A Piece of Puzzle.

“All men have the stars,” he answered, “but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all these stars are silent. You–you alone–will have the stars as no one else has the-“

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)

The world changes and we have to change with it. I spent my whole life in another country, grew up in a different society and now I am trying to integrate into American culture. I realized that immigration makes me feel things that I didn’t feel before and also makes me think in unfamiliar ways. My childhood made me a confident and funny Russian girl because of the affection of my parents and other folks. My adolescence the opposite gave me a lot of challenges and tests but also helped me to find true friends, career goals, faith, and important questions for myself. All of this shapes my identity repeatedly, changes my social status, and shows me new sides of my own personality. I think about society like a puzzle, especially about American culture, because now I want to find a way to be part of it, and for me, it is necessary to understand what kind of edges and bumps I have to find my place in American society and fit this puzzle.

I started to think about things like “Who am I?” and “Who do I want to be?” lately. There are a lot of factors that shaped me as a personality, but the most important reason why I am who I am is my childhood. “The infantile and adolescent phases play a crucial role in the formation and consolidation of identity” (Mann, 2016, p. 212). I have so many qualities that made me, I hope, a good person thanks to my parent’s and friend’s influence. My life started in a small town in the Russian North. When I was born, I’d already been loved by my parents, my brother, and other relatives. I don’t remember anything about the North, because we moved to another region when I was about two years old. My early childhood was pretty happy. I spent all day and night with my Mom because she wasn’t working to take care of me and my brother. My Dad was working a lot, but he still spent all his leisure with us. My family loves activity very much, so we played games with balls, solders and other toys for whole weekends. In summer we were also going fishing and camping. That was so much fun! All of this time in my family circle made me a sensitive, soft, and empathic person.

Another part of my childhood started in school. I found out that the process of searching for friends and a friendship at all is not that simple. My first real friend, who is still with me, appeared in my life when I was fourteen, but we became close friends only four years later. She takes care of me all the time and calls me “baby”. Frankly, she is older than me, so I think about her more like a big sister than a friend. I met her in the School of Music and the music tied us up. She is the person who taught me how to support and protect others. It’s a little bit hilarious because she is a teacher. My other best friend burst into my life in our last year in high school. We were spending all the time together, had overnight stays as soon as possible, and could talk about everything without any shame or judgment. She is the person I can be the most relaxed and bold with. And now I am on the opposite side of the world from her. It is competitive for both of us, but we were making each other stronger our whole friendship and we will do the same.  All of the people that I met in adolescence made me more confident, braver, and stronger. Even if I had bad days because of them, cried so much, and hated myself, I am still grateful for this experience. Good experience or bad, no matter. Any experience changes me. But I am the only person responsible for how that experience will shape me.

My social identity defines how American society treats and affects me. Also, my social identity was constantly changing within my whole. “Integrating one’s past, present, and future into a task that begins in adolescence and continues for a lifetime” (Tatum, 1997, p. 35). I have features that I was born with, like my ethnicity and sex – I am a half-Russian and half-Bashkir white woman. It gives me cultural characteristics, my native language (Russian), and my weakness as a woman. This is a big part of my past and I can’t change it. On the other side, most of my social identity was shaped in adolescence. I chose to grab opportunities for my education and started working hard on it and I am on my way to know more than two languages (for now it’s Russian and English, but I also want to learn Spanish and French). This side of my identity makes me stronger and more significant in American society. But as I think about myself as a woman without a degree, financially dependent on her parents, who just moved to another continent, I feel so weak. Nevertheless, I have a permanent resident status that gives me a lot of opportunities to study, work, or do whatever I want. This life, my parents, and the United States of America, all them, give me lots of chances and I’m going to use them. At the same time, I have one thing that could be both an advantage and disadvantage – faith. I consider myself an Ietsit. Ietsism is an unspecified belief in an undetermined transcendent reality. It is not a religion so I don’t have a community like a church for Christians, for example. It means that I don’t have a circle of people who can support me. However, I don’t have any confines I could have in religion and I like this freedom.

All of my experiences have shaped me in many different ways and made me more flexible to live in American society, but I am still working on myself and exploring my personality. The conception of being accepted by society makes lots of people feel uncomfortable and anxious. I am one of them. Society taught me how to be anxious, how to be afraid of others’ opinions, and how to hate myself. But now I am choosing stop to fearing life, myself, and people. Because it does not really matter what people think about me while I love and understand myself. The most important thing about my social identity is my own treatment of myself, and society’s point of view also depends on it. How can I ask society to accept me even if I do not accept myself? And how can I ask others to respect me if I don’t respect myself? I have to start from it to become a gorgeous, independent, and confident piece of the puzzle.

References

Mann, M. A. (2006). The formation and development of individual and ethnic identity: Insights from psychiatry and psychoanalytic theory. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 66(3), 211-24. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11231-006-9018-2

Tatum, B. D. (1997). Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? Revised edition. Basic Books. https://sbctc-lwtech.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01STATEWA_LWTC/117qsle/cdi_proquest_ebookcentralchapters_5368838_10_96

De Saint-Exupéry, A. (1943) translated from the French by Katherine Woods, The Little Prince https://blogs.ubc.ca/edcp508/files/2016/02/TheLittlePrince.pdf