blog #10

Identity plays a large role in all of our lives. We are all searching for who we are and if we are lucky we have already found out what that is. But usually everyone remembers their middle school years when you are growing into your body and trying to find out who you are and who are your true friends. While tutoring at the Millbrook School, I am able to watch this painful journey of discovering identity unfold in both the classroom and on the playground.

When I look back at my middle school years it is hard to remember because I have tried so hard to get rid of the memories. It was a time when everything is changing and your group of friends and social status seem to be the most important thing in your life. When I work with the middle school children those memories are brought back. Not only are these children going through this changing period in their life, they are going though it in a city and language that is foreign to them. One day before we went inside we were playing on the playground, which is located next to the basketball courts. Playground does not seem a suitable name for it, as the smell of marijuana blows with the breeze and packs of the local kids who can not be more than fifteen slowly move by with a forty and a carton of cigarettes yelling for their friends attention. The younger kids separate on the playground. A group of the local girls are sitting on a climbing piece and cry out to a pack of boys walking by, while the Meshketian Turks linger by the monkey bars. My sister and I joke from afar about the Westside story unfolding on the local playground. But when we get closer we hear the harsh words of adolescents. On boy from our program Ravil, was standing hooded in his G-Unit sweatshirt, while the local kids taunted him. “You can’t wear a G-Unit sweatshirt ‘round here, you ain’t black,” one boy was yelling as the group of girls laughed behind him and his friends stood in a way behind him that scared me. I wanted to say something, but what could I possibly do. How is an outsider supposed to know what is socially acceptable and what is not? These kids have come to Baltimore from a different place and how are they supposed to know the etiquette of attire. They are at the age of trying to find out what suits them and who they are, not only as a person, but now an American. No wonder they act out, they are given such a hard time and they themselves are at the bottom of the middle school food chain with no one to take it out on or to talk to. Every week I witness this harsh battle with discovering identity.

In Twelfth Night, a comedic play by William Shakespeare, this theme of identity is threaded throughout. The character’s are constantly disguising themselves and hiding behind disguises. They go so far that people mistake them for other people. Viola for example dresses up as a male servant for the Duke and Olivia actually falls in love with him. This idea of wearing disguises to cover up your identity and actually to use it in pursuit of something else, is just another tie to the “playground”. When I look back at my middle school years, all I can think of is how the clothes I wore were in a word embarrassing. I was hiding under the disguise of what I thought was cool, to fit in, in the pursuit for my true identity.