Viewing Self and Life
AB
Psychology 101
May 24th 2012

I. How I Became Who I Am
We don’t choose the life we are born into, even though sometimes we wish we could. All you can do is make the best of the situation you are given. I feel I am very lucky to have had the childhood I did and even though I may not have realized it at the time I now know that there are many others who weren’t as fortunate as I was growing up. From the time I was born until the time I was about thirteen I always had a good relationship with my parents. Even though there isn’t a time in my life I remember them being affectionate toward one another they always made sure that I was happy and had everything I needed. I grew up an only child, my parents had both been married before and had other children but by the time I was born all my siblings were grown and out of the house. As for other family my dad’s side lived out of state and was never really around and my mother didn’t have much family. When I was very young my parents always had boundaries for me but weren’t very strict most people would probably consider me spoiled. We went to church every Sunday but as I got older we went less and less until we completely stopped. I think the main reason my parents took me to church was to give me a sense of value and stability. Not only did my parents give me a good sense of stability by establishing rules and values for me, we were also very fortunate when it came to money. My father worked at general motors and my mother also had some kind of part time job, even though we were just middle class money never seemed like an issue to me as a child. I always had a place to live, food on the table and clothes on my back. When I was young probably between the ages of three and eight I never had a problem making friends mostly it was neighbor kids or the kids of my parent’s friends but I don’t remember a time feeling lonely. As I got older I didn’t have many friends, especially throughout middle school I moved a few times and no matter where the school kids seemed to treat me the same, I was teased a lot and somewhat of an outcast. It seemed like every time I would make a friend my mother would get very upset if they did sometime that upset me and her disapproval usually would ruin the friendship. Throughout elementary I also performed well and never failed anything. In middle school I did well in the early years but as time went on my grades slipped I think that had a lot to do with my social standing, being teased on a regular basis really affected my academic performance. By the time I made it to high school I did make a small group of friends who I still stay in contact with to this day. Academically I did well my first few years of high school but around my junior year I got my driver’s license and started skipping school quite often which of course had a negative effect on my academic performance Even though I did poorly in high school I really enjoyed art classes. I took at least one every year and did a few extracurricular projects as well. I was very close with my art teacher and she was a very big role model in my life. She put a lot of my work in various art shows as well as had me paint a mural in the elementary school music room and I also did a painting for the comfort inn’s pool room. Even though I grew up a happy and healthy child my family had one major flaw. My parents clearly did not love each other I didn’t notice it as much when I was young but the older I got the more I realized how unhappy they were. When I was thirteen my parents divorced, that was a very tuff time for me and not because they split, I knew they didn’t belong together and they would be much happier but because that’s also when my relationship with my mother started to fall apart. Since my father was the one to move out I stayed in our home with my mother. We would fight constantly and she would blame me for their split. I understand she was under a lot of stress