Personal Narrative: My Elements Of Social Location

We as a society live in different whirlwinds of social locations defined by our race, gender, social class, age, ability, religion, etc. This spectrum of elements has a strong influence on the way that we behave and the way we view ourselves. When it comes to my elements of social location, I’m an 18 year old Caucasian girl just entering college coming from a middle-class family. I’m essentially aware of how my gender affects the way I both behave and see myself. Some societies still have the stereotype that women are inferior to men due to the fact that we get hormonal quite often and we are generally smaller in body structure. I feel as if I subconsciously view myself subordinate as compared to a male because of how us women are sometimes considered weak. Because of this negative perspective of myself, I sometimes lack confidence in social
situations, feeling as though my thoughts and emotions are silly because of my gender. If I were to be a male on the other hand, society would make me feel powerful and stronger which would probably help me have more confidence in myself. Age plays a considerable mantle affecting peoples’ self conception and behavior. For myself personally, I am 18 years of age marching towards the end of adolescence, entering the real world if you will. This is a stage where things get confusing. I often find myself questioning who I am and what I want to do with my life and how I’m going to get there. I still view myself young and will still need help from my parents from time to time, but I’m becoming more independent along with becoming mature. Instead of rebelling against authoritative figures, I’ve come to realize that I need them in my life and these types of realizations come with growing up. As far as being caucasian, I find that it doesn’t affect the way that I see myself nor the way that I behave. I feel like it doesn’t matter what our color is, we are all human. They do have social stereotypes for whites just as they would for any other race, we should all try to look past skin color and see people for who they are. That’s what I try to do at least. Indeed we are beyond what our skin looks like. I successfully passed all of my classes and graduated from high school.
Now being in college, I can see that I have the ability to achieve my goals in the world of education. With that being said, my self-image that this feeds is an image of me going in the right direction and being able to go far in life. Working hard to succeed is the way I’m behaviorally affected by my educational background. If this segment of my social location were to be different, as in not graduating from high school, I probably wouldn’t have nearly the amount of self-worth that I have now in college. My self-esteem would be lowered and I probably wouldn’t have any clear direction of what I want to do as a career. With being middle class my self-concept is quite content financially. I feel as if in a stable place at this time. Behaviorally, I don’t feel entitled to anyone or anything, and I am grateful for what I have. Although I’m grateful, sometimes greed does take its toll on me. If this class element were to change and I was in a substantially lower class, it would probably conduct me into becoming grateful to a further
extent. The concept of who we are as individuals and the way we behave is societally tied to the factors of class, jobs, education, gender, age, and race. This can definitely create a cognitive dissonance in ourselves if and when we don’t like the standards placed on us by those factors, like when I feel weak because I’m a female. When people create a new standard for themselves and disregard the social pressure to fit in with their social location, they can identify with people of any background and hopefully change the way society as a whole places expectation on those factors.