My Challenge Essay

Since my early teenage years, I 've always found myself going through different challenges in life and looking for solutions to resolve. Most of the obstacles that I encountered in the past I attempted to resolve alone. In most of the cases, I 've been able to challenge myself and find a way to analyze the issue and come up with solutions. My strategies in resolving problems were always successful until I encountered one of the most challenging problems in my life. A challenge that changed my entire life, mindset and the way I used to approach to problems in life. When I got married, I had to leave my widowed mother alone and this was the hardest separation in her life after my father’s death. My mother didn’t take our separation easy at all;

I put myself under so much unnecessary pressure that distracted me from having a normal peaceful mind. During that time, I had to pause and think deeply about the reasons why I was dramatically broken into pieces. After many days of struggle and therapy, I was able to realize that my approach and concept about taking care of my mother was absolutely unnecessary and incorrect. I realized that by giving more attention to my mother, I was not helping her to deal with our separation. However, I was unable to understand why I couldn 't think like any of my friends who had left their single parents. I tried to change my old habits and gave my mother some space and time to deal with this separation. I kept practicing many new ways which helped my mother to start dealing with the

I was so frustrated with such a drastic change in myself since I couldn’t understand the reason for such an attachment between my mother and myself. I was able to gradually change my mindset as well as my relations with my mother, even though that was not easy. When I learned that the nature of self depends on culture in this course, I was finally able to understand the reason behind having such a strong dependency between my mother and myself. According to what I have learned about collectivism and individualism, as a person who was born in a non-western world, my family has a unique position in my life and that 's the reason why I could hardly act like any of my western world friends for whom self is very important and they are very good when it comes to deal with such problems in life. The concept of collectivism and individualism helped me to know that my feelings and mentality weren’t abnormal and I was just different due to my culture and the way I was raised in my family (Myers 40-41). By knowing these new concepts I was able to put my mind at ease and have a better approach toward the new techniques that I was taught to cope with that