My
sister and I are very much alike. We look quite similar, we are
like-minded on various topics, and even our hobbies are very much the
same. For anyone, who might get to know both of us on a personal
level—a level of believes, opinions, an favourable
characteristics—our characters would seem to be very similar. Most
people though, would rather get to know us on a facile level and
might therefore consider us to be extremely different in terms of
character, only because I seem to be more extroverted in comparison
to my sister. While for her, it went as far as throwing up out of
nervousness, when she was forced to speak in front of people, I have
always enjoyed public speaking as such from an early age on. I
remember one of my teachers, who had only known my sister at that
time, telling me after my first class with him “So you are the
lively one of the both of you then” and at first I simply did not
understand what he meant. At home no one would ever consider one of
us to be more lively than the other; judging from the outside,
however, people might easily consider my sister to lack character of
a certain kind, simply because she does not favour attention as much
as I do (—which to me does not have anything to do with
''character''. Maybe I am the one with less ''character'', because I
enjoy giving speeches and being on a stage and therefore seem to be
shallow enough to enjoy this kind of attention...?) In this scenario
I would be one who is naturally fearless in terms of publicity, a
feature I do not consider to give, or take, the attribute of
''character'' to, or from, me. What this example should illustrate,
and how society often considers things differently, is outlined in
this quote by Menand:
We
think that sucking it up, mastering our fears, is a sign of
character. But do we think that
people who are naturally fearless
lack character? We usually think the opposite. Yet those
people are
just born lucky.
(Menand)
Except
this kind of natural affinity to certain behaviour, which is
considered to show ''character'' by most people, a general lack of
fear or high willingness to take risks might as well just show plain
stupidity or lack of thoughtfulness. What at the age of 14 or 15
years I considered fearless and therefor ''cool'' behaviour could,
looking back on it today, also be described as fairly stupid. It is
interesting how those I looked up to, because of their rebellious
behaviour, in my early teens, have mostly become those who have made
least out of their lives. Might their ''rebellious'' behaviour not
have been rebellious at all and instead just a result of not enough
deliberate consideration of consequences?
I
think character can be found in anyone, because to me ''character''
is, what happens, when you deal with yourself and the people around
you. Even the shallowest person must have consciously or
unconsciously chosen this path of displaying characteristics I
consider as shallow, because of the way s/he sees the world and gets
along with it.
E.J.
Works Cited:
Menand, Louis. 2010. "Head Case" in The New Yorker. Online
resource. Web. 1 January 2014. <http://www.buffalo.edu/content/dam/www/news/imported/pdf/April10/NewYorkerPsychiatry.pdf>
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