<p>Assignment: Do people learn who they are only when they are forced into action?</p>
<p>Life is always pregnant with hardships; if it wasn’t for hardships, in fact, people would never be coerced into learning more about themselves. If it wasn’t for my mother’s depression, I would have never learned about the kind of person that I am and the type of person that I want to grow up to be. Comparing my life in India to when I moved here and learned about my mother’s depression, I can see that the hardships that I had to go through helped me to change in many ways.</p>
<pre><code>When I was in India, as a child, I was very carefree, lovable and charismatic – at that time, though, I did not have many concerns. I would go to school, come home and do my homework and play with my friends. When I moved to America, however, my life took a dramatic turn.
My mother got depressed after moving to America due to the radical change of pace between American life and Indian life. My mother hated the overly clandestine and private people of America. Eventually this led her to become deeply depressed to the point that she wouldn’t do any housework or cook or clean.
As the oldest child of the family, I had to take over my mother’s chores and my own responsibilities. I was cooking, cleaning, looking after my younger brother, etc… all at the tender age of ten. During that time, I hate my life because of my problems at home and problems at school ( I was constantly harassed by the other children due to my foreign English accent). Slowly though I learned to live with my problems and through this process, I learned a lot about the kind of person that I was. I actually knew myself so well that I could predict my behavior – quite accurately – during a myriad of situations.
Even though my mother still has severe manic depression, instead of hating my mother and my ill-fated life, I learned to love her more than ever before. I sometimes ruminate over what kind of person I would have been, if I had neither moved to America nor lived through my mother’s depression. I know for certain that I would not have become that person I am now – a person who is unique and able to relate to other people’s hardships when they need someone to comfort them. This though wouldn’t have been feasible if I hadn’t had my hardships to teach me about myself.
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