Everyone will overtime form a unique identity that encapsulates who he or she is. In truth, an individual’s identity is impacted by a fear of self-destruction and eventually loss of innocence. Their experiences in life will create a person based on what they have witnessed. This can be positive and negative depending on how weak of a person they are. To begin, in everyone’s life they discover their identity early or later on in their life. In the basketball diaries by Jim Carroll, him and his friends started bad habits of by cutting school, smoking cigarettes and sniffing on soft drugs. This shows us that these bad habits will turn out into something much worse as they continue. When they start doing the soft drugs they were teens maybe 16 or 17 and at this age your not suppose to be doing these bad actions. From this age Carroll is already forming who he is going to be, his identity. A person environment also plays a part in who they are, during his time all the drugs were new to them because they just got their hands on them. Everyone around him were doing drugs, they were prostitutes in his neighborhood and drugs addicts. Thus being exposed to all this will have a negative role on his identity. To continue, self-destruction causes people to hit rock bottom once in their life or come close to it. Carroll becomes addicted to heroin and nothing else matters to him. He drops out of high school because of his addiction. At this point, he is destroying his life but he’s too caught up in his heroine addiction to do anything about it. He has now begun to disrespect his mother and decides to move out so that he may do his little habits, which led to his addiction, in privacy. Carroll, at this point in his life, has given up on himself. When not on heroine, Carroll feels lonely and has the feeling that no one in the world loves him. However, when on heroine, he feels as though he is in his best place and feels love from this girl. She is not beautiful but when she smiles he sees her true beauty. Carroll is then put in jail by his mom. This is where he hits rock bottom. Although she put him in jail, had it not been for his mom, Carroll would be dead because the addiction was slowly killing him. Equally important is the fact that loss of innocence will show a person an experience they are not ready to handle at a young age. As a teen you should not be