final identity essay

Andreas Fell

9/19/14

Prof. Young

ENG 1100

The Complexity of an Identity

            An identity is like a fingerprint, everyone has one and everyone’s is different. These identities make us who we are. They cannot be changed or manipulated. Throughout the years certain social situations have come up where people attempt to change others identities to make them fit into the society that they want to see. The key word in that sentence is attempt because you cannot change what is already written in stone. An identity is strong, it is powerful and those who embrace it have a different out look on life because not only are they embracing who they are, but they are looking out at the world through they eyes of their culture.

            When identity is brought up it is always thought of the literal terms as who the person is physically. Even though that is a single definition of what an identity is, another look at what an identity is, is needed to truly understand what makes us who we are. To go into their personality and really look at their internal identity, what makes up who they really are as a person, their background, ethnicity, where they were raised, who they were raised by, is necessary for the connections that we make in the world around us. You could look at me, and my physical identity could be that I am big, a guy, have a beard, and that I am tall. But to really look at my internal identity would take a whole lot more than just looking at me.

            No two people have the same identity; there are a plethora of different factors that go into what an identity. By that I mean that in todays society with so many different culture overlap and different people from different culture marrying people with different cultures and backgrounds it makes it hard for two different people to have the same identity. You even have a different identity than your parents. In my own life I have experienced different events that have impacted me that my parents, when growing up, have not experienced. To go into detail even my own lifestyle is different that my parents, they were the type to not be adventurous with their experiences, however looking at my own life the things I have done and have experienced have made me a much more diverse person and have added to what I call and identify to as my personal identity.

            But not only the persons background can determine ones identity. Other factors such as culture raised in, and area where a person lived can also alter their identity. For example in “How to Tame A Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldua she says “With Chicanas from Nuevo Mexico or Arizona I will speak Chicano Spanish a little but often they don’t understand what I’m saying. With most California Chicanas I speak entirely in English… Often it is only with another Chicana tejana that I can talk freely.” (248) What she is trying to say is that even though she is talking to other people with the same culture and ethnicity as her and who speak the same language as her, the dialects within those languages can make it a totally new language. Going to my own experiences, my background is Greek, and within the Greek language is different dialects, I can speak regular “text book” Greek, but where my family from Greece is located in we speak a dialect called vlahika its spoken by a small amount of people and it is only heard in the north of Greece. That being said, the different factors from that area of the world influence something so important as language just shows how influential these factors are.

            An identity is a melting pot of different factors that all combine to create an individual person. This combination of identification cannot be changed no matter how hard the person or some external factors tries. It is an individualized marker to help distinguish us in the world that contains so many different combinations of cultures, ethnicities, and other factors that at the end of it all even though there are 7 billion people here on this earth we are all individuals and are different from each other. Yes we may share some similarities between each other but even those don’t match up perfectly. The dark times in our history where we attempted to change who people were and change their identities was a sad and very stupid time. It was stupid because you cannot change something that is so individualized. If it’s a brick once its always a brick. That brick is never going to evolve to a computer or even anything remotely non-brick like. It will be like that forever.  That can be related back to identities. They can never be changed only added to. They are some of the most important things that we can call our own. Without identities we are just a blank face in the crowd.