Early in our lives we are blissfully unaware of our identity. It is solely dependent on those around us. Eventually there comes a time when most of us question our identities, some as early as their teens and some as late as their twenties or thirties. It is questioning our identity that I see as the first step to discovering our identity for ourselves. If we are okay with others defining us, then that is how it will be. But once we question it, we are able to take control of it. And it is my full belief that we should take control of our identity.
No Exit is a play written by Paul Jean Sartre in which three souls are locked in Hell with only each other as torture. Sartre indirectly brings up the matter of identity a few times throughout the …show more content…
This perspective of identity struggles come from Alice Walker. Walker is a prize-winning American writer whose work often challenged sexism and racism. In her essay, In Search of Mother’s Garden, she paints a portrait of a time where it was seemingly impossible for an African American woman to have her own identity. It is especially the way she writes about her hardworking mother that I find enthralling, specifically this: “I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible – except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty.” (Walker, 1983) Her mother enjoys gardening, and even though it is technically work, it soothes her. Planting and pruning is cathartic to the point that her mother becomes one with the flowers. It’s her escape from reality. It is work that her “soul must have” in terms of identity. She uses that time to be who she wants to be as she lives in a society where she cannot actually be that person. It is her way of holding onto herself so that she is not swallowed by what society says she
No Exit is a play written by Paul Jean Sartre in which three souls are locked in Hell with only each other as torture. Sartre indirectly brings up the matter of identity a few times throughout the …show more content…
This perspective of identity struggles come from Alice Walker. Walker is a prize-winning American writer whose work often challenged sexism and racism. In her essay, In Search of Mother’s Garden, she paints a portrait of a time where it was seemingly impossible for an African American woman to have her own identity. It is especially the way she writes about her hardworking mother that I find enthralling, specifically this: “I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible – except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty.” (Walker, 1983) Her mother enjoys gardening, and even though it is technically work, it soothes her. Planting and pruning is cathartic to the point that her mother becomes one with the flowers. It’s her escape from reality. It is work that her “soul must have” in terms of identity. She uses that time to be who she wants to be as she lives in a society where she cannot actually be that person. It is her way of holding onto herself so that she is not swallowed by what society says she