What Shapes Us Up to Be the Person that We Are

It’s a frequent judgment that our thoughts make us the way we are, but I believe that we are a lot more than that. Our parents, friends, neighbors, teachers, social interactions, life experiences, and our fears and failures carefully construct who we are. The core of our personal identities is made up of an always changing fusion of feelings, characteristics, qualities, and emotions. These changing personalities create the complex person. The way our thoughts interact with our feelings, the way our feelings seem to be embedded in our bodies, and the way that our bodies seem to so often be the subject of our thoughts is complex. This leads us to conclude that we are an everlasting spiral of shifting parts; and yet, on the contrary, we remain the same human being.

Culture may also have an influence on our diet, the way we dress, speech, social activities, and the type of relationships we form with others. Your health, beliefs, behaviour, and relationships can also be influenced by the society that surrounds you. The media also has a large effect on how people develop and view each other. Many parents are concerned about TV programmes showing negative and violent themes that can affect their children’s development. Gender, racial, and sexist stereotypes as well as celebrity role models can also influence a young person’s point of view. Positive images can too be portrayed through media.

People who are socially isolated lack family and close friends. Family is important because it provides you with education and socialisation, supports you emotionally and financially, and protects your health and wellbeing through care and guidance. We are given a countless amount of opportunities in front of us. These chances that we take and turn down are what shapes us up to be the person that we are. There are so many aspects of life that we can’t tell a person all at once what made us who we are, because, in reality, everything changes us even when we don’t realize it. And that’s another thing about life. It’s always changing. You are always changing. A person’s personality forms during their childhood and is shaped through an interaction of two factors, their inherited tendencies and their environment. Inherited tendencies are aspects of your personality passed on to you by your parents, such as shyness or having a happy outlook. Love and attention shape our lives more profoundly than anything else. We’ve all created our own personal histories, marked by highs and lows, that we share with the world, and we can shape them to live with more meaning and purpose.

Along with good friends who are present, loyal, and honest, most people want friends who are trustworthy. If you can’t count on a person, it’s hard to consider them a good friend. Mutual trust between friends is a building block of a solid friendship that could last a lifetime. A friend is someone who helps you overcome yourself. Someone who is an ally in your endeavor to become more than you are. There are many many different kinds of friendship, different roles that friends can play, but this is the common thread. For others, it’s smaller gestures that loom large. The friend who talks for hours when you’re feeling alone, even if it means going over on his cell phone minutes, the one who helps you with your homework, even when she hasn’t done her own, or the friend who helps you search for your retainer, even when it means going through the garbage from the school lunch.

You may live without friends and relatives, but family is something which stays. We can survive without friends but we survive better if we have faithful friends. “Happiness is only real when shared” is a sometimes confusing quote from Christopher McCandless, a man that died nearly 26 years ago. Yes; there is freedom in being detached, and, yes, you can be perfectly happy alone, but you don’t fulfill the basic human need of sharing your life with someone. Only a life similar to the life of those around us is genuine life. This implies that true happiness only comes from sharing it.