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Shania Fryar February 21, 2019 Professor Jodi SP 213 Intercultural Cultural Identity Essay I was born and raised in Queens, New York and I identify myself as an African American. My mother was born in New York but was raised in North Carolina. Then my father was born in North Carolina and was raised in New York. I grew up very anti-social since I was only interacting with just only my mom and dad. The only other person I would interact with was my little sister. I had no relatives around because they all live in North Carolina. Then I have my two half-brothers and one older half-sister that use to be around me most of the time but, ended up moving to Virginia. When I was younger, I didn’t even know I had any cousins until my mom and dad took me on a road trip to go and see them. After meeting everyone for the first time I was enjoying myself and was really opening up. I also started to separate from this shell that I’ve had for most of my life. I finally felt like I belonged somewhere. I realized that these people I met are my family, this side of me is the part that I’ve been missing for so long. Meeting them has definitely shaped me to be the person I am today. After that my parents noticed how much I’ve changed after meeting them, so they decided to make a trip to North Carolina every time we had a chance to. We visited for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break, and also stayed there for the whole summer a couple of times. After going to visit them I’ve learned all their traditions. They always have a family barbeque or a family outing to places where there are fun activities

that I’ve never done before. Doing things that I’ve never done before with my family creates a bond and helps me to understand why family is so important. Even though I live miles away from them it’s good that my mother and father made it a priority to make sure I see them. If they didn’t I would’ve probably still been shy and un educated about my family traditions. I believe that family plays a major role in my identity. Most of the things that make up who I am is because I developed it after learning it from others. When I was small, and my other siblings were still living in New York I would always get to see them on the weekends. When they would come my dad would have video games set up to keep them entertained. I was too young to understand how to play the game, but I would always be interested. I liked watching my older brother and sister play so I guess you can say that watching them made me curious. The games would consist of shooting or sometimes it was an old computer game like Fogger and Pacman. There was this one particular game that was made by Sega. It had Sonic the Hedgehog in it and there were levels that had a boss where if you didn’t kill the boss you weren’t allowed to move on. I feel like playing these games made me a competitive person because I always want to win. I don’t like to lose but whenever I do, I never give up I always try again. My parents noticed my passion for video games and bought me my very own Gameboy. Then after the Gameboy I got the game cube then a D.S, then a Wii, and then the Wii U. Years later I started to realize that the games that I really wanted to play were violent and everyone knows the Wii doesn’t have violent games since it’s for young kids. I figured that in order to play those certain games I have

to get a system that isn’t kid oriented. So, I ended up speaking to my dad about it and he thought I was old enough to play violent games, so he purchased me a Play Station 4 in 2015, which I still have and play on till this day. My whole life I’ve been surrounded by video games. Even my father who is currently 48 years old still plays on the play station. I believe that video games turned me into a total tom boy. In Middle School I considered myself as one and I still do today but not as much as I did when I was younger. I would have more guy friends than I would girls. That was only because the girls in my middle school class didn’t play any video games, so I drifted more towards the boys. When moving on to high school It was still about the same. I gained more female friends than I did in Middle School, but I had way more guy friends than I did girlfriends. That’s just what I prefer. To me it seems like girls are more drama oriented and I’m not the drama type of person. So overall I would say that video games has impacted my life tremendously and shaped me to be the person I am today....