All the books that we have read this semester have held similar aspects of adolescents, but I would like to focus on their differences. The stories that we have read were about different walks of life, and that made them intriguing. If all our characters were the same, then it would feel like we were reading the same book repeatedly. This idea also applies to life. If every person you met were the same, then you probably would find yourself becoming less interested in human interaction and life in general because everything would feel like a repetitive cycle. Therefore, I believe that the variety we encounter throughout life makes it interesting. I love meeting people with different backgrounds than myself because they can always provide stories or info, unlike anything I have ever heard. I love learning new things and gathering more information, so those interactions especially are important to me. That is why I do not understand why people hide their differences to stay within the norm because I know for a fact that I do not want to be like everybody else. People should be allowed to express their differences, and our society must evolve past the outdated preconceptions that our youth develops of a desire to stay in the norm.
I have mentioned the importance of differences in some of my past blogs and discussion post, but I want to focus on this issue for my final blog post, as it strongly relates to adolescents. I want to know why it is so ingrained in our society that everyone needs to fit in and how we can eradicate it. When I have kids, I want to see where they start to develop this idea, and I hope that I can help them understand that you do not have to worry about everyone else’s opinion. I hope that I can stress the importance of being yourself and staying true to who you are no matter what. I wish my parents stressed this idea enough to me because they honestly never brought it up. Because of this, I conformed to the norm once I got in high school to fit in, but I do not know why I had such a desire to do so. It might be because the cool kids constantly are glorified in movies and shows, or it may be that I felt pressure to do so from my peers. It led me to go through many significant changes during high school, but it was not until I came to college that I realized that nobody’s opinion about me mattered, and I never needed to change. High school caused me to lose interest in multiple things that I loved before high school, such as the band, theater, and cross country. I even cared less about schoolwork, and that just was not in my best interest. The stories we read in this course helped me to realize those mistakes, which is why I have been so focused on this idea. The differences between each of the characters we read about are enormous, but many of them tried to hide their differences, especially Cameron Post, Esperanza Cordero, and Lewis Blake. Lewis Blake lives on a reservation, which leads him to have a very different home life from many of his peers. He starts to fade away from his friends from the reservation and his culture because the other kids constantly tyrannize him for it. He even goes far enough to hide it from his best friend, George, and never allows George to come to the reservation out of fear of being judged by him, even though George seeing the reservation would not change his opinion about Lewis. In The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Cameron hides her sexual orientation from her peers to avoid criticism. However, she must also hide her differences to such an extreme extent that she must hide them from her family. I imagine this would be much worse than just worrying about fitting in at school because Cameron would have to put up an act at all times, which must have been extremely taxing on her mentally. In The House on Mango Street, Esperanza handled her social pressures to fit in the best of these three characters, most likely because she was younger. Esperanza still felt embarrassed about her class and ethnicity while at school, but Esperanza eventually shows pride in her identity throughout the book. By the end of the book, she understands that she must take on life her way and will not be successful going through life trying to be someone she is not. There is research on why adolescents try so hard to be someone that they are not, but I believe this topic can vary significantly between cases. All the adolescents that fall into the same social trap that I did are all different from the average person. I know this because they had to change who they were to be like the average person, so they would not fit into the sample population looked at in any research on this topic. I hope that if anyone reading this has experienced a situation like mine, you can elaborate on how you handled it. If you fell into the same trap that I did, what led you to do so?
-Jason Rittman
Representing Adolescence @ Pitt 