For the Love of Our Many Lives

Abstract

As a young student graduating from college and entering a world of independence and freedom, I am forced to consider my life options while simultaneously being compelled to reflect on the past. Although no one can be a direct product of society, nor can one completely separate oneself from the influences of society. Therefore, it is necessary to trace the root causes of certain major decisions I have made in my life, and to learn how these decisions have affected me and my goals. Looking at economic status and social class is often the best way to begin to divulge into the inner workings of oneself. Important personal relationships have also had a dominant influence on who I am and who I have become. The question, whether these relationships led me onto a path that I chose or they pushed me onto a path which was deemed most fit, will be explored. In addition to various relationships that influence my identity, it is of primary importance to also analyze the lack of relationships in my life, and the roles I adopted as a result. These roles are roles not resulting from autonomous choice, but rather resulting from the society in which I was raised. In this paper I hope to uncover the often-subconscious effects of society and its relations, hoping to "link private and public; present, past, and future; and the life of an individual to the life of society and the meaning of the cosmos" (Bellah et al. 83). Only through deep inner analysis, while simultaneously examining the environments of the past and the present, can one truly understand oneself. I was guided off for my first semester freshman year to a university whose social working and cultural identity was far from what I was accustomed to. The combination of the estranged culture with the social environment of my family and the various corresponding identities, led to one of the most affective decisions of my life. I was also searching for self-definition as an individual: The obvious point of similarity is the emphasis on the independence of the individual. As we have seen, self-reliance is an old American value, but only one strand of the complex cultural weft we have inherited. The expressive culture, now deeply allied with the utilitarian reveals its difference from earlier patterns by its readiness to treat the normative commitments as so many alternative strategies of self-fulfillment. What has dropped out are the old normative expectations of what makes life worth living. With the freedom to define oneself anew in a plethora of identities has also come an attenuation of those common understandings that enable us to recognize the virtues of the other (Bellah et al. 48). I was also in a period of life when I was supposed to define myself using the relations I had already established, while integrating my perceptions of the character of people I was to meet in the future. At the age of seventeen I was to begin a journey for which I had been preparing for what seemed like my entire life. Choosing which college to attend was painstaking enough, but once I had chosen the road, the process seemed easy--the road to independence, freedom, fun, to what was supposed to be the best four years of my life, and subsequently the University of Wisconsin. For a permanent resident of New York, Wisconsin may seem both geographically and ideologically distant. The choice to attend a school such a grave distance from my home in New York was part of my child-like desire to flee from home, aided by the ability to travel such a distance relatively easily. With the advancements of the technological age that we live in, distance did not seem as serious as it truly was. I had perceived the family to be only a phone call away, or a click of the mouse away in cyber space, but the emotional distance turned out to be an eternity. This misconception of the effects of time, space, and distance are a result of the global society in which we live. The false promises of the information age and its lack of true communal identity led to my decision to attend University of Wisconsin. …