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Kevin Horn English 099 Dr. Lowry March 5, 2012

It Gets Complicated Our sense of identity can be shaped by many things in our life like lifestyles, gender, education, and even religion just to name a few. In my experience in life I think it is true that identity is shaped by assumption number three which is personal choice which is how it is referred to in my readings of Rise Axelrods Identity. Identity is a personal choice in my opinion because even though your parents may have raised you a certain way as you are growing up you find out that things in life just dont work out like your parents say they do, so you start to form your own sense of self and start living life by your personal choices and decisions. Another way this theory is true is when you go to high school and you start to form different types of cliques, gang, and other social groups as referred to in my reading of Inside Quad-City high school cliques by Ann McGlyinn who explain why we look to belong an adapt to certain cliques. This personal choice is one of the biggest choices one makes in their life because you want to be accepted by a certain group of people that may or may not be similar to you for instants if your very good at math or a honor role student how would you fit in with a clique like

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the jocks or the skater kids it would be very uncommon for you to choose a group like that so you tend to play it safe and go with a clique that favors you more. In my personal experience in school I made some of the same choices to be around a group of people who favored me whether it was good/bad .This group of people I hung around where gang-members, football players, and other popular kid that accepted me for who I was and what I was about. With the choices I made I was very popular in for fighting and being one of the leaders of my clique/ gang so I start to gain a lot of notoriety for my peers and the community around my school. Another choice I made was to never bring my lifestyle that I lived at school home because I never wanted my mother to know what I was doing in the streets. In conclusion, with the personal choices I made in life I went through a lot of hardships and lost a lot of good friends to the prison system and even death so with the assumption that identity is shaped by personal choice is true through theory and what I lived through. We choose the cliques we belong to and we as a people live are everyday lives off of the choices and decisions we make.

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Work Cited Axelrod, Rise.Identity. Martins, 2009. 3-13 print McGlinn, Ann ,Inside Quad-City high school cliques. Dr. Lowerys English 99 Course Pages Files. Jan. 24,2012. Web . Feb. 10,2012. Remix, 2nd Editon .ED : Rise Axelrod. New York: Bedford/ St.