Erin Flewelling: Exploring Identities

From fear to self-acceptance and laughter.   The top picture is me when I'm seventeen. That's Duane, my first boyfriend ever, and despite the full beard, he is only 20. I don't know what's happening there, but I do look like a deer in headlights, and I'm holding his hand in a death grip. That's pretty much the story of the first half of my life, fear of failure or rejection and hyper-seriousness in all areas. I suppose I laughed sometimes, but never at myself. I started getting stress migraines when I was six. Ironically, I was at least kind of good at pretty much everything, and I didn't do the things I wasn't good at. I just had anxiety and didn't know it. The second picture is me last spring, and oh, that's Duane, my husband. We are a lot older, but apparently I have learned to laugh--including at myself. I don't get migraines, and in general I am less afraid of rejection and failure. This may be a life-long ...

It may not be fair, but we are making judgments all the time about who people are and what they do and what they are likely to do based on the way they dress, the way they walk, the way they speak, the vocabulary they use, the grammar they use, the way they speak with their hands--or not. That's the way life works. At least that's the way sociologist Irving Goffman describes people's behavior in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life . Goffman claims we are all like actors on a stage, playing roles, consciously or unconsciously presenting an image of ourselves to the people we encounter. When I read this, it sounds  a little superficial. Fake. And yet, if you think about it, Goffman is not so far off. Let's say you see a group of people like these individuals here . (I don't know them. I found them on Google Images.) What do you assume about them? Who are they? You can draw all kinds of conclusions about education, income, speech patterns, career, just ...