Essay Example on Writing a Cultural Autobiography: Exploring Your Life Story

Introduction

Autobiography writing is a type of storytelling or imposing a logic of stuff through tales. Culture is defined as the ideas, social behavior, and customs of a particular person or community. It may also be defined as arts and other exhibitions of human knowledgeable achievement considered communally. The cultural autobiography must be an interpretation or tale about your life coming from this self-culture. Technically, it explains much about your life in a better way on paper or in a written method. In this paper, the main theme is going to be my cultural autobiography.

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Age and Generational Influences

I am an adult now, 27 years of age though I've not yet reached a point to start my own family and stuff like that. I have a group of friends of different characters, though they are not such a bad influence. I have grown to an age of knowing how chose great friends with great and good characters who are also with me every time that I need them the most. Some of them are dancers like me and I am so privileged to be the one who taught them how to dance better and I am still better than them in dancing.

Since some of us have been together for a very long time since we were very little children, we created a dance group and practiced hard for the dance competitions and we always got to win most of the competitions or also get acknowledgment from most of the people. We used to do a lot of things together as normal children would usually do. Whenever one of us had a birthday party, we did it as one and we used to splash water on each other no matter the temperature of the water or the condition of the water.

We always celebrated birthday parties like one and in very great unity. Right now we hold parties and bring a lot of friends and buy all sorts of drinks following the will of everybody attending the party. We even still create pool parties like before when we were young. When we were young we even created scientific and engineering projects to showcase our abilities to the world and show people how good we were and to make our school and parents proud of us. We made sure that we dedicated much of our time in whatever we had decided to do to make sure that we did not fail ourselves, our parents, our school, and everybody who supported us in whichever way possible.

Developmental Abilities

Luckily, God has showered me with very many and great blessings in my life because I have never developed any disabilities in my life. Since I was born I have just lived a normal life able to play to walk, run jump, and enjoy myself when I still can. Though I always lived a simple life with my inborn abilities, I always value the presence of those who are not like me or have certain disabilities because of the need for our help.

Religion and Spiritual Orientation

From the day I was born, I got raised to look at my cultural identity as the person I am in Jesus instead of my gender, social class, or ethnicity. Although my mother was raised as a Catholic, she never had a close relationship with God while my father even lacked the Godly growth despite the reality that his grandmother Presbyterian church minister who was ordained in the same church. When I was about to be born, its when God's voice spoke to my parents calling them to go back to Him to praise, worship and glorify Him and luckily, they listened to the call and answered the command by doing God's will.

As newborn believers, my parents wanted to be good role models and teach me in the best way possible which they thought were to raise me in the church also. They wanted to be the best parents and they knew that leading me to church was the best way ever. We started spending a lot of time together as a family and whenever we were together, they taught me the Godly ways like the importance of prayer, treating God as a friend by giving Him room to come into my life, Jesus' love which was one of the most important lessons since God is love and without love, we can not have God in ourselves.

I grew up in the Christ-life for some time but as we all know, friends may define who we are. I started getting myself into companies that went to church neither know God well and I was so into it until I lost my way. Furthermore, I was not a Christian since birth and luring me into it when I had grown up to some age was a really hard task to get me to be a Christian. I always spent a lot of time with my friends, a group that never did anything that was in a relationship with the church. I got used to the anti-Christianity life until I become of this age which is hard to turn back. Going to the church every Sunday or every day seems to be a very hard task for me; it feels like going to work without getting paid as if it was a punishment, community service or slavery.

Ethnicity/ Race Identity

I was raced in America but I am black, though I must say that I was very blessed to get parents who loved traveling and a lot of things that introduced me to different aspects of life. I was introduced to many cultures in life since my parents were also from different ethnic backgrounds. My grandfather from my father's side was African American while my grandmother from my father's side also was from the United States of America. My grandfather from my mother's side was from Mexico while my grandmother from my mother's side was Canadian. Our family always loved traveling and I was so privileged because my father was an experienced driver and his job involved transportation.

I used that to my advantage because most of the times I would go with him on very long journeys during the transportation of the goods that he used to deliver. I loved it so much being on the road getting to see other adventures and meeting new things in life which were very interesting and some of them even gave me a purpose in life while others taught me some life experiences that you'll never get taught in class. I also experienced racism as one of my greatest challenges since I was so young to this age. Most of the people especially the whites usually pestered, underrated me, and did all sought of bad things to me which I had to get used to since I had no other choice.

Socioeconomic Status

I am of a middle-class person when you get to look at my socioeconomic status, though I work very hard to achieve a lot of things in my life like most of the focused people would do. I work very hard to improve my socioeconomic status and to help our family because I don't like it when I see my parents struggling a lot in their life especially at the age they are right now. I hope to be very successful in everything that I do so that I'll get to help my parents, family, friends, and everybody else around me.

I am a very friendly person when it comes to my social status despite my ethnicity, background or whatever it is that most people think they must have to have great friends in life. I may greet anybody that I come across on my path like I knew them, this is because of how I value greetings. Greetings bring people of all kinds and variant places together in harmony, peace, love, and togetherness. Greetings are very vital in social life though some people do not see its importance or its worth. Well, it just looks like a petty issue or stupid but it's quite the opposite.

Ingenious Heritage

I adapted to my cultural heritage since we were young. We have always had different cultures in our families like taking meals together as one family, praying together, living together, caring for each other, creating bonfires, dancing together, going for outings and walk together, going for trips together as a family and so much more. These have been the main cultural heritage values that we ever had together.

Originality

I am an American born in the United States of America where I also got to grow up. I have grown to love my country and I've also been proud of it despite all the challenges that I have gone through in the country like racism. Being born in a country in which you are the only black person in a congregation of very many white people may be very hard to cope with it cannot face such challenges in life. I was always bullied in school and also in the streets because of my race and originality. Although, the United States of America is a very great nation, a nation of great privileges and opportunities that you can utilize well if you get to identify them.

The United States of America is the most powerful country in all countries in the world but it also lacks some aspects which always the same for every country. The thing that I love most about my nation is the technological advancements that it has made since I am a technology maniac. I love technology a lot and that is something which is brought in very handy in my country. My nation is dependent on itself because of its hard work and everything it has tried everything in its power to achieve everything that it possesses. I have traveled to different parts of the country and I have seen very many good and interesting things in it.

Gender and Sexual Orientation

Technically speaking, I am a girl and I like going to parties with my friends. During the weekends we host a lot of parties to bring people together and to celebrate. We cheer parties up and make them enjoyable by dancing, bringing the best entertainers in the area, cheering the people, bringing the best deejays in town, and stuff like those. We would even plan pool parties that would even make it better and brings drinks that everybody loved and ordered according to the specialty. Parties are always very important in one's life especially when you are very young like teenage periods and youth periods before you get to the ages that you can do none of them.

Until now I have had different boyfriends with different issues that made us part but now I still have one boyfriend who has stayed with me for so long. I have had different issues with my boyfriends, like cheating, not coming into the right terms with each other, misunderstandings, relationship failures and so many more. I have experienced just the normal problems that any teenager or youth has ever had. Although I had all those problems with different men, there is always one partner that is always together with, even after partings ways, you will still come back together because of the love that you share. Right now I may say that I have the man that I will always love for the rest of my life.

References

Brodzki, B., & Schenck, C. (2019). Life/lines: Theorizing women's autobiography. Cornell University Press. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Ou2YDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=Cultural+Autobiography&ots=QUgAZsVHJ5&sig=PHiv0R5I11-OhilAhCjFU5Ne5TA

Gilmore, L. (2018). The limits of autobiography: Trauma and testimony. Cornell University Press. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ZpRlDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=Cultural+Autobiography&ots=a9p2U5-hTw&sig=hf2iYe1vc4jVBtQ2St58QeyoBvs

Gunn, J. V. (2017). Autobiography: Toward a poetics of experience. University of Pennsylvania Press. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=qBMmDgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=Cultural+Autobiography&ots=rd-7hlAgsh&sig=PbVdoSuE6c3a7YUIhENBIgHDULQ

Wang, Q. (2016). Remembering the self in cultural contexts: A cultural dynamic theory of autobiographical memory. Memory Studies, 9(3), 295-304. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1750698016645238