The retelling of one’s life is a unique experience. For in the telling one often reassesses one’s life, perspectives, and experiences in broader ways that promote deeper understanding of self and others. In the stories included here, I discovered many insights into myself and others with respect to development, growth, and point of view.
In My Own Extravagant Laughter, I detail the childhood and adolescent experiences with my best friend Alberto that taught me a great deal about growth, perception and thinking from a single perspective. In Becoming American, I recount my experiences trying to retain my culture of origin while assimilating into mainstream American culture and its impact on me, my parents and friends. In my Response Essay on Ways of Reading, I illustrate how the new concepts I encountered in this book had a direct impact on my views of self-expression and critical analysis. Finally, in my summaries of Tompkins’ work, I discuss how our impressions of different cultures stems largely from information whose authors bring a certain perspective and bias to those representations.
I think the most important lesson I learned from these essays is that if one is determined to develop one must continually reinvent the self. This is true with respect to believes, values, perceptions and understanding. Often our individual behavior is automatic and unconscious, stemming from habitual thinking that is based on the belief or limited knowledge that only one perspective or framework is correct or valid. Because of this, when we encounter input that would help us broaden our understanding and gain deeper insight leading to multiple perspectives and beliefs, we often shut it out thereby undermining our own growth, understanding and development.
I think my best two essays in the following collection are, in order of quality, Becoming American and My Own Extravagant Laughter. In the first
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