The Role Adversity Plays in Shaping an Individual’s Identity

Traditionally, when an individual thinks of the challenging adversities that shape their lives, it is seen as a negative concept that shapes their lives in a way that it lacks success and fulfillment. However, based on the poem “ The broken images,” as well as from my personal experience, I believe that an individual’s adversity help shape the person’s identity in a positive way and play a significant role in one’s life by giving them strength, and helping them find who they truly are.

I strongly believe that adversities that we experience in the past shape us to become the person that we are today. Those difficult experiences can also allow an individual to understand the confusion of who they really are and give them the strength that they need to survive in those difficult situations.

The author of the poem “in the broken images” conveys how hardships shape an individual's identities through the second speaker that compares himself with the speaker “he”.

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Like most individuals, this person goes through a series of incidents and hardships such as confusion of understanding his broken image and failure, but the way that he dealt with his adversities shaped him to become a person that has some understanding of himself and his broken images. This person sees life as a broken image because he believes that our lives can fall apart anytime. The way that he sees life suggest that he might have experienced some difficulties in his past and those difficulties have shaped the way this person views life and how failure and obstacles are part of the life cycle.

I also thought that the broken images represent his experience of how life in reality fails and disappoints us. However, the disappointments and failures that he has experienced have helped him to become more alert and sharp than those who have not. As a result of experiencing difficulties in their past, he or she is not confused when they are faced with difficult situations, because he or she expected it.

Therefore, during difficult situations, this person was able to appreciate his senses and develops a new understanding of themselves from their failures and challenges. Through their experience of facing difficulties, this person has learned that every failure teaches them a valuable lesson, such as improving their senses by learning from their past mistakes. Improving their senses has allowed them to grow their sense and understanding of themselves at deeper levels. The fact that this person says “ when facts fail me, I improve my senses” and at the end of the poem have some understanding of their confusion, indicated that this person views obstacles such as failure, as a logical step towards understanding our confusions about our lives and who we are as a person. This person has taken time to review their confusion and understanding of their life, even when struck by obstacles such as failure. In the end, this allowed this person to gained some insight into understanding what makes them who they really are. When I was in the Kakuma Refugee Camp, I faced adversity each and every day of my life and this gave me the strength that I needed to survive in the camp and courage to never give up. For my family and I, survival was an ongoing and conscious process. When we first settled in the Kakuma Refugee camp, I struggled to sort out the frankly unimaginable past horrors that have shaped my life's existence. I can still remember the times when I used to fight in lines for sacks of meal and cans of oil, delivered by trucks that come from UN. Now that I look back at it, I can't still believe that was the way that my family used to live.

When I was at the Camp, I used to I miss our old home in the Ethiopian village known as Balih Robe. when I came to Canada and told some of my friends about my experience of living in a refugee camp, some of my friends assumed that just because I was raised in war zone area and was a refugee once, I had nothing better to do than fight in a line to get food and drink from the UN. But I told them that even though my family and I were refugee and had no home or food of our own, we were still not worthless and should not be looked down upon because I believed that we were struggling to survive and the struggles that we faced at that period of our lives might give us the strength to move forward and build a new future. I also told them that they should not focus on how my family and I were suffering, but on how we were able to survive in a camp that had no real roofs. Despite the challenging circumstances that we were in, my mother was able to gain the strength that she needed to raise 7 kids without her anyone’s help because of her past experiences with adversities. Therefore, even though in the beginning the role that our adversities play in shaping our identity might seem negative, we should realize that at the end of the day the adversities that we face will pay off and make us a better and a stronger person than we already are.

In Conclusion, I have developed strength, not by being happy every day, but instead by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity that plays a significant role in shaping my identity. Because of my past experience with adversity, I still believe that all the hardships that I have experienced in the past have and continue to strengthen me. Back then I might have not realized when it happened, but I am sure that it has shaped me to face any difficulty that I might encounter in life. Both the speaker and I have learned that there's always gonna be some form of adversity that we have to face in life, but facing that adversity is what helps us become individuals that grow and improve ourselves to survive and find out who we truly are through the experience.