A person’s identity is influenced by various factors, some acknowledge that culture is the biggest effect on our identity, while others hold a dissimilar idea and think that identity is part of our nature. Lucy Grealy, a person who has facial defects wrote an essay about her distinctive experience that she was teased by others since young, and became dissocial and self-abased. I believe that the people around us have the strongest influences on our identities, which can also be shown from Lucy Grealy’s essay.
Due to her cancer, Lucy Grealy has lost almost half of her jaw which leads her to an unusual life, and this incident was the beginning of the change of her identity. People who surround her tended to make fun of her after that and said her face looked like a monster mask. She started to ostracize her herself and became self- abased, and since then Halloween became one of her most enjoyable periods of time and because it is not strange to wear a mask to hide her face (Grealy 67). During Halloween, everyone wears a mask, so no one can see her face. Despite Halloween, school was still a rough time. Kids teased her and no one would like to have lunch with her, she even end up having lunch by herself in a teacher’s office (Grealy 67). Grealy’s classmates didn’t understand who she actually was because they personally judged her identity. Grealy changed from a normal person into a person that was isolated by the society through teasing. It seems like physical beauty and outlook is more significant when people make evaluations of others. We estimate their identity by what they look like and how they dress up; internal beauty only accounts for a small percentage of the whole evaluation. Grealy’s horrendous changes to her life occurred because of what happened to her face.
Another portion of the influence of our identity is our friends and family. Family members and friends