learntoquestion ltq discussions

We shape ourselves to bend to societal norms. The more we fit in, the happier we are said to get. People (including myself) heavily depend on others' opinions of them, and if we don’t meet peoples standards, we often see ourselves as worthless, stupid, etc. A popular example of this is seen with girls, where the beauty standard is tall, skinny, blondes, and if you’re not that, girls often see themselves as ugly, put themselves down, and feel the need to conform to societies increasingly high standards to be wanted. However, people with higher self esteem, are more confident in themselves and know that just because society says one thing about them, that doesn’t define who they are. Evidence for this is in Identity: By Julio Noboa Pollanco, “I'd rather be unseen, and if then shunned by everyone,.../than to be a pleasant-smelling flower/,....and plucked by greedy, human hands. (Pollanco. 13-18)”. In some vessels, I noticed that the person and me have similar aspects to our personal lives (ex. Someone did a point shoe, and dance used to be a big aspect of my life and identity too). It brodend my view on my classmates because it made me realize that what I thought I knew about people was just a thin layer to who they really are, and how similar/and different, we all can be. The point of the project was to show you never really truly know someone, and that people can manipulate their lives to seem all happy (outside of box) so people view them as that, but really on the inside they are struggling. This is also supported from the text ‘How social media shapes our identity’; “The trouble is, most difficult memories aren’t captured by photos, videos, or tweets. Screens, like screen memories, are avoidant; they turn away from the painful. There are few crying children on Instagram.(Renner. 6)” So when people tell you to not believe everything you see online, they say this because sometimes people present a fake reality. What you assume is a good life for someone could actually be their worst nightmare and you would never know. We do this because there is shame surrounded with struggle, and embarrassment. We have attached these toxic reactions to these situations and it has resulted in people being afraid to be upfront and honest. I also wanted to make a point to talk about the outside of the vessel. It is supposed to be how other people view you, but you don’t ever really know, so it’s an educated guess. But if you were to ask someone how they see you, they could give you the answer you gave yourself, or something different. Most of us put things we think people see based off our actions and demeanor. As we learned in the reading, people project how they seem themselves onto how they treat others. We needed to be critics of ourselves. Most of the time, we often are all very self critical anyways. I am wondering if kids who put more positive things on the outside, most likely have higher self esteem than the kids who put question marks, or bad traits. This is not saying those kids are bad people, just that the vessel was used as a reflection of ourselves and our actions, and kids who aren’t as confident they have good traits are afraid to write things in case they are wrong. The outside could also represent a possibility of hope, and how you hope people view you. You want people to think that you’re a good person, that you’re smart, talented, and so you put those on the outside as an act of hope that you’re right.

Beverly Daniel Tatum, in her article “The Complexity of Identity: Who Am I,” describes how individuals create their identity. She states that this is a process of “simultaneous reflection and observation,” (Tatum 1). I think what she means by this is that individuals create their own identity both by observing themselves and reflecting back what other people see in them. Some characteristics that a person sees in themselves are dominant in society and others that are subordinate (Tatum 3). She argues that when creating identity the concepts people focus on tend to be aspects of their identity that are subordinate. She is a college professor and when teaching she asks her students a similar question to the one we answered with our identity vessels. She asks her students to fill in the blank in: “I am ______,” (Tatum 2). In her classes, many people listed aspects of their identity that were not in the majority. She noticed that, “where a person is a member of the dominant or advantaged social group, the category is usually not mentioned,” (Tatum 2). Dominant groups include white, male, young, cisgender, straight, financially stable, Christian, and mentally and physically healthy, (Tatum 2). With respect to race, she noted exceptions of being in an ethnic enclave such as Italian and Irish people that could be seen as formerly subordinate groups since Protestantism and British heritage used to be more prevalent in defining the dominant groups within white culture. This exception highlights how the dominant and suppressed groups can change throughout history, or how within a dominant group there might be different subgroups in a hierarchy, but this doesn’t mean that oppression vanishes. It simply expresses itself in different ways but dominance of certain groups continues to take precedence in how someone views themselves. During the gallery walk of our projects I saw that people often didn’t list that they were cisgender, heterosexual, or white in a parallel to Tatum’s observations. I saw several examples of people using flags or other symbols to show that they were members of a non-dominant group. After seeing our projects and reading these articles, what shapes how we see ourselves? I essentially agree with Tatum, that our identity is a combination of what those around us see about us – which tends to be ways which are visible because they are different – and how we analyze ourselves based on our own observations about the world.

Tatum’s article was written in 2000, before social media. Some may argue that social media is just the latest way that people define themselves in society, a process that has been going on since ancient times. Others may view social media as fundamentally changing the way we create identity. Renner, in her article titled “How Social Media Shapes Identity,” highlights the importance of individual agency for younger people through social media and also the possible negative effects. Renner states, “[n]ew technology–especially the smartphone– allows us to produce a narrative of our lives to choose what to remember and what to contribute to our own mythos,” (Renner 2). This may be true however it also simplifies our identities into photos and captions that might oversimplify and flatten our identities. An example of this for the project might be when people asked on social media to have others describe them in a word. I saw some of this happen this year and in prior years. This method is helpful in getting ideas, but it also seems to reduce people to a word or two. I also think it is probably true that the phenomenon Tatum observed in 2000 (before social media) that people emphasize how they are different from community norms or dominant culture might be something that continues to happen on social media.

While looking at the identity vessels, I realized that it is much easier to assume things about people than getting to know them. Especially in high school, people often believe stories they have heard of others without doubting anything because it’s just easier to do so. I looked at the vessels of people I only heard things about and reading over their statement and looking at the items inside the vessel made me feel warm. It’s hard to get to know someone from a few things they included but it allowed me to understand their values. I realized how little we know about someone until we take time to listen to their experiences. The directions for the assignment were the same for everyone: how people might perceive you vs. how you perceive yourself. What stuck out to me was the choices of the vessels. I think people went above and beyond for some of the vessels and it left me in awe. The most common was a shoebox but people still went the extra mile by making it very decorative or designing it in a way that reflects their personality. I heard that many people were envious of others’ vessels, but I’ve heard so many students showing appreciation towards other vessels and admiring their creativity. Most people looked at the vessels before reading the statement or the name on the statement, and I think that helped minimize “competition” and instead revealed people’s genuine unbiased reactions.

I think the way that we see ourselves is based on the personal experiences that we’ve all gone through and the environment that we grew up in. Especially early on in your life when you are in your developmental stages those early on experiences really determine who you are and change your perspective on life and your view of yourself. This also applies to the way that others may view someone else. Based on their own experiences they already have their own views that may differ from yours, so in their minds you may be different or weird when in reality you just aren’t the same. I think that this is a universal concept because everyone does it and it’s not just something that one person does everyone does. Personal and social identities are connected in some ways because the way they portray themselves to the public may be the same person that they truly are. However some people portray a fake version of themselves so that they can have public appeal but inside that’s not the person they are. Identity is malleable because your identity can develop based on experiences that you’ve had and the environments that you’ve been in and adapted to. I think that society today limits how much you can change and grow because we have such a negative culture. Once someone’s views on you become negative it is very hard to ever change in their eyes even if you’ve done so many amazing and nice things afterwards. Society’s influence can be discouraging to others, and makes the effort to change themselves seem futile and like a waste of energy. I would hope that learning about social psychological theories would change other humans to be more accepting of other people’s identities because all the studies show our ability to treat others poorly based on characteristics. From my peers' identity vessels I learned that there are so many different components that can form someone’s identity and that we truly are all different in our own ways. I always knew that people were different but seeing how people grew up or what their favorite things to do were and how there were so many various activities that they enjoyed showed me everyone is their own person. I was surprised by how creative some of these vessels were in the construction of their vessel. Honestly I liked my vessel a lot and thought it was semi-creative until I saw other people and I was just like wow they were super creative. One connection that I’ve made from class from seeing the vessels is that “Personal identity is multidimensional”, I noticed on the inside of how people view themselves there are way more complex components that go on compared to the view that other people may have of them. That may come from the fact that they don’t know much about how people view them but in the cases that a person does you can still see that there’s more on the inside than the outside and that they have multiple parts to their identity that they identify themselves with.

Popularized in the 1940s, the saying, “don’t judge a book by its cover,” holds true today not only to its original meaning but also to the judgment that we make towards others. It can be hard to catch these judgments and oftentimes we can group a person and stereotype them before ever having a conversation. School is a place where this issue arises constantly as everyone is so focused on their work that they can forget that there is a deeper side to everyone. The same goes for the way we see ourselves. The presentation of one’s self could be entirely different from their internal view. Beverly Daniel Tatum describes this in “The Complexity of Identity: “Who Am I?”” as, “The parts of our identity that do capture our attention are those that other people notice, and that reflect back to us.” A large portion of our identity is shaped in youth, and it comes from what someone thinks about others. The identity vessel project reflected this as well, as many projects’ insides told a completely different story than their outsides.

One thing I’ve noticed time and time again is that I tend to get into a mind-reading mentality. It occurs because I think I know what others think about me, and it boils down to how I perceive them. This mentality makes a negative loop of judgement, which is why a project such as this is so important. I learned a lot about my peers, and some of the projects were specifically eye opening. Two projects stood out to me in particular, and they were those of people I used to be friends with but had drifted apart from. It was really impactful and heartwarming in a way to see their identities laid out, and it shows that people both change and keep aspects of themselves. This project shows the profound impact that believing you know what others are thinking can have, and how truly negative or detrimental it can be. I hope to learn from this project that while judgment is just a part of psychology, there are ways we can work around it and to appreciate others, making the world a more understanding place.

1. A lot of the way others see us is based on stereotypes and biases. Whether its intentional or not, everyone encounters biases in their day to day lives. People will judge one another based on their race, their gender identity, their clothes, the way they speak, etc. Our individual identities impact our personal and social choices because if we resonate with a certain group/identity, we’re not as likely to have as much judgemental biases towards that group of people. Personal and social identities are connected because social identities are that of which people seek to find themselves/ similarities with themselves and others within a group due to having similar identities, occupations, ethnicities, etc. So one's personal identity tends to fit within a group's social identity unless they conform themselves so much in order to fit into the group.
2. I believe that identity is malleable because over time you can change who you are. There are some things about yourself that are concrete such as your race and your ethnicity but you’re able to change other things about yourself like your occupation, your gender, your personality, etc. In the reading “How Social Media Shapes Identity”, the topic of society today limiting our ability to change and grow throughout our lives is mentioned. This is due to social media being so commonly used nowadays. This could be because people you’re trying to leave in the past are able to find you due to your use of social media, or due to digital footprints, you’re not able to hide from the old version of yourself because other people are posting the old you, or you have an old account up that you’re not able to take down.Social psychological theories impact humans willingness to view and accept the identities or the growth of others due to constantly seeing the old version of them, it’s hard to imagine the new version and accept the changes.
3. I learned a lot about my peers' interests and what they care about through their vessels such as activities that they take part in, people that they care about, and other things that have had impacts in their lives. I was surprised by how creative some of the vessels were and how many people decided to think outside the box with the way that they formatted their vessel. These vessels relate to what I have learned about the concept of identity because you really get to see how people see themselves and see the biases that you may place onto someone that is totally incorrect due to them just being different from you and something that you’re not used to.

I believe that there are many things that impact the way we view ourselves. Our household environments, the people around us, and our communities can impact the way we see ourselves. Being raised in a positive, uplifting, and encouraging household allows one to view themselves in a secure way. In an environment like this we may be told phrases that teach us to love and appreciate ourselves for who we are. However, these beliefs begin to fade as we get older and we start questioning ourselves causing our security to decline. Wondering things like why we don't look a certain way or why we are not smart and capable enough, consumes us. Unfortunately from this we even may make choices that will not benefit us. This ultimately impacts the way that others may see us. The way we present ourselves, our personalities, and even what they hear about us all impacts how others view us. An example of this is in our identity vessel projects. Most of these people I have known for the past four years of attending this school and have only known them for either what I have heard about them or the surface level facts. For example these two students in our class. I knew the boy was very tall and smart and the girl was very smart and did ballet. After I read and analyzed their identity projects, I learned that the boy's hobby is knitting and learned a bit about his family and some of his other passions in life. I learned that the girl likes some of the same musical artists as me, she enjoys spending time with friends, and although she comes off as intimidating she is very funny and kind once you get to know her. If I had never learned any of this about them, then I would have never learned that we actually had a bit more in common than expected. Our individual identities can impact our personal and social choices greatly, especially if one feels secure enough in their own identity. Feeling confidence and security here, allows you to more freely make decisions and choices without the worry of what others will think. Through this, it will be easier to express our real selves. For example in the poem “Identity” by Julio Nobao Pollanco the main message states that standing alone, being ourselves, and creating our sense of self and purpose is better than trying to fit in with those around us. The first stanza states “ Let them be as flowers, always watered, fed, guarded, admired, but harnessed to a pot of dirt.” This is stating the idea of letting others confide in the box that society so badly wants us all to be put in. This way of living is always the easier way compared to stepping out of the box and then appearing as “different” to everyone else. The last stanza states “ I'd rather smell of musty, green stench, than of sweet, fragrant lilac. If I could stand alone, strong and free, I'd rather be a tall, ugly weed.” In this stanza the author states that the idea of being yourself, no matter what, is always better than trying to fit in and be someone and something you're not. These ideas ultimately portray the feeling of being secure and confident in our identities and how through that we can make bigger, harder decisions for ourselves without letting the ideas of others impact us. All in all, I believe that our identity is made up of a variety of things which can be easily added to and taken away especially as we grow up and learn more about ourselves and the world around us.

It is often that individuals struggle to define their identity, considering what shapes how we see ourselves, how others see us, and how we see others. Well, the answer is all around us, both the personal and social identities contribute to how the person views their placement in the surrounding world. As stated in Beverly Daniel Tatum’s article “The Complexity of Identity: Who am I”, which explores the deep depths of how an identity is structured. She states, “shaped by individual characteristics, family dynamics, historical factors, and social and political context”( Tatum, 2000). Though Personal identity is multidimensional but rather unique and internal, based on inner experiences, it can be many aspects in one, some will come naturally, and others will develop over time based on the situation. This conclusion is known to be accurate considering the results of an Identity Vessel Project, an assignment created to reflect on our external and internal perceptions of ourselves, and has aligned with what we learned in class. Most items had opened up to many pictures of themselves alongside their family and friends, representing the pure connections and different beliefs that we have developed in a certain cultural setting, not many people will recognize that. Having emotionally stable relationships with others influences the perception you have of yourself, defining who you are, with the feedback and interactions with them. In comparison to the social identities that are created through certain social groups or a specific community. Similar likings will create a common ground for people to connect and eventually fall aligned in similar values. This impact will shape your social identity, and how you see yourself based on how others will perceive you. The two identities showcased on the individual identity vessels changed my perspective of truly knowing someone, it gave me an empathetic feeling. Knowing how I might have perceived someone is only in a social setting, I never truly know them until I become a part of their personal life. Similar to how I constantly think that others’ opinions define who I am and can be when in reality, I’m the only person who honestly knows myself, that's the most important part about one’s identity, it can be however you decide it to be.

As I looked through the identity projects I found I didn’t learn much about individuals as much as I noticed the broader themes of identity and how people my age see themselves. People our age tend to see themselves as relatively lonely and different from our peers, yet I saw how similarly many of the people viewed themselves. There were also many people who directly wrote in their statement that they didn’t know how the world perceived them, which I believe is a common source of discomfort or insecurity among high schoolers. Because we don’t know how we are perceived, we assume people are constantly judging us for what we see as negative things in ourselves. I noticed that most inner identities tended to revolve around friends, family, and heritage, not lived experiences and on the surface, many people said they thought they were perceived by attributes, not actions; they were smart, quiet, or kind. It seemed like people’s inner identities revolved around their social identity, whereas they thought they were perceived for their personal identities, which surprised me. The lack of identity based on action (or things we can control) speaks to our society at large, there is, perhaps, higher value in impersonal things than personhood. The vessels seemed to align with the claims made by Beverly Daniel Tatum in the paper “The Complexity of Identity: Who Am I?” In the paper, Tatum draws conclusions about how we view our identities in relation to the people around us. She found that people who hold an identity in the majority tend to not report that identity when asked, whereas those who are members of a minority group will identify with those groups. In our class project, the students who were white, male, and/or heterosexual tended not to include it in the project because “in the absence of dissonance, this dimension of identity escapes conscious attention.” (Tatum 2). I did notice, however, that many female students and LGBTQ would include colors or symbols related to their gender identity and many non-white students included symbols to represent either national origin or heritage.

Overall I learned how complex everyone around me is. It is very easy to just see people as they present and in a one dimensional way, but this project helped open us up to each other and show how many dimensions make up each and every one of us.

From the identity vessels, I learned that a lot of what shapes people’s identities, both in the way they see themselves and how others see them, is their interests and hobbies. I saw this aspect of my peers’ identity in the form of their choice in a pointe shoe as their vessel, represented by images of them participating in an activity on the outside, or a tennis ball placed on the inside. Our interests and hobbies can heavily impact the people we choose to be friends with, the conversations we have, and the things we spend our time doing. However, while we all have parts of our identity that connect and influence our personal and social identities, there are parts of our identities that we might choose to keep private and not talk about: so while they might be a part of how we see ourselves, they are not something others would know or see.

I don’t think our identity is necessarily malleable but it can be heavily influenced by others and the desire to fit in and be liked. Especially with the introduction of technology and social media, it’s become easier to portray yourself as whatever persona you want, regardless if it’s true to you or not. Nausicaa Renner explores this concept further in her article “How Social Media Shapes Identity” when she explains how social media and technology “allows us to produce a narrative of our lives, to choose what to remember and what to contribute to our own mythos.” However, social media and technology also limits our ability to fully change and grow in the eyes of others because of digital footprints and past selves frozen in time through photos.

From the identity vessels specifically, I was able to learn a lot about how people view themselves and how they believe others might view them. I was surprised to learn new things about classmates that I had shared over five years of classes with and even people I consider to be my friends. The identity vessels were important not only to me learning more about my peers though but also about myself as I confronted the false ideas or stereotypes I unfairly held against people I didn’t know as well as I thought I did.

One of the most interesting things I noticed while looking at everyone’s identity vessel was more about my own reaction to them rather than what people actually decided to include. Even though I knew and understood that the purpose of the exercise was to set aside our prejudices and judgments while learning about people’s identities, I realized I had to make a conscious effort not to fall back on my old judgments while reading people’s personal statements. This made me aware of how despite my commitment to being a good person and having empathy for others, the social atmosphere to see the world as “us vs them” is still deeply ingrained in all of us. This makes sense, especially in a social world as complex as high school, because we are so hardwired to belong to a group and fit in with our peers that it’s nearly impossible to form “in” and “out” groups in our minds, consciously or not. This idea also manifests itself in how we team up against individuals with whom we disagree, even when we really don’t know much about them. Especially at a school like BLS, where although there is a diverse group of ideas and beliefs, there are a lot of commonalities in basic ideology that come from being a public school in a relatively progressive city. Because of this, even if we don’t know a lot about a person, we are likely to write them off as “bad people” if we hear that from our peers, because we are so afraid of being ostracized for having any belief that deviates from the norm. Another interesting aspect of this project for me was just observing how people were able to illustrate their identities not only by the objects or symbols that they chose, but by the materials and vessels themselves that they chose. While many people chose a shoe box or something similar, there were also some unique vessels such as a ballet slipper, or a lantern. Something I noticed while reading personal statements was that a lot of people struggled with how they were perceived, in that they felt like people only see them as who they used to be, and not as who they are. Based on this, I realize that our identities are much more malleable than we often believe, which up until now I was able to accept in my own identity but not necessarily for others. It was also clear how a lot of people felt trapped in other’s perceptions of them. In the poem Identity, Julio Noboa Pollanco claims “If [he] could stand alone, strong and free, [he’d] rather be a tall, ugly weed” (Pollanco, 21-22). Julio believes that if he were free from the limited perceptions of others, he would be able to show the “ugly” parts of himself without shame, an idea that, to an extent, felt very apparent in a lot of the personal reflections. I also felt that there was an element of the reflections that came from the fact that we all knew that anyone could be reading them, and that many people were still holding back parts of themselves or how they perceive themselves because they didn’t want to be judged by others.