go against the norms of the school and started to spend time around a different group of kids. Now I do not even talk to any of the kids I used to spend time with, instead I spend time with people who are fun and nice people. My gender has also been a major part of discovering my looking-glass self. I was expected to like sports from a young age and naturally I picked up on a few of them. Now that I am older I completely changed from playing sports thought to be “Manly”, baseball and basketball, to sports I truly enjoy, cross country and track. The last thing that affected my discovering looking-glass self is my family. With my parents constantly pushing me to be the best that I can be, I have been able to excel at many aspects of my life. Not only did my parents push me to excel but so did my siblings. Being one of five children gave me plenty of support and motivation to become the person I am today.
The opinion of your peers greatly affects the person most people turn out to be. Children who attended my small elementary school were young and they did not really create to many social norms or clicks in school. Instead they befriend many, if not all, of the kids in that grade, a class of 23 kids. I had about 15 good friends who I had over on play dates, went to their birthday parties, and hung out with at school. The small branch of the district I attended only went to fifth grade and then the students had to integrate into the main branch where all the students attended junior high and high school. Our class size instantaneously grew from 23 children to about 100 and that is when the social norms were really created.
The main branch of kids had already split into two main norms, the “cool” kids and the “other” kids. Though the “other” kids were made up of the kind and fun people to be around, most of them did not play sports. Being a fairly competitive kid who loves sports, I naturally joined a sports team and the kids on my team were from the “cool” kids group. I decided then that I wanted to join this group and the easiest way to do this was to start acting like them. The “cool” group of kids was made up of only about a fourth of the kids attending our grade but they were mostly the rude/mean trouble makers. Many of them picked on other kids, did not have good grades, and would get yelled at by the teachers. I slowly integrated myself into the group of kids around basketball season. I was on the A team, with almost all kids from the “cool” group and when they picked on B team kids, so did I. This created a serious role conflict in my life. One of my best friends was on the B team and I didn’t want to be mean to him, but I wanted to fit in and create friends with my new team mates. Slowly I noticed that these kids were not really my friends, but instead only hung around me because of how I acted and how I presented myself.
The new norm I was a part of dictated my lifestyle, making me wear certain clothes, befriends with certain kids and not with others, and not do things that was not considered “cool”. My friend for five years now had to be the target of my snide remarks and rude comments. We were still friends outside of school when I could act like myself, but in school people would not be able to tell that we were friends. With this new strain in our relationship I soon began to doubt my decision to change my presentation of self. Again I made a decision to change my self-image, but this time I decided to stick to my beliefs and values. I no longer associated with the kids who were “cool” and athletic like I was supposed to and now spent time with people who truly enjoyed being around me. They were kinder, more fun to be around, and I was able to act normal but with all decisionscomeconsequences. My social status in the school went down and now I was a target of a lot of the harassment of the “cool” kids, who now I realized were not cool at all. I actually decided to not play basketball anymore because of the kids who were on the team and how they treated others. They caused our team to lose games because they stuck to their false beliefs that they were better than other people and would not look past their perceived views of who was good and who wasn’t. My social perspective of the people I once perceived as friends changed dramatically over a few months and now that many of the kids in our grade have matured the kids in that norm are no longer “cool”. They are now disliked by the majority of our class. Even though I went against the norms of society for a while things worked out for the best and every worked out okay.
Though social norms have played a large role in creating the person I am today gender has also played a large part. When I was younger my father, because I was a boy and boys are supposed to like sports, was able to get me interested in sports. He never pushed me to do anything I didn’t enjoy but I never wanted to let him down so I took up his favorite sport, baseball. For a while the sport was not too bad, mainly because he was my coach, and I loved spending time with him. After a few years I had to join a league where he was not able to coach anymore. I didn’t really enjoy the sport much by then, I was never very excited by it in the first place, and this created a large role strain in my life. At the time I didn’t have any other sports I liked to play or participate in and quitting the sport, because of things I picked up from the media and my peers, made me feel like I was going to be less manly. These ideas and images I picked up from the media and from my peers were totally false assumptions but they still kept me playing a sport I didn’t enjoy for over two years. In today’s society many ideas like, a boy who does not play sports is less of a man, are totally false and just create problems for people who try to fit in with the social norms. For two years I wasted countless hours playing a sport I hated because I tried to go with what society said was manlier. Finally after those two years I did quit playing baseball and started running, which I enjoy tremendously and now I participate in many running events. Just because I don’t play a sport that is considered manly does not make me any less of a man.
My family is the last important factor that has played a large role in creating my looking-glass self. They have always been there for me in time of need, constantly pushing me to be the best I can. In today’s society not as many families sit down at the dinner table each night together. Well my family is what people might call “old fashion” in a sense. Almost every night of the week my mom or dad cooks a homemade meal and we sit down as a family and talk about our day. During this time my parents have always supported me and my siblings, giving advice when needed and congratulating us in our accomplishments. When I was younger it would always excite me to come home and tell my parents how well I did on a math test or that I got an A+ in a class. Though my parents always pushed me to get good grades this probably effected the grades I get down the most because wanting to get a congratulations from my parents set me in a habit of getting good grades. Without this support and time with my parents I would not be able to have the 3.95 grade point average I have today.
Not only have my parents been there to push me to excel in school, but they have been there to push me in sports as well. In seventh grade when I tried cross country out, I found that I was a fairly talented runner. After that first year of running I knew the only way I was going to improve was if I ran during the summer. My father would make time every day, whether he had work to do for his job or around the house, and at least run a mile with me. My father getting interested in a sport helped me to become one of the leading runners on Shepherd High Schools cross country team.
My parents were not the only people in my family that helped create my looking-glass self. Being the second oldest of five children in my family made me want to be just like my brother who was two years older. He too ran cross country and this helped me learn how hard I had to work to become a fast runner like him. Seeing him succeed in the sport just made me want to work harder to become as good at it as he was. This year I ran a time that beat his personal best and he came to the meet, even though he probably had other stuff he wanted to do, and supported me the whole race. The same thing happened in school. He was a good student and was able to get decent scholarships to CMU. Watching him come home and study for a pre-calculus test while he was still in high school made me want to get into the advanced math program like he was.
All of these things played a huge role in creating my looking-glass self. Figuring out how to stick to my beliefs and values in junior high helped me to become a very independent person who doesn’t give into negative peer pressure in high school. When I head off to college this will help me be more confident as I will have to find a new social group once again. When I figured out that things portrayed as man and womanly things in the media were false I started enjoying things I like to do much more. It is more important to do what makes you happy than what others think you should do. Most of all without the support of my family the person I am today would not exist. They helped me push through many tough times and always helped me excel in whatever I did. Figuring out what is true and what is not in society can be very tough, but when you do you then figure out what type of person you want to be. The end result is confidence and happiness.