Auto-Ethnography Final Draft

Jake Pavlica
Composing the Self
Auto-Ethnography
Final Draft

Face to Face

In the early morning hours, the shades still shut preventing the grey gloom of the morning from fulling waking me, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Like a stranger passing on the street I don’t often give myself a second glance when I pass my reflection. On this day I turned back around and faced myself. It dawned on me that rarely do I look at myself in the mirror . Brushing my teeth and thinking about which plaid shirt I’ll wear today a singular question pings around my head like a pin ball machine; who am I?
I usually don’t give such existential questions the time of day. Asking myself metaphysical questions has never been something that gives me clarity, rather it just clouds my mind with so much thought that I begin picking apart every aspect of my being until only the surface level exoskeleton remains. For this reason I found this question interesting to explore. What really makes up an identity? The first thing I jump to is my experience. I have gone through public schooling, found a passion for art, and I’m fond of weekend debauchery just the same as many others. The small details of the categories we put ourselves in are the ones that make up our own ideas of ourselves.
With this exhibition into the heart of identity I will be interviewing others to find out what it is that makes us tick. For many, the culture they were born into becomes a primary baseline for their personality. Being born into religion, or a deeply rooted culture becomes our first insight into morality, the self, and our own ideals. It can act as guidelines for many; a set of rules to make life more understandable and structured. What I am curious to find out is what happens when someone begins to stray from the lifestyle they have been immersed in since birth. How do we find ourselves again when we begin swimming agains the current of the ideals we have been taught to be sacred.
One thing that is always brought up when speaking about identity is the concept of nature versus nurture. Nature versus nurture posits whether or not we are the sum of our genetics or the product of our environment. For many, the genetics they are given is a major source of their identity, given that certain aspects of life can be easier or difficult judging by the genetic code you are given. Our appearance is what shapes our interactions with society; how people treat us and the groups we find ourselves connecting with. Outside of society comes nurture, which relates to our home and family values. Nurture seeks to understand how our family atmosphere dictates our morals and worldview. The two terms are very much interconnected. I for one think it isn’t a versus relationship, but more of the two walking hand and hand. Either can be supported by the other, but the important takeaway is how does it determine your own mindset.
I was born a white male. Needless to say I have not faces the same amount of adversity as others who have faced systematic oppression in our society. Life can be hard for everyone at times, but being born a white male means that my skin color or gender has never been a factor that made life more difficult. I have always seen myself as an ally to those who have been through hardship with how society or their family has treated them. Though I cannot always relate to someones experience with hardship I lend an empathetic ear to them in order to find out what they have been through and what small things I can do to lessen that burden.
I have a great deal of friends who have experienced being an outsider in places that should feel like homes. In my interviews I will ask the following questions to get down to the root of what it is that led them to the paths they are on now.
When I was growing up, a process that I am not pretentious enough to admit is over, I considered myself a black sheep. I felt like I always stuck out of a crowd like a sore thumb and I wore that paranoia on my sleeve. I was jittery and didn’t know where I fit in. I was overweight as a child, a subject which I am still sensitive about. I was never piked first for teams in PE and I was never the kid that girls had a crush on. I was a goofy, disproportioned weirdo and I don’t think that has changed. Because I felt I was unattractive and had nothing to prove I never burdened myself with fulfilling expectations. In class I was unfiltered and a joker, I would try to make people laugh so they would like me and I actually ended up making some friends because of this. Low self esteem has a way of building up inside of you, and it creates a pressure unlike anything else. Everyone has experienced it. I would keep my eyes on the floor and hoped none would look at me for very long for fear that they would see the self hate that oozed from my being. Even with the the neurosis I held to be liked by everyone, I felt it was all in vain and that I would be a fat kid forever. In a way I was right. The second guessing and fear of not being found attractive sticks with you forever. Self consciousness is apart of every waking hour of my life and I could sit for hours picking apart the things I dislike about myself without ever seeing the full picture in the mirror. That pudgy mass of nervous energy is still inside and I don’t think I want it to go away. Because I was the cute fat kid no one expected anything from me. I wasn’t the hot guy on the playground that girls fawned over and chased; I was the kid who talked to his teachers like human beings and read comic books on the school benches and wished he could fly.
We develop our identity through our relationships.
Our first impression of friendship and connection comes from our parents, but that attention at times feels like a technicality. We cannot choose our family and we are older by that familial relationship. The family we can chose are our friends. As a child I felt that my personality was split down the middle between the one that my parents saw and my friends saw. Around my parents I was innocent, polite and respectful, but around my friends I unleashed some primal version of myself. I think this dichotomy is common when discovering what we are really all about. At some point the two personalities we juggle between these two enrollments converges and becomes who we display to the world.
My experience as an adolescence provided a baseline for my personality. Based on the genetics traits I was dealt, I manifested as the person I am now. Certain thing change over time; true, but that fundamental memory of a past life is still there. The people I meet now have no idea of who I used to be, of the clogged pours and bashful eyes that peered out through stringy blond bangs. Sometimes I think I catch a glimpse of that old me walking past me in a reflection. I see that person in my shadow and I see that person when I feel others eyes on me. My past self will never be truly gone and I am grateful. I have been humbled by my beginnings and though those times were difficult and often completely miserable, I came out feeling like a better version of myself.
According to Jenny Nicholls, author of “The Nature of Nurture: How Much Genes Determine Identity.” These are the traits most commonly associated with being passed down genetically:
1 Personality 40%
2 General intelligence (e.g. reasoning) 50%
3 Spatial ability (e.g. navigation) 70%
4 Remembering faces 60%
5 Verbal ability 60%
6 School achievement 60%
7 Reading disability 60%
8 Autism 70%
9 Schizophrenia 50%
10 Stomach ulcers 70%
11 Breast cancer 10%
12 Weight 70%
13 Height 80%
14 Eye color 95%

I for one see only validity in physical features. To express that someone is merely a carbon copy of two conjoined organisms is a laughable statement. Science has a way of generalizing that I personally cannot get behind. It was not until a few years ago that academic physiology papers had to formally address that no two cases are exactly alike in terms of psychological nature, so why should personality be treated any different. I have a story belief that people are an analogous mixture of their genetics and their environments which come together to create the cohesive consciousness.
To combat the theory of passed down personality comes an article from Bandura and Mischel. “Walter Mischel’s Theory of Personality states that an individual’s behavior is influenced by two things-the specific attributes of a given situation and the manner in which he perceives the situation. In contrast to the traditional social cognitive theories, Mischel argued that a person only behaves in a similar manner whenever these actions are highly probable to yield into the same results. He emphasized that we have individual differences, so our values and expectancies must be consider in predicting a person’s behavior and personality.

According to Mischel, there are five person variables that contribute to the conditions of a specific situation. They are used in predicting how a person will most likely behave.”
1 Competencies – our intellectual capabilities as well as social skills.
2 Cognitive Strategies – the different perceptions of a specific event. For instance, what may be “threatening” for you may be “challenging” to another person.
3 Expectancies – the expected results of different behaviors that are realized by the person inside his mind.
4 Subjective Values – the respective value of each possible outcomes of various behaviors.
5 Self-regulatory systems – the groups of rules and standards that people adapt to in order to regulate their behavior.
The idea of adaption is prevalent, indicating that we are datable creatures, never fully formed and constantly in flux. Like my schooling example, we learn from the environment we are placed into and the baseline of the genetics we know to be ours is only a technicality in how we act in these situations.

My interview was conducted with a person that I will refer to as “F” to protect the anonymity of this person, who happens to be a close friend of mine. F is transgender and identifies as a man. His story stands out to me in particular because the idea of the gender spectrum has only recently become apart of the normal everyday experience. Gender fluid and transgender people have come forward with empowering tales of self discovery that take the idea of finding yourself to a whole different level. I have always been fascinated with this. I often take for granted how easy it was for me to fall into line based on the basic attributes I knew to be true; I am a boy and I’m white. Those are two things that I knew to be true and certain at the base level of my personality. For F, these foundations were rattled later in live when he realized his body did not match up with the being he knew he was inside. I have known F since before his transition into a male so I have seen both sides of his story. I asked him a few questions to get an idea of what his experience has been in discovering his true identity and navigating societal norms and the values of his family life.
F identifies with South Asian/American Culture, queer culture, and local music culture. He is outwardly spoken about his identity and tires to help those who are struggling with their identity find their true selves. “When I was in elementary school I think I already knew I wanted to be a boy, or at least masculine. In 3rd grade I asked everyone to call me Julio and I got lessons from my best friend on how to be a boy. I remember he brought gym shorts and a bandana and we both stood outside the boys bathroom for like 15 minutes, but it smelled too bad so I never went inside. 10 year old me had it figured out and then we hit middle school and I learned quick that I better at least buy my clothing from the girls department or I would be even weirder and even more ostracized”. School is a primary factor in determining who we want to be in the eyes of our peers. We often find ourselves falling into the latest trend to keep up with what is “hip” and trying to stay on the same page as the people we hope to impress. To discover as aspect of yourself that strays from the norm, like F, takes an enormous amount of bravery especially in the early years of elementary school. As much as we wish to appeal to others like us it comes partly from a place of fear of not being accepted.
Like many, F felt the pressure of society through social media as he began to discover his true self later on. When asked about the influence of society through social media on his culture he had this to say: “I think mass media and the internet has had terrible influences on me. I think especially the wave of internet activism has been really difficult for me, as I tried to appreciate and participate in that culture, I just felt like I was doing less and less substantial work but felt more and more overwhelmed by the lack of action I was taking and the amount of guilt I felt. I think queer culture has been overwhelmingly positive, encouraging me to listen to my voice, love myself and not feel the need to change any part of myself for anyone. However, the female to male transgender community I found on the internet, while initially positive, contributed to a lot of my internalized toxic masculinity. Instagram is where I learned what the term transgender even meant, and what it actually looked like. It’s where I truly found my identity, but also where I equated a lot of negative habits to masculinity and developed a lot of really negative ideas about what it meant to transition”.
Along with battling the hypocrisy of social media, F also experienced friction at home. F comes from a family with religious undertones, making their beliefs on homosexuality and transgender people quite conservative. “Growing up queer in church, I learned real quick that a lot of the love and acceptance being preached was only towards a very small few, namely white, cis, straight people. It was hard to see that a structure that encouraged all these amazing ways of living life, could actually be acting in the complete opposite way, spreading hate, sidelining people and valuing beliefs over actual people’s lives. When I came out as gay, my best friends dad who also happened to be my church’s pastor, flat out told my parents that he would never facilitate my marriage because it went against what he believed in, BUT he still loved me and our family. That’s the narrative I got all the time. ‘We still love you, but you’re still a sinner’ thankfully, I never really bought into that bullshit and saw through the hypocrisy and hatred. It was scary to see people who I once looked up to as leaders, acting in such hateful ways. That was probably the first real crack in my questioning of beliefs. Thankfully my family followed suit in this break from the church, or at least specifically that church. I am constantly at odds with my mom. Although my family is very progressive, they have a hard time with the gender binary and some other more ‘radical’ theories. Every time I try to exercise my femininity it is always regulated by my mom, “You can’t wear nail polish, you’ll confuse people” ‘why do you always have to be so over the top?’. I know that my mom is only coming from a place of love and protection, but most of the time I can only hear that the way I am isn’t right. Luckily as I get older it’s easier to prioritize my happiness over making my mom happy, but it can be really difficult to feel at home in an environment where I constantly feel the need to perform my best.

My early adolescent was anchored in church, which looking back now is super funny. Church is where I started my love for music, being the youth worship leader at my church for 2 years. When I came out as queer and later trans, I took on the burden of being the queer ambassador for my church, engaging in conversation with everyone about whether or not being gay is a choice, always staying mild mannered, doing my best to be the best most perfect gay brown kid ever. Slowly over time I realized how exhausting and unfair of a job this was, and how some people were simply not going to change no matter what I did. I’m grateful that the church taught me so much patience and grace with assholes, but I think again I internalized a lot of really shitty views on queer people just from the snide comments all around me. At the time though, I was a very happy teen, I did a lot of things that I liked, and felt very lucky to have a lot of the resources I had. I had a girlfriend, a group of friends, and my parents were proud of my grades so I was basically golden”.
The hurdles that F had to conquer inevitably gave him more insight into himself. Our environment plays a pivotal role in how we turn out as a full fledged persona, but that does not mean we become replicas of that experience. Many people, such as F, use the hardships in their life to hone in on what they wish to change in our society. He was lucky enough to find music, as I did, as a way to release the tension and nonsense of life and give meaning to your experience and emotions. I feel sympathy for those who have not found that medium in which to escape from the things that make you doubt yourself. The hardships we face are what cut us into rounded human beings. The people who have seen first hand how a family can turn on you, or how religion and society can turn its back on you are often the people who walk on not their life with more perspective. When we talk about identity its easy to fall into the trope that we learn from what we see, and that is not entirely false. We do learn from what we see, but we often learn how not to live by the examples shown to us by the ignorant and the unknowing. Our individual cultures come from a place of comfort, a place in which we find ourselves feeling like we are apart of something greater. Beliefs and mindset are not hereditary and we need to stop acting like it is. No two people are exactly alike and thats what makes the world interesting.