Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

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English 112 Sec. #71

Everybody is bound to act differently in a given situation based on their personality. How they act when they are around their significant other may be quite different from how they will act in a group of friends. Similarly, how they act in a group of friends will be quite different from how they act around somebody that they have never met before. I find it interesting to see how I personally act in these situations and why that might be. A person’s identity is being exactly who they want to be because that is the only way that anybody can truly be happy. Personally, I am the kind of person that needs to figure out who they really are. Who I am right now is somewhere in between who I was and who I am yet to be.

Unfortunately, I find myself conforming to be the kind of person that whoever may be around wants me to be. I consider myself to be fairly good at reading people, and so it is easy for me to become a likeable person in their eyes. Even though I may not like a certain person, I will most likely still act the same way around them that I would anybody else that is not somebody I consider a “friend”. For example, there were several people in high school that I did not care for at all, but if they were ever to say anything to me, I would respond to them in a positive manner and be friendly towards them. I suppose I just have not accepted, yet, that there are always going to be people that do not like who you are. My problem is that I try to avoid that, which, sometimes, gets in the way of who I really am.

“Who you are” depends completely on how much you are able to accept how you act all the time. In my case it could simply be that I have not figured myself out yet, and that would explain why I conform to be that likeable person. The problems that occur, however, are when people see me in different ways, and I have to choose who to be when I am around them. Still being in my teens, I most often resort to that bold sarcastic person. I have not really thought of being any other type of person, however, mostly because that sarcasm and joking around has been what has gotten me accepted in the past. This was mostly when I was in the drumline of my high school where everybody pretty much had the same personality. In maturing, however, I have realized that that kind of person is not somebody who goes very far as far as society is concerned and, more importantly, is not the kind of person that I want to be. I would much rather be light and caring but still be able to joke around. Those traits are what are built into my true personality even though others may be more prominent at times.

When I first meet somebody I will go out of my way to gain acceptance from them. When I got to college, I will constantly do things that would seem completely absurd to any third party because it made those people that I was helping happy. In retrospect I have realized that it is not completely about making other people happy but more making myself happy with the way I am around everybody. This, of course, is not the kind of person that appears stand-offish around a group of friends and also isn’t the person who will sacrifice all of their time for somebody else when they are one on one. For example, at the beginning of last semester I would go down the Fine Arts Center at any time, no matter what I was doing, if they needed or wanted somebody to go with them. I also realized that when I was in a large group of my friends, I would be very unnecessarily sarcastic whether it was just to get my point across or to just prove myself to the group. I slowly realized that it did the exact opposite: the people I was around were actually thinking less of me because of my actions.

The definition of identity is simple. It consists solely of being accepted not by others but by oneself. My personality has changed an enormous amount during my life, sometimes for the better and others for the worse. That time span started out with me being completely egotistical. I did not have any cares about anybody else and didn’t think about how my actions might affect somebody. The pendulum then swung the other direction where I was the kind of person, as I explained earlier, that would go completely out of their way to accommodate another. I still need to find that point somewhere in between that I can be that person who is both accepted by my friends, peers, educators, and family and also is accepted by me. For now, however, it is still a journey to find that happy medium.