Blog post #2

The sentence I will be focusing on for the purpose of this blog post is from chapter six: “How does a person change, and what should we make of this process of adaptation?” 

The book discusses the idea of identities that never change, and I truly stopped to think about this concept. I feel as though I am changing not only my identity but my perception of the world around me on a daily basis, and honestly throughout my life I think I have made drastic changes about every three months. This notion of a set reality is truly difficult for me to wrap my head around, and further down on the page I was able to stop being so distracted by the sentence “Like identity, perception is always a product of who we are in the moment and the conditions we find ourselves in; it grows and adapts, too.” My question that this makes me think about is, if this idea of a “stable” identity is so unrealistic, what exactly does it mean to be stable in this world? I feel like most people are just trying to be sane and mentally stable, but truly what does that entail? Does being mentally stable mean you have finally balanced out your ever changing perceptions of reality and can manage identity changes smoothly? Newsweek says that one in five americans are suffering from mental illnesses every year: I teeter back and forth between thinking of this as being an “epidemic” with my age group right now because of college and the uncertainty surrounding our lives, but truly I don’t think that is something that changes with age. Reading this chapter and writing this post I have literally come to the realization that not only does no one have it figured out (not exactly news), but the people who seem better off mentally most likely have just had more experience with this concept of “impression management.”

This chapter brings up impression management and says that one of the ways in which we learn to improve is by societal cues. I have a couple close family friends who are occupational therapists working in mental health. Sort of going back to my previous point of mental illness, this makes me think of the work that they do. Every day they are working to help the mentally ill adults of our society—whether that is homeless people or just people who can’t live on their own, these are people who are not able to get the same societal cues as us and thus are unable to get this “impression” to a more manageable point. It makes me realize just how important good communication skills are in the process of working with mentally ill adults. I still have no idea where I am going with my degree in communications but I did originally want to be working in mental health, and honestly writing this little blog post has made me consider taking the next steps to combining these two passions.