Establishing identity

I feel This Is Me by Charlie McDonnell is an appropriate song to be listening to, in relation to the topic of this ramble.

I was flicking through some exercise books from a few schools ago and I found a small essay response I wrote, aged, like, 13, to the prompt "culture identity". Spelling and punctuation amended, it goes exactly like this:

I have lived in Northamptonshire my whole life, which is in the Midlands in England, and I'm half Scottish, half English. I was raised into a Christian family and that is the religion I try and live my life by, but I think Buddhists have some good values too, and so I try and stick to the laws of karma. I don't know enough about politics to give a proper opinion on it. In my family I am the youngest, and my siblings are a lot older than me, so I think some parts of me are older than others, like my sense of humour. 

The idiocy makes me laugh. That and the appalling choice of lexicon. Nearly cried laughing at the "parts of me are older than others" bit. I assume I meant that, in some ways, I'm more mature than most people my age without older siblings. Which is clearly a lie, I still laugh whenever I see this:

It's the phallicake!

Pitiful writing skills on my part aside, I got thinking about what's changed since then. You know. Culture identity.

For a start, I don't live in Northants anymore; about a year after that was written my family picked up and moved to Suffolk.

I've since found out that while my mother is completely Scottish, my father is completely Irish - I have no England in me!

Christianity, and the benefits and sacrifices that come with it, mean a lot more to me now than they did when I wrote that - I do stuff I shouldn't and I feel guilt, I want to stop before I let anyone else down, but I'm in a constant internal conflict between the ethics of my faith and the fuck it I'm young mindset I have every respect for so it looks like, for the foreseeable future, I'm going to carry on doing stupid things and regretting them later. 

Buddha's still pretty good. [I'm not Buddhist, but their values are almost completely compatible with Christianity, and I think they're a decent set of moral guidelines for humanity as a whole.]

I still don't know anything about politics - except, whatever any of them do is never going to advantage everyone they're responsible for, no matter their intentions, honourable or otherwise. Other people hate the PM, I pity him. Can you imagine how it must feel to know that half your country hates you because your priorities and your actions don't benefit them?

Being so much younger than both my siblings has made me a better person than I would be if I didn't have them; on top of everything they do for me, something I've realised recently is they make me put things into perspective. A few months ago I was whining to my sister about coursework, and a couple of minutes later Leo puked all over her; he'd been really sick for two days and there was nothing she was really able to do about it. He's okay now, but I remember feeling crappy for having the audacity to complain when there was a mother in front of me with a sick baby. Now [I think] I'm more sensitive to my audience; I know to whinge about coursework to someone with equally [ultimately] trivial worries, and I know to offer sympathy to people whose worries far outweigh mine.

No one's reading this but if you are, I challenge you to write your next blog post as a response to the stimulus "identity" and to make a better job of it than I did first time.

Quote of the Day: Stars fading but I linger on. [Dream a Little Dream of me, Mamas and the Papas]