Loretta Stewart The Mirror Analysis

Everyone at some point in their life has an issue dealing with self-identity. Whether it has to do with personal beliefs, or losing a loved one, everyone goes through it. We all have a time where we just want to figure out who we really are, and I mean that could take years. I went through that phase most of my years here at Fort. I tried being friends with everyone, and after a while I started to realize that maybe some of the people that I was hanging out with weren’t the best influence on me and on my faith.
My faith has played a huge part in my life the last four or five years, and I had always had a strong belief that God lets everything happen for a reason. Three years ago this Halloween I lost one of the most important people in my …show more content…
I felt like I needed to be the one to break the cycle of depression, I felt like the author of “The Mirror” in a way. In “The Mirror,” Loretta Stewart states “Today, I’m glad I broke the mirror. It’s symbolic of my desire to break the cycle of failure in my family.” In my instance it wasn’t really a thing that had been going on for decades like in “The Mirror,” but it was still a cycle and I felt like if I didn’t take that step and try to break the cycle that it would just continue. Being the one to try to break the cycle intentionally is really difficult because, someone are so used to how it was and they want to continue believing whatever the cycle might be and in my case it’s depression.
Identity is a big part of everyone, we need to know who we are in order to carry on our lives. We can’t just pretend to be someone else everyday, as much as we would like to. Self identity is important because, it’s the way we see ourselves. It can affect how we feel about ourselves and how we feel in certain situations. If we feel that we are a shy, and quiet person we might feel the need to not talk as much as we might in other times. How we feel at any given time can affect our mood, I know that if I feel sad that I don’t talk very much, and don't talk very loud. It really depends on our …show more content…
For instance, I am part of the drama club so I identify myself as a drama kid. However, I have realized that I don't have to just be a drama kid, or just be a dancer, or student publications kid, or any other group that I’m a part of. I can be apart of as many groups as I want to be. We learn from movies and media growing up that once we are in high school we are labeled as a certain social group. We think at that young age that’s who we are, that we are a nerd, jock, prep, or whatever group we hang out with. We are taught that to become “popular,” you have to be super skinny and drop dead gorgeous. That if you are a “nerd,” you have to wear glasses and get straight A’s. We identify ourselves as what society sees us as, we pretty much are stereotyping ourselves. In “The Mirror,” the author is pretty much stereotyping herself by assuming that she is a failure, because the women that came before her made some bad life choices. She identified herself as a failure, so therefore other people saw her as a failure. At the end she talked about how she was glad she broke the mirror because, it showed her desire to break the cycle. She knew deep inside all along that she wasn’t a failure, she just allowed the cycle to mold her into her female predecessors. To break the cycle the author had to change how she saw herself,