Classification Essay

According to a study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science journal, researchers have found that much of a young person’s personality is formed as early as first grade. It is fascinating how important these formative years are to a person’s future life. If our personality and perspective on life is formed by such a young age, it should then be understood that those people closest to us are the ones framing our perspective on life. These perspectives follow us throughout much of our adolescence and even into adulthood. How fitting it seems then, that the categories we find many of our friends fall into appear to be affected by the attention, or lack thereof, received at home at an early age. As I look back at my group of friends from high school, it is clear that we all had someone in our lives were trying to please. The only real difference appears to be the way we went about getting the approval we so desperately desired.

The Brain

A brain is always trying to please the adults around him. He suffers from a paralyzing fear of failure and will do almost anything within his power to avoid disappointing the adults that see potential in him. Generally speaking, the pressure the brain feels is almost entirely self-imposed and internalized. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him on the outside, but inside, the brain is freaking out. He’s constantly worried about the next test or the next semester. Much of these anxieties can follow him late into life if he can’t find a way to balance the chaos going on in his mind. He has a tendency to be overly obsessive and should failure show its ugly face, the brain can be utterly and completely devastated as a result. Hopelessness is the ultimate foe of anyone found in this categ...

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...s and was generally abusive to almost everyone around him. He was a tough guy to get along with and he and I had our own problems throughout the years. In the end Phillip decided to go into the military to get away from his parents. The military straightened Philip up and when he came back his parents were actually very proud of him. His dad eventually got cleaned up too and things have never been better for Phillip.

Luckily, many young people come to learn the same lesson as Phillip and myself. Just because you find yourself lumped into one of these ‘Breakfast Club’ categories doesn’t mean that you are trapped there for life. At a young age the weight of the world seems to rest on your shoulders and you find solace in the shared misery of teenage angst. Once you move past that stage of life, though, you find that these groups have more in common than first thought.