Personal Narrative: My Identity

I have never looked up to, and never have I ever been around, anyone more in my life than my sister. From the moment I was born, we were attached at her hip whether she wanted me there or not - we played with toys, and games, together; I looked up to her; I respected her; she taught me next to everything that I knew about life back before I started school. Once I got a bit older, I reached the point of having the ability to genuinely discover who I was, and find my own identity. Around the same time, my sister was working through finding her own self, though she was a bit further along in the process than I was due to her being older. She was my guiding force in the construction of my identity. During her search for her own self, my sister …show more content…
The issue with my newly developed interest in these things was that, as the impressionable youth who was judgement fearing youth I was, I thought that my participation in these things would cause the students around me to think of me as less of a man. I already had zero interest to join sports or do anything else thought to be remotely masculine, so maybe if I joined these things people would judge me for doing what I was genuinely interested in because they weren’t the normal masculine activities most men at my school were participating in, and that scared me. I had already spent plenty of time being bullied, emasculated, and feeling insecure, for having been a short, lanky kid without any muscle mass, and I feared having to deal with even more of that. My sister easily caught on to my hesitation. She told me that I had nothing to fear; if I liked doing something, it didn’t matter if anyone viewed me as less masculine than I was because it doesn’t matter how masculine I am as long I enjoy what I do. I don’t need to follow society’s expectation just to fit in and do what others expected from me; I didn’t need to feed any masculinity complex just to feel comfortable in my own skin. That’s something I’ve lived by ever since then. My masculinity doesn’t matter to me; my femininity doesn’t matter to me; none of that matters to me; what does …show more content…
I’ve always been an emotional person throughout my entire life, though I used to be more insecure about how emotional I was. I’ve had days where I would feel happy, days where I would feel sad, and days where I’d really need to cry because they were long, hard, emotional roller coasters, and a lot of the time I would feel bad about it because I was under the impression that because I was a man that I had to be hard and unemotional like the more dominant, and generally masculine, influences in my life as well as what I learned from societal expectations, and fear of being made fun of for my feelings. My family never did terribly well with demonstrating their emotions: my father and my sister never outwardly communicated when they were sad; they never cried around me; they would keep their emotions behind a hard shell, and whenever they became upset they simply became mean. I wasn’t like them. That didn’t stop my sister from being there for me to cheer me up and put up with me whenever I would become sad; she would always be there to tell me it’s okay to be emotional. I was always been under the impression that being emotional was bad. Society and media have always portrayed feeling genuine emotion as something feminine which resulted in me, due to my insecurity in my own masculinity, feeling weak every time I felt the slightest bit emotional. She told me that I should never be