The Boy In The Mirror Analysis

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Identity development occurs throughout one’s life and is a difficult process. It helps people fit into where they belong and find out who they are. Identity is always changing as one is continually affected by many things. The factors that affect identity are connected because when one changes, the others are likely to change as well. Identity formation is affected by one’s environment, experiences, and community, making one different from others. The environment people are surrounded by affects one's identity. Different environments change the way people act and feel. In the article “Changing America,” students move away from their culture where they are exposed to other cultures daily and “May sense that they are losing their family stories in …show more content…
Experiences affect one’s identity because new experiences occur daily and can impact a person positively or negatively. Really good or really bad experiences stick with people forever. In the article “The Boy in the Mirror,” the author James McBride was bullied throughout school, which made him struggle with finding his identity, causing him to believe that his “true self was a boy who lived in the mirror.” McBride's external experiences made him internalize what he wanted his true identity to be. Similar to McBride's beliefs, in the article “How Social Media Shapes Our Identity,” Naussica Renner explains how technology “allows us to produce a narrative of our lives, to choose what to remember and what to contribute to our own mythos.” Technology affects the way people experience life by caring too much about what others think. People make their lives on social media look perfect by sharing the positives and keeping the negatives to themselves. People create a “fake” and more positive identity to make them seem better than others. The community one surrounds oneself with affects one’s