Category: psychology

Pondering on the Days of my Youth

While my childhood, for the most part, is a bit of a blur to me, there are a few things I do remember rather fondly from the days of my youth.

I was not particularly graced with an abundance of toys, and therefore, the ones that I had become all the more special to me. There was one very treasured toy in my somewhat small collection. My beloved Mrs. Beasley Doll. I vaguely remember for years, how I carried this doll around with me and showered her with the most adoring love and affection a child can bestow on one’s most treasured toy. Aside from my beloved doll, I can remember distinctly how from a very young age until well throughout my teenage years, my next greatest love was my radio. Whether it be a small portable cassette recorder, to a small pre- “boombox” era radio. I can still remember the day I finally got my very first Sony Walkman! Boy, did I sure think I was somebody then. I had been blessed with the ability to have portable music pretty much throughout my youth, but now, with the tiny little speaker that fit just over my ears, my music was more private, it was mine, and I did not have to share it with anyone. I am not entirely sure why the idea of having my music all to myself was so appealing to me. Given that today, as an adult, I love to play songs for other people, and I enjoy sharing songs that mean a great deal to me with people that I am closest to. I suppose, in retrospect, during my childhood, there were a lot of things that were out of control and far beyond my scope of comfort, and when I could put on my personal speakers and control the music that only I listened to, it was a form of escape. Ironically, music has long been a form of escape for many people, and I am among those plenty.

I did not have the luxury of having a large group of people in my life throughout my childhood. My family was very reserved and kept a pretty tight circle. Growing up as a child, I only had a handful of cousins, and only three of them were even within my close proximity. The other family members were only present in my life once a year, during Thanksgiving, and then there was one family that I saw sporadically throughout the year, but we were never close. One of my cousins that did live next door to me became my best friend. He was a second or third cousin; we never did actually figure that out. However, it did not matter. He became closer to me than I was with my first cousins or even my brother. We went through a period, as young teenagers, in which we wanted to escape our lives. We had a lot of things in which we wanted to run away from. But we were too young and far too scared to even try running away. So, we created these imaginary fantasy lives for ourselves. I had always dreamed of being a drummer in a rock band and he loved the guitar. With a badminton racket and a few sticks carefully selected and snapped off an unsuspecting tree, we would fire up some music, normally on the portable radio outside, and instantaneously become the heroes in our own little world of rock and roll. Music videos came on the television on weekend nights late into the night. Even though, I knew we would both risk getting into more trouble than we ever wanted, I would let him slip in the front door after midnight on the weekends, and we would sit quietly in the living room, watching videos, and dreaming of one day escaping the world in which we knew and becoming famous in our own rock band. Aside from music, we actually created our own pretend identities. Looking back now, it is really funny and really sad at just how much we craved to be someone else to the extent that we began to really take on the personas of our make-believe personalities. Our alter egos even evolved with us as we grew up as teenagers. We created the identities in our youth, and as we became older teenagers, we changed our characters names and personalities to adjust to our newfound lives from childhood to teenager. The saddest part of it all, looking back, is that my alter ego was always a boy. Things had happened to me that I felt like if I had been a boy would not have happened. My pretend persona was a boy because I despised how being a girl made me feel weak.

As a child, I remember developing a strong love for reading. I suppose it was yet another means of escaping reality. I could sit for hours and read about anything or anyone. I still remember one of my most favorite books of all that I read at about the time of transitioning from a child into a teenager. I cannot remember my exact age, but I remember I was young, but still old enough to comprehend reading a young adult fiction. The book was titled, The Summer of the Sky Blue Bikini. I have long since looked for that book in my adult years, as I would love to sit and re-read one of my most favored reads every. But, alas, I have yet to find it. We had a small creek that was behind my house, it was just a small hike through some deep woods, but definitely worth the trek down to it. There was this bend in the creek that had this huge rock tucked in the curve that made a perfect place to sit and watch the water streaming by. It was deep enough in the woods that there was such a sense of peace and solace, yet it was close enough to the house that my parents never concerned with us being down there for hours on end. I would often take me a treasured book down to the creek and assemble myself comfortably on the rock in the bend. I would take in the serenity of my surroundings. The ferns, the moss, and the babbling of the water racing past me. Then, I would sink into my treasured book. During my teenaged years, it was mostly a Stephen King masterpiece. I would sit and read until the light of the sun was getting just about too dark to see to get home. Then, I would reluctantly make my way back out of the woods and back to reality.

Affiliate Disclosure Statement- This blog post contains affiliate links. If you click through and make a purchase, I may receive a commission (at no additional cost to you.) Thank you for your support in this way.

Ten Years From Now

Ten years from now…

Ten years from now, I will be about sixty years old. Ten years from now, my first granddaughter will be old enough to start driving. Ten years from now, my car will be long paid off and likely ready to fall apart. Ten years from now, there will be a lot of changes that take place in my life.

But I choose to think about the types of changes that I can affect taking place in my life. Where I want to be ten years from now, and the things I would like to accomplish ten years from now. I have always believed in and maintained a five-year plan, and now, I am giving consideration to my ten-year plan.

Ten years from now, I would like to be an accomplished author. I would ideally like to have written forty books by then. At the very least, I would like to have at least half that much. Twenty books written and published would be adequate for me ten years from now. As long as the books are of good quality and will sell. I could be ambitious and set a goal of writing one hundred books within the next ten years, but if every one of those books are rushed and of low quality, every single one of them would be a waste of my time. I would prefer to have only written two books of high-quality work that people will want to read because they feel as though they have something to gain from them. However, for the sake of my ten-year plan, I will simply say that I would like to have written and published forty books ten years from now.

In addition to writing and selling books, ten years from now, I would like to have generated other streams of income. I would like to become a life coach and help other people set their sails on the right direction for the stormy seas they face. Ideally, I would like to become a successful life coach only after creating my own successful life free of the self-doubt, anxiety, insecurity, and lack of self-confidence that I currently have.  I would like to create a bonafide system for overcoming the mental and physical obstacles that prevent me from living a truly happy and free life, in which I have defined the ability to shed mental and physical clutter that prevent the clarity and freedom of living life fully. Ten years from now, I would like to share my own life success story with the world. I would also like to host a successful podcast in which I share my own life story, a memoir of such, and give others the courage to face and overcome their own demons and battles.

Ten years from now, I would like to have my ideal body and achieve optimal health. I have a significant amount of weight to lose currently and have been battling depression and high blood pressure for years. I would like to see myself overcoming both of those hurdles. My blood pressure can easily be managed by reducing my body weight and maintaining a healthy diet. Reducing my body weight can be quite a challenge, due to the fact that it will require a great deal of work on my part. The work will not be easy, nor will it always be fun. However, I owe it to myself and to my family to do the work necessary to gain better health and have a healthier and more active lifestyle for years to come. There is evidence of a direct correlation between depression and obesity. However, it is a vicious cycle and a catch 22 of sorts. Depression tends to lead to overeating “comfort foods” or binge eating and being overweight tends to lead to depression. They go hand in hand and one can create the other. Therefore, ten years from now, I would like to have gotten a handle on my weight and reversed the damaging effects of high blood pressure and lowering my risk of heart disease. As well, I would like to have overcome depression by living an active life that includes hiking and participation in many family events.

Ten years from now, I would like to have achieved obtaining my master’s degree in psychology. I would like to take the things that I learn and understand about the human psyche and human behavior and apply them to my writing as well as the topics discussed in my podcast. I have always had a great fascination with what makes people do the things that they do. I would love to develop a great understanding of that and develop the ability to put it in ways that can help others understand human behaviors as well.

Ten years from now, I would mostly love to have the ability to live my life as a reflection of the success and achievement of accomplishing all of the things that I have set forth in my ten-year plan. I would love to own a quaint little farmhouse in north Georgia, the place I call home. I would like to have small parcel of land to accompany the home, in which I would have space for gardening. I would love to have a large rocking chair front porch with a white porch swing. I would love to be able to spend morning sitting in the swing with my morning coffee and watching the world come to life with the morning sunrise. I would love to have family over and enjoy holidays and meals with the people I love most. In addition, I would love to own a nice little codo in the Gulf of Mexico, the place I call the home of my heart. Going back to the multiple streams of income, I would love to have the ability to use the condo for a rental place when we are not there. I would love to spend time sitting on the balcony overlooking the teal blue water and watching some of the most incredible sunsets my eyes have ever had the pleasure to behold. I would love to have the ability to walk down to the beach and just sit watching the waves and birds, while contemplating what an incredible life I have and gaining inspiration and insight for new writing material.

There are no guarantees in live, and by no means are there any guarantee that I can achieve any of the things in which I have set forth in my ten-year plan. However, nothing that I have chosen is such a massive dream that it cannot be accomplished. The reality is that nothing I want for my ten-year plan is unrealistic to me. I simply have to be willing to do the work and make the effort to take the chances on myself. Ten years from now, I would love to look around at the incredible things and people surrounding me and think back fondly on this blog post and remember when it was all just a dream. It is often said that a goal without a plan is just a dream. Dreams are good and dreams are important. However, dreaming about my ten-year plan, will never make it come to fruition. Each of these accomplishments, require a solid plan. A plan that will include hard work and possibly many late nights or early mornings. But the reality is that each of these things are worth it to me to put in that work.

The Psychology of Being One Hundred Pounds Overweight

For the majority of my adult life I have found myself refraining from participating in many activities. I avoid most social events. I even manage to avoid family gatherings. It seems quite senseless; however, I am unable to make myself convinced of that.

When at the gym, I would avoid eye contact with other people at all costs. Going to places, like the fair or a theme park, can become an absolute nightmare. There is this continual fear of being “too big” to fit in the rides. Once, several years ago, I actually had a situation where the restraints on a ride did not fit me properly because of my size. I was horrified during the entire ride that was I was going to slip out of the ride. I could literally feel my own body siding back and forth due to the fact that the ill placed restraints did not have me secured as they should have. I was actually even small then than I am now, and at this point, I make any excuse I can think of to refrain from attending any such park. I absolutely cannot endure something like that again.

At work, I had friends. My fellow coworkers would invite me out to lunch with them. Also, often times, they would all make plans to go out after work and have dinner or go out for drinks. I was never blind to the fact that I was the largest person that worked in out department, and I would therefore, be “the fat one” at the table or out in the clubs. So, it just made more sense that I would politely decline their offers to join the gang for a fun outing. Luckily, I did live farther away from work than anyone else did and I had a substantially longer commute home, so that always made for an easy out, and provided me an unquestionable excuse when I constantly declined the invites.

Being in a relationship seems to be the worse. My husband truly loves me, of that I do not question or doubt. My problem is, I can never convince myself of why he does. I am older than him and feel most days like I weigh twice as much as him. He always has an uncanny knack for getting romantic and wanting to try out various things. You know, to “keep the spark alive.” However, I am so incredibly insecure about myself and have little to no confidence it is damn near impossible for me to be comfortable exposing much of myself to him. No matter how much I know that man loves me, my damn insecurities about myself keep this wall up between us that only causes more turbulence than I can describe. When I feel insecure and reserved with him that way, it, in turn, causes him to feel insecure in our relationship. He begins to question the validity of my attraction to him and begins to convince himself that I am not comfortable around him intimately, because I am not attracted to him. It really is a vicious cycle and hurts everyone.

Going clothes shopping can be one of the greatest nightmares imaginable. I tend to avoid going shopping if at all possible. When I do go, I generally refuse to use the dressing rooms. I cannot really explain it, but I have the crazy idea that if I try on clothes in the store and they do not fit, I will become depressed and leave with nothing. I cannot say that it entirely an idea. I have in the past taken my stash of carefully picked out items to a dressing room, only to try on the items before me in absolute horror, as not a single thing in the pile would fit. Or if they did, it would be a mere one or two pieces. It is devastating. Therefore, I tend to prefer facing that fear and wallowing in my self disgust alone at home. I have also, so many times, picked out clothing in a store in the sizes that I was convinced I would need, only to get home and realize that I was too generous in my thinking. Nothing will damage your pride more than allowing yourself a size, or even two, bigger than the last time you bought clothing, only to realize even the larger sizes are not large enough.

Fun family outings can turn into a nightmare when faced with being that size. There is a constant fear of having to be squeezed into a carnival ride, or worse, that the security bar/belts will not fit around you and you are shamefully escorted off of the ride. Even while eating a salad, the very idea of eating in a public place will send you into a near-panic attack. I once was eating a granola bar as I drove from work to school, knowing that I did not have time between the two to stop for any type of semblance of a meal. While stopped at a red light, a man in the car in the lane next to me looked over. I was overcome with shame. It was a simple granola bar, it is not like it was a foot-long hot dog or anything, and it had been the only thing I had eaten in well over six hours. Yet, the very idea of someone seeing me eat, when I was already so overweight was nothing short of mortifying.

Society’s tendency to “fat-shame” can place an unnecessary amount of stress on someone who is already battling internal demons of mammoth proportion. There are times when those fears may be legitimate, as in, there may be situations whereby you are unable to ride certain rides at the fair. But, more often than not, the majority of those fears are irrational, and bear no legitimacy. The person in the car next to you at the stop light, may in fact look over at you as you are eating your granola bar. However, that in no way means that he finds the whole idea of you eating as disgusting. He could simply be looking around to try and find a pretty lady to smile at. Or perhaps, he is searching the faces of other drivers to see if anyone looks as miserable about commuting in traffic as he does. Perhaps, even, he has had a very bad day, and is just hoping to find one person to smile at him and make his day seem just a little bit better. When you go out to eat with your family and friends, most of the people inside the restaurant are too busy with their own friends and family to be worrying about watching you eat.

Yes, fat-shaming is real. And, there are instances in which someone will gawk at a heavier person and make fun of them or make cynical comments toward their eating habits. And most definitely, being one hundred pounds overweight at the gym can be an incredibly awkward and embarrassing experience. Yet, those are not always the norm, but as the heavier person, we tend to let out minds always draw from the worst case scenario and whether people look at us condescendingly, with disgust, or simply just glance up at a fellow person walking by them, we draw from those fears of what others think and in our own minds, we assume what we believe they are thinking about us. It is a dirty trick that our minds play on us.

Making Peace with the Past

It is often said that you cannot go back home. Although, some people try to challenge that ideology by eventually returning to their hometowns, to former lovers, or moving back in with their parents. Therefore, one is left to question, does it really work out in the end? I have myself had the occasion to return to my childhood home to live with my mother for a time, following the bitter ending of a broken relationship. At first, it was very awkward for me. But I just assumed it was the whole “I’m not supposed to be moving back into my parents’ house” pride thing. However, as the time lingered on, I began to realize that it was so much more. I found that the demons who haunted me in my past were still dwelling in that house. I found it to be a cold and unwelcoming place.

I had been in therapy several years ago and was under the impression that I had already dealt with all of the haunts of my past life, in particular my childhood. As I stood within the wall of this darkened paneled house, I figured out fairly quickly that I had not. I was taken aback by the torrential flood of emotion that befell me just being there. It did not make any sense to me. I mean, I had stopped by there to visit my mother numerous times. I had spent many a holiday with my family at her house. We had shared laughter and joy, and hugs abound there in the past few years. So, I could not understand what was happening to me. For the most part, during the evening hours, when I would arrive home from work and we would have dinner together and then sit in the living room watching various programs on the television set, I was fine being there. Even she and I had laughed and had some relatively good talks between ourselves. But, at night, when I was shut in behind the door of the bedroom, all alone, that is when every emotion I had ever felt in that house would come to pay me a visit. I could not shake that resurgence of sorrow and pain and utter heartbreak no matter how hard I tried. I began to watch television in the room until I would fall asleep at night, or I would read myself to slumber. Still, the darkness shrouded me like a heavy cloak.

My mother and I was working so hard on repairing a long-time damaged relationship, and I did not have the heart to tell her that being in her house was absolutely driving me insane and slowly crippling my soul. But I knew I could not stay there for much longer. The feelings and the memories proved to be far too hard to deal with alone in the night.

After a few months, I made the decision to move out, and got a place for myself and my daughter. It was probably, of all the choices that were available to me, not the most sensible or ideal place for us. But it was a quick move, and, at the time, I felt like anywhere had to be better than reliving my nightmare childhood night after night.

Ironically, shortly after my daughter and I had moved into our new place and were getting more settled in, I had started new classes at the college I was attending. During the semester, I had an internship placement. The internship was volunteering at an agency that did community counseling. Part of the process to be allowed to volunteer for the agency was to sit in and participate in two of the counseling classes offered. With the time frame that I had available between my full-time job and full-time course load at the college, I had one class that was on effective parenting, and one that was about making peace with the past. I believed those to be simple enough. I had, after all, already had therapy several years ago and dealt with many things from my past. Although, I had not given any particular thought to the experience that I had recently had while staying in my childhood home with my mother. Being that I had since moved out and into my little hipster cottage on the mountain, I had not given that a second thought. As it turns out, however, I should have considered it more significant that I had thought.

At first, I thought it was going to be interesting, and a little bit fun, to get an inside view of how group therapy worked. I was given my workbook to follow along. I also originally thought I would just be sitting idly by as a quiet observer, since, after all, this was my internship I had not signed up for this group therapy class. I could not have been more wrong. In order to get cleared to begin volunteering and complete my subsequent internship, I had to take an active role in the therapy sessions, and was expected to complete the exercises and journal entries in my workbook just the same as anyone else in the class. Initially I was a little shaken up about the idea of having to take group therapy. But later decided it would be the best way to learn how a group therapy session works. Plus, I would have the added benefit of free therapy for myself. With that, I was ready to embark on my path to making peace with my past.

The first two group sessions, I was reluctant to speak up for the most part. I immediately began to feel emotions stirring deep within my core. But again, this was an internship setting, and I was still unsure of just how involved I was expected to be with the actual counseling of this class. The leader of the class was very good at her job, and after the second session had called me aside to let me know she could tell I was holding back and let me know matter of factly that she fully expected me to participate as much as anyone else in the group beginning the next week. I was called out. I was expected to address the emotions that I had begun feeling from the first session we had. I was still unsure about how I felt sharing anything personal with a group of strangers. Yet, at the same time, I was feeling all of these emotions coming to the surface during the first two sessions and I felt like I wanted to talk about them, to get them out, and understand what they were and why they were there, haunting me. I was beginning to get scared. If I had already felt this much emotion surfacing in only two sessions, how would I ever make it for the following ten weeks if I did not deal with what was happening to me?

For the following ten weeks, I cried, I felt, and I hugged my fellow group participants. We all learned so much about each other, and subsequently, ourselves during our twelve weeks together. A lot of what had happened to me while staying at my mother’s house began to make a tremendous amount of sense to me. I learned that while I had been in therapy in the past, I dealt with a lot of things, but I had only touched on the subject of my relationship with my parents. I had dealt more with the relationship with my mother, because she was still alive, and I still had to maintain a relationship with her. But I had not ever fully processed or dealt with the relationship with my father completely. And, while I was staying in that house, all of those repressed and unresolved feelings came flooding back, because they needed to be met head on and processed, so that I could officially and finally move forward with my life in a more  healthy and happy way. During those twelve weeks of my free therapy internship, I met every single one of those feelings head on and dealt with them. But I did not have to deal with them alone. I had one- an amazing counselor, and two- a group of five other incredible women who were at the ready to hug me, cry with me, and encourage me at any given moment. And I was ready and willing to do the same for each and every one of them.

I have often said that I believe everything happens for a reason. Often times, we may not know the reason or the how or why behind things that take place in our lives. Regardless, sometimes, things just happened that we later realize we really needed. That internship that year was actually an accident. I had originally signed up for a different internship for the semester. Somehow, the paperwork had gotten messed up, but this was not realized until the semester was beginning and the placement at the counseling office was the only placement left available. I had planned to be a silent observer and just learn how to conduct a group therapy session. Yet, I was prompted and encouraged to speak up and take an active role as a genuine participant of the class. And, something amazing had happened. Over the weeks of the class, I learned that I still had a lot of unresolved things in my past that I have never dealt with, let alone made peace with. With the help of the counselor and the other ladies in the group, I was able to put so many things to rest, to move past a lot of hurtful things that had held me captive and crippled for so much of my life. I made peace with my past, and I was able to free myself in ways that I had not realized was possible previously. I have since moved forward, and have a close relationship with my mother, and have buried the heaviness and dark feelings that had once consumed me just being in her house. I have been able to develop a close and loving romantic relationship, which I also came to realize was near to impossible in the past because of the many things that I had left unresolved kept me from allowing myself to get too close to others, or allow anyone to get too close to me. I am grateful for the opportunity that I had in getting put in the wrong internship placement and the ability to make peace with my past.

Who’s Identity Is This Anyway?

The family dynamic is often different from family to family. But, sometimes, one, or both, parents will form an unhealthy attachment to another member of the family, be it a spouse or child, that can cause a great deal of undue stress to the family system, as a whole. A problem in living could arise when a single mother becomes too dependent on her children. She may use them as a crutch. As the children get older, and get jobs as teenagers, the mother uses their income as “family” income to cover the bills and family expenses. The mother does not want the children to date or have relationships outside of the home. As the children grow into adulthood and eventually do leave home, the mother becomes very bitter and grudgeful toward them. The mother tries to make her children feel guilty for leaving home, and continually expressed to them that she is struggling to make it in life because she does not have their financial support. She expresses to her children that she is depressed, the home is unkempt, her health is declining, and she lies in bed all the time. She makes suggestion to them that she just “wants to die” because she has nothing to live for since her children have “abandoned” her.

            The problem with using her children as a crutch and trying to make them feel guilty for living their own lives, not only affects her, but can have an enormous strain on her children. The relationship they now have with their mother can be strained and stressful. Some of the shadow side of her thinking can include the limiting beliefs that she needs the financial support of her children to survive, or that her children have abandoned her when they have simply pursued their own adult lives.

            Some of the goals that can be beneficial to her can be, finding hobbies or interests that may get her out to social situations where she can make friends, she could take an interest in dating and develop a relationship that becomes important to her so that she does not feel alone, and she could work on restructuring the relationship that she has with her children in a way that is more of a parent of adult children, rather than a mother who is dependent on them.

            The outcome of achieving those goals could include a future where she no longer has a strained relationship with her children, but a healthy one in which they can progress through the future in a normal family system. She could find someone to date, and find happiness in developing a relationship with someone who could be a potential spouse and they could build a life and home together. Also, she could find things that she enjoys doing and make friendships that will get her out of her home and socialize more instead of lying in bed all the time feeling like she has no one or nothing in the world to live for. Achieving those goals can also influence her declining health. By taking an interest in having friends or dating, she may be more inclined to take an interest in herself and work on the things that are contributing to her poor health, such as taking her medications, eating properly, and being more active versus just being dormant by lying in bed when she is not at work.

            This process could be achieved by being empathetic and actively listening while allowing her to set the pace, or be in the driver’s seat, and work on the problems as she is ready to tackle them. When she gets to a place where he is bogged down by her limiting beliefs or procrastination or simply stuck on one problem and does not seem to be making the effort to progress forward, she can be nudged or challenged in a way that will provide the little push she needs. A collaborative effort to work on setting the goals with her that are realistic and will produce the idea future she envisions for herself would be the next step. Then, mapping out an action plan and focusing on a reasonable time frame to put the implementation in motion to mover her along toward her goals would come next. All along, there would be a need for feedback to assess where she is in the helping process and what should be the next step to keep her moving forward.

References

Egan, Gerard. “The Skilled Helper: a problem-management and opportunity development” 2014.  Cengage Learning.

0

Finding One’s Self

            The quest to find one’s identity is the heartbeat of humanity. The quest for identity can be attributed to many things that lay the foundation to one’s identity, such as race, culture, sex, or even personal history. Daniel Keys’ writing of “Flowers for Algernon” is an example of one man’s journey to find himself. Everyone lives their life as a journey to simply find their one true self.

            Everyone deserves to be treated as though their life has meaning and value. Incidentally, Charlie Gordon defends his right to be seen as somebody. “” But I’m not an inanimate object” I argued, “I’m a person.”” (Keys p 89). This argument of his has the haunting element of the many peoples who have been trapped in the bonds of slavery over the years, proclaiming their right to be seen as equals, also that statement can be ingrained in a society of oppressed people such as the Jews who were horrifically persecuted and maimed simply because of being Jewish and their desperate cries to be seen as a real people, who deserved a place and a right in society as much as any other nation of people.

            Another standard by which some choose to use as a form of personal identity is one’s status. For some people, the more they have, whether it is friends or possessions, the more popular or revered they will be. Charlie Gordon believed that if he gained more intelligence, was smarter, everyone would like him more and he would have more friends. He recorded this theory as he was writing in his progress reports before he had the surgery to make him smarter. “If your smart you can have lots of friends to talk to and you never get lonely by yourself all the time.” (Keys p 15). This is much the same way of thinking by people who believe that the more nicer things they have, such as, expensive sports cars, boats, or expensive material things the more status they will have and therefore people will look up to them and admire them. It also correlates to the idea that others have, in that, if they “go with the flow” and do what the “in crowd” does, they will have more friends and not be lonely; such as, if they go clubbing or to bars and drink and party like everyone does, they will always have lots of friends around and never worry about being lonely. However, sadly enough, this way of thinking is shallow and generally lends itself to reckless actions that leads on to finding themselves in a much worse place than they were before they tried to use their status to forge friendships.

            Charlie learned after his operation that intelligence is also an identifying factor in one’s identity. People become categorized by the level of their education or intelligence and others react to them accordingly. Often times people of higher intelligence tend to look down or dismiss the validity of someone else because they are of lesser intelligence. In a conversation between Charlie and Alice, this idea was addressed as she pointed out to him that he, in fact, made her feel awkward following the operation because she could not keep up with him intellectually and stated that next to Charlie, she felt dull-witted. She went on to say to him that now, most days that they see each other, after she leaves him, she goes home with a miserable feeling that she is now slow and dense about everything. She explains that she reviews things that they have said to each other and thinks of things that she should have said and thinks of all the bright and witty things that she should have said, then feels like kicking herself because she did not think to say them when they were together. This kind of intelligence segregation begins early in life. One can see it in schools where the smart, or more commonly referred to as, “preppy” kids demean or simply ignore the lesser aptitude students. It is also prevalent in the workplace as higher up the management chain. The more educated and higher salaried employees do not really do any kind of socializing wither the lower educated and lesser salaried employees. In many cases, it falls back to the status ideology, but mostly in these situations, it simply rests on the principle that at different intelligence levels, they do not have very much in common and do not have the ability to communicate on the same intellectual levels.

            From birth, one’s family, culture, heritage, and ethnicity begin laying the groundwork to their identity. As one progresses through life, factors such as education, work experiences, status, friends, and relationships mold the clay and help to define their one true identity. Each individual lives out their lives in a way so as to find that quest on one’s true self. Charlie Gordon gained just enough intelligence to realize that no matter how much one can alter their life, deep down, there is no changing who a person truly is. The core value of the idea is that all men are created equal, but society sets the standards by which all men are perceived.

Resources

Keys, Daniel. Flowers for Algernon. Orlando: Harcourt, 2004. Print.  

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑