Self vs. Society

A lot of times when writing I feel as if I'm in some pseudo-artsy-indie-in your face shitastic teen movie. You know, the kind where the art studio/music room serves as the main background for some climactic interlude, such as sex between the cello player and school administrator or passing blunts and having "deep" conversations? Who is to say that my life isn't all but a joke? Psychologists and those specializing in childhood development speak a lot about the fine line separating self from society, and I hold it to be widely true. Is this thinking, moving, human being that I am really who I am supposed to be, or am I just a creation of what society and culture at the time of my raising deemed to be growing up?

I believe I am real, that I am my own person, yet this person who I am seems to be less absorbed in characters developed on a screen and more in tune with those written in a book. Is this why I constantly write? I see myself as a creation of all the stories I have read when I was younger. As a child, I read a lot what we now would consider older classics. Heidi, Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie. All of these stories set in idyllic settings certainly clashed with my real life of living in the oil refining wasteland that was (and still is) Northeast New Jersey. One could literally see the Empire State Building from the top of the apartment complex my family and I lived in when I was 10. Yet however close this penned "city of dreams" was, it was still so far from the realities of where I grew up.

Naturally, the area where I grew up is not something I discuss much with anyone. The nanosecond birthplace is brought up between my peers, my answer is immediately giggled at. "Joisey" is a place to be made fun of, no thanks to recent televised escapades of tanned, Grey Goosed, and scantily clad guidettes and their ape-like, jacked up male counterparts. This is the New Jersey that is shown to the world, and that the world understands, not the state that I grew up in.

While I did grow up in a neighborhood of strictly middle class families, my school reflected the entire makeup of the small city of Bloomfield. At Watsessing Elementary, WASPy children were in the extreme minority. The majority of these white kiddies were ushered off by their parents to attend the various private schools in the area, gasping in fear at the idea of their child having to go to an urban school. Therefore, my brother and I as well as a handful of other children were left at the clawed hands of the public school system.

However, while the learning environment wasn't exactly the greatest, with outdated classrooms and overcrowding, I thrived. While certain academic programs, such as music, art, and science, were struggling to make due with what they had, I learned many more valuable lessons in the aspects of life. Tolerance was something I don't think I would've learned if I was ushered off to a private school or raised in a mostly white area. Basically, I learned that EVERYONE is different simply because I was exposed to it. There were kids who had gay or lesbian parents, parents who didn't speak English, disabled, impoverished, Jew, Evangelical, Catholic, Buddhist, black, white, asian, hispanic, the works. And despite every child being radically different from one another, we were similar in the sense that we all tolerated and accepted each of our differences. We were aware of a world outside of school. Outside of our own state and country. It was seen as okay to be different and certainly wasn't something to be used as a target for abuse and scapegoating. However, was this a part of the society and culture we grew up in, or our young misunderstanding of how the world operates? Where most of the time differences aren't celebrated and instead are feared?

This is a blend of self and culture. How can I tell this is truly my nature by biology and raising, or how socialization in my specific community created me?

Ending yet another semester of schooling is always odd. I feel extremely relieved to have completed all my assignments and challenges thrown my way, I feel accomplished, yet there is also a sense of something lost. After putting in so much effort, what do I have to show for it? What shall I spend the remainder of my time doing?

I manage to keep my GPA at the highest level, making Dean's List for another round. Yet there is a confusion for what I really did.

There was no passion for me in these past few months. As I planted myself at a computer to write up another too long paper and attempt to prove to my professors that I was absorbing the material and thinking critically, I was completely at a loss. But eventually my mind would click and I would slew out some 10 page response on something I lacked any emotion for. All the work was there, and it was done well. However, the motions were robotic. Strings of sentences were pulled out of my head and I stuck myself in a mindless daze of simply getting things done.

I'm certainly happy that I do well in classes. It's a stability I never had before with school. But while I am being challenged, I feel that it isn't enough. If there was a professor out there who would completely shoot me down in my ideas, my world would be turned around. However, it would be for the better. No longer would I feel security and I would actually have to attempt to fight for my thoughts. Yet I have not reached this stage yet. I go along with some hackneyed, possibly insane idea of a text and there are no complaints.

What is needed is not a challenge from others, but a challenge I set for myself.