Draft

John Andrews

English Final Paper

Rough Draft

11.27.2012

    The story of my body stems from personal uniqueness and the perspective that being yourself is normal. I believe that the story of your body begins as soon as you begin as a human. It comes from the interpersonal differences that create and make each of us separate. My story became a reality through my familial differences. My mother grew up in a small town of southern Illinois called Pekin, while my father was from an urban city of Chicago called Waukegan. As to be expected, each family's political affiliations and overall beliefs about reality barred no connection. As a child, it was difficult to differentiate between truth and origin recapitulation. This forced me to find my own conceptions about reality. I decided to veer off the path of familial ideological reputation and move to my own form of self-belief. In a way, the split representations allowed me to see both as a tool for constructing my own system and the perception of myself within society.

     I have always been fascinated by outdoor activities and using my body to its limits to explore dangerous terrain for the pure reason of appeasing my curiosity. I found that doing risky or dangerous things gave me a sense of thrill and I would occupy my time with them. I also found a home in athletics, allowing me to gain friendships and experience a team building exercise for the first time. Most people find this interesting but I loved the arts. I became ecstatic when drawing for the first time. I found it liberating to unleash inner feelings without any type of censorship. Each side of these developments found home inside one of my extended families traditions. My mother's side enjoyed the outdoors and athletics, where my father's appreciated the arts and the intellectual side of nature. I enjoyed all of these things, not letting society deem what is appropriate for me to like. This is where the focus on personal uniqueness through the normalcy of self-expression achieves its power in my paper. I will allude to the new friendships gained throughout each of my experiences during each discussion in the progression of my life and the way it shaped the my perception of my body.

     Growing up with an ideologically spilt extended family allowed me to see that people are generally judgmental. Now I understand this from an evolutionary and psychological perspective that humans need to judge environmental stimuli in order to deem things safe or worth proceeding. Constant judgements are made in everyday situations but the one that I am most interested in would be the judgment of social acceptance. Each side of my family holds different expectations or judgments to particular members of society. Essentially, if you don't meet their criteria of a quality person then you are less than satisfactory. Obviously this has been broken down into the most fundamental aspects of their judgments, they are not horrible people who discount an individual immediately based on their observations, but it speaks to the origination of in group versus out group comparisons. Seeing both sides and growing up as a combination of both, allowed me to realize that people have difficulty accepting the different. I have redefined this idea in my mind to accept people as not different but unique. That following or judging a person based on external qualities is only a disservice to yourself. I believe that everyone has a story to tell and a life to influence and disregarding those traits only recapitulates societies conceptions about what is normal and acceptable. Personally, judgments from other people have yet to be destructive or harming to me. People made me feel uncomfortable in my body in my life but it didn't encourage me to change the idea of myself and body until the third grade.

     The first instance of being uncomfortable in my body started around the age of nine or when I was in third grade. For the first time in my life I became overweight. It was at a time that growing was definitely apart of my equation and my mother always justified my eating or weight gain as a method of becoming a man. Saying that my body needs to gain weight in order to grow. My friends held opposing ideologies. They never made me feel unwanted or worthless but consistently harped on my recent increase in pounds. I was always larger then most of my classmates and I also believed that this influenced their word choice around me. I pondered the possibilities, seeing other obese classmates scrutinized for their appearance and thinking that my position could have been worse. Instead, I should have intervened showing the fellow students their impact on other people and the devastating affects it could create for a person. Nothing that was said to me had a cognitive, negative affect but subconsciously shaped the perception of myself within society. The idea that one must fit into a certain norm existed in my life for the first time. This angered me because I always thought of other people as unique, no matter their appearance. In a way, this changed my perception of society. That society is a governing body that determines personal magnitude regardless of real traits by focusing on superficial qualities. This is when I decided to take my anger to the football fields, and try out for the Libertyville Boys Club, the LBC.

     I found a niche in the athletic lifestyle because I was particularly good at the game. I tried out for traveling football for the first time and made the team as a starter. This game also incorporated all sizes of people. Larger individuals played on the line, faster smaller people held the outside positions and the combination of both filled the rest. I played on a team made up of third through fifth graders, so being the largest person on the field was never in the question. I felt at home, where people applauded my larger build and I could use it as a facilitator for my improvement. The norms of being physically acceptable in society no longer applied to my situation. Football gave me a sense of respect for being the person I was, instead of the person that people wanted me to be.

     As an athlete, it was necessary to be active. I started lifting weights when I was in sixth grade, a couple years after the beginning of my football career. This was not the typical heavy duty weight lifting regimes that are seen with college and professional level programs. It started with my cousin showing me the positive feeling associated with bodily improvement, as he had been working out since high school. Immediately I started to build muscle and this was exhilarating. I gained a new respect from my friends at school as they began to notice my changes. My more fragile friends actually asked for my protection at school, similar to that of a body guard. This new sense of self-worth was indeed an ego booster; however, ended up shaping my perception of my body and the gravity that was associated with being bigger than other people. I had tied the meaning of successful to being physically fit. I never let it get to my head, but then again I never had issues in terms of my body size. Growing up it was generally easy for me to maintain a healthy physique from my constant physical activity but I actually enjoyed the exercise. Unfortunately, this changed the perception of myself and started a conformation toward the typical success seen when adapting to societal norms. It made me believe that attaining that body type determined our gravity in the social context. Mostly from my participation in sports, I continued to live that lifestyle. I became involved in different sports from football to basketball to lacrosse each achieving the same affect until I sustained a career altering injury that would change my perception for ever.

     I tore my medial collateral ligament my junior year of high school in a football game against our rival school down the road. This ended my athletic career or any attempts to reach the next level in sports. I was devastated by the realization that I would no longer compete at the same intensity. I went into a sort of funk or depressed state of rumination about my future. For my entire life I believed I would play sports and this ruined any of my chances. I continued to exercise but the feeling of competition could never be recreated. As unfortunate as injuries are, this one allowed me for the first time to see outside the boundaries of my preconceived ideas about my place in society. The depression lasted into my senior year and depleted from the power and lack of commitment and focus on extracurriculars like friends and partying that accompany seniority. It wasn't until my freshman year of college that I truly found myself. Being from Chicago, Illinois most people did not understand my decision to attend Ohio University. I chose Ohio because almost zero of the people I went to school with came here and it would allow me to focus on myself and see the world from a different perspective. Immediately the setting was daunting, knowing nobody that you go to school with is a difficult obstacle to overcome. The varieties of people remained the same, cliques tend to form regardless of the place because similarity tends to rise over all. People typically choose friends that they seem to be connected to or synonyms of. I took a completely different technique, and never tried to be similar to someone else or fit into a group of people. Instead I found a group of friends that would accept me for who I am. The success I found alluded to my most cherished times of my life, the realization that you naturally will find people that appreciate you for who you are.