Be True To Who You Make Yourself

When I first moved to Chico I hated it. For a couple years I was pretty positive that choosing to live here was the worst choice I’d made in my life. It seemed like everywhere I went, everything I did brought me bad luck. I didn’t know I was doing it at the time, but I started looking for reasons to hate this town and, believe me, it was more than easy to find those reasons. Besides factors in my own life that included lost relationships I found things in the newspapers like shootings, stabbings, and muggings. Plus the over accepted mentality of public display of idiocricy supplemented and justified by several “buck nights” and “power hours” and the slogan “Chico: our drinking town has a college problem” is far from aiding anyone in getting out of here in four years if at all, let alone alive (although I’d be a liar if I denied my participation in such happenings). But it wasn’t until recently that I decided to change my outlook. After all, I’m stuck here until the end of next year anyways, so I might as well make the best of it; I can’t allow the potentially negative aspects of my surrounding affect me too much but instead I need to hold onto my own identity.

Jasmine, from Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, makes a conscious effort to hold onto her who she really is. Coming from India to America, Iowa nonetheless, she states that she “knows what she doesn’t want to become” (5). While this isn’t a stand to stay firm in her identity, it is a decision to form it in a certain way by choosing what it won’t be. No one can make the decision of what they will become because the future is so uncertain and the events that lead to the shaping of the people we become are out of our hands. But deciding what we won’t allow those things to make of us is possible. For example, you can decide not to be a negative person and practice that aspect of your life daily. This sounds like a religious idea, practicing a life decision, but it’s more similar to a conscious mental state we can strive for. Going along with the same example, it’s harder to decide TO be happy rather than to decide NOT to be negative because happiness, true happiness, is found in exterior events that we cannot control that affect us positively. These are events that make us smile unintentionally and are out of our control if they are truly unintentional.

Jasmine holds onto the culture that formed her even in the alien world of Iowa. While she’s with the man whose child she carries, she remembers the prediction made by an old astrologer from her home village that told her she would be a widower (1). When Bud wants to marry her before she gives birth to their child, she says no, feeling as though she “saved his life by not marrying him” (12).  Her cultural upbringing isn’t lost and carries into her life in America instead of dying away, allowing her new cultural surrounds to smother it out. Again, Jasmine is making a conscious decision to keep he own identity, in this case her cultural identity.

However, Jasmine does not hold true to her name, which she changes several times. With every move, she changes her name for a certain level of acceptance; in Iowa she let's Bud name her Jane. She wants this to be because of Plain Jane but he kids and remarks "Me Bud, you Jane" (26), referencing Tarzan and implicating the separation of her exotic heredity. While she allows this distortion of her own identity, she recognizes it cannot completely dilute who she is: "In Baden, I am Jane. Almost" (26). Even though she's allowed Bud to name her, she not only welcomes the implication but keeps in mind that it does not and cannot define her.

I was adopted when I was very very young and my name used to be something other than what it is now. My original name held a special meaning that was exclusive to who I COULD have been and now, my name reflects what my life became with a new family, the family that raised me. The name has never defined me. Instead, what defines me is first my upbringing and now, as I've matured, what I consciously decide to allow to shape me. My name is just coincidence, reflective of the past... to an extent.

What remains to be most important is that the decision to decide how you're shaped isn’t an easy one; sometimes it’s easier to let things eat at you slowly over time and change you. Letting that happen means not dealing with personal issues and not conforming to the aspects of life around you. But keeping true to yourself is incredibly fulfilling if done on a daily basis.