Who Am I?

In the following posts I hope to retrace the steps of my life to explain how it is I came to be sitting here, now, as a 31 year old post-bac student in the Secondary Ed program at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, USA. I've often wondered at the present and how I got here. Is life a series of random  events tossing us this way and that? Am I am where I am today because of my race, gender, sexual preference, age, etc. You hear that a lot. But when I slow down and reflect, I have perfect certainty that life is not random but that each moment is a choice to move toward one's fully realized self--their destiny; or away from it. There are certainly guides along the path of life. After all it would be foolish not to recognize how many wonderful people are bumping into each other out here and that any full self reflection will uncover just how much other's actually shape who we are.

I'm going to start with my childhood and family which I have to admit I lucked out on. I was blessed with a loving and caring family that told me from as early as I can remember two things. 1. Jesus loves me. and 2. I can be anything I want. I have doubted those two things as much as anything else in life, but as I continue to traverse the path of life, I continually test these assertions in as reasonable ways as I know how and I find that indeed, my parents were on to something.

In this self identity project I want to examine one moment of time and how that moment of time has unfolded and created has shaped where I am today and most importantly where I am going in the future.

I was born on February 10, 1980 to two young parents in Southern California. I was their first born son. My mom, while cleaning out her closet recently came across my baby book and she shared it with me. My father wrote something there that blew me away. It was a prayer he had written on the day of my birth. He was 25 years old and probably terrified of his new responsibility. His parents, my grandparents were loving people; I remember that about them. My grandfather always had a big warm bear hug to offer when us grandkids were around. But they had their struggles in life. They abused alcohol and I am sure caused scars in my father. My father has wanted to give me the life he never had growing up. His prayer went something like this: "Lord, let me raise Matthew to know you. Guide him and let him grow up to be a man of God. Protect him and watch over him."

Though my parents weren't rich or highly educated, though my parents are just average people with their own scars and are trying to make it in the world as we all are, this prayer above all else has shaped my life.

Baseball

I am building up to a moment. A moment of seeming randomness that happened my sophomore year in high school. But I have to stop along the way and talk about baseball. Countless books, articles, documentaries, movies and interviews have highlighted baseball as a truly American pass time. Baseball doesn't hold it's place in the American imagination that it once did. One of the results of globalization has been the rise of soccer and the slow sad fading of the glory of baseball. Still, my boyhood was shaped by the sport.

I was a shy kid--a smart kid. I played violin and GI Joes. But when I was 9 my parents forced me to play baseball. They just signed me up and said it would be good for me to be around other boys. I was resistant to the idea initially. Soon I discovered that I had a talent for ball and that talent made me popular with the other boys. For 9 years, from Little League to high school ball, summers meant being outside on warm evenings: parents cheering, team mates chattering; the smell of hot dogs and bubble gum, mounds of spit covered sunflower seed shells.

Baseball, really was how I learned to be a social creature. It wasn't just my brother, parents, and myself, but my teammates, school, and community.

So Many Trees

When I was 11 years old, my father moved my family up to Washington State. I had never even heard of Washington State. In the moving truck, with our family car hitched up to the back, I anticipated our arrival at our new home. Maybe I could see the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, or maybe if I was fortunate get a glimpse of the President Bush.

My father to this day explains his reasons for moving us: he didn't want to raise a family in the smog, the gangs, the racial wars at school. But now that I am older, I know it must have been very difficult to uproot and move away from everyone we had ever known.

We left the rolling desert hills and sunny southern California and trekked north. The desert turned to dry grass, then to rolling vineyard on the sides of warm hill tops and eventually into trees that were bigger than I had ever imagined. There was a gray mist about us and lichen and moss hanging from trees. I thought we had gone to Endore, the forested moon of Star Wars and we would meet the Ewoks. We were not in Washington D.C.. We now lived in Fern Gully.

My body has never truly grown accustomed to the dampness and chill of Western Washington. It is almost as if there is a melancholy spirit that hovers above this region. A kind of darkness you can feel pass as you clear the region by plane. This moldy spirit has also shaped who I am today and it creates a bond between everyone in the region as we all trudge along through long winters.

New Kid

Now we're getting close to that day in my Sophomore geometry class. The moment I like to trace my footsteps back to.

It was hard to move from all my friends in Southern California, where I was always picked first for team sports to this cold damp tree infested region where I had to prove myself all over again. The kids in Washington state didn't seem to put academics or sports as high up the value scale as people in California had. I remember they asked me, "Are you a Husky or a Cougar?" They just kept asking that over and over and I had no idea what on earth they were talking about. They wore strange gear too, like parkas and raincoats. I didn't think much of this new place at all. And so I read a lot of books, especially science fiction and fantasy.

There was no orchestra program at school and I seemed to be a grade ahead of everyone else. So for some very odd reason the kids made fun of me for my intelligence. I remember being called dexter and bookworm and things like that in seventh grade. It is sad but I did indeed dumb myself down to fit in. I found that B's were better than A's as far as social standing went. School seemed like a great big waste of time.

01101 100101 0101

Now we come to it. It was the first day of Geometry on the first day of high school my sophomore year. My school was at the time one of the largest schools in the state with over 2600 students. My middle school and junior high years weren't the highlights of my life. I mostly tried to stay out of sight, devouring novels like Jurassic Park in a matter of days.

But now I was in high school. I'd seen movies about high school and looked forward to living out the familiar narrative--rejoicing in the locker room after home field victories, falling in love for the first time, taking the SAT's and such. It all seemed so big.

I had taken a seat in the rows of desks and looked to the front of the room where my teacher, an obese old man sat breathing through his mouth. As I would soon learn, it was his last year as a teacher and he would soon retire. He was one of, if not, the worst teachers I have ever had in my entire life and probably a big reason that I never took another math class after my junior year of high school.

He called roll and put all of our names into his computer and the computer spit out a random seating chart. He printed it out and tacked it to the wall. We found our names on the chart and took our seats. I was bummed. I got a seat in the front row to the far left, right next to the teachers desk. There weren't any hot girls next to me and all the cool guys that looked fun were on the other side of the room. But sitting behind me was a tall goofy looking kid whose name turned out to be Aaron. Aaron and I soon became fast friends.

So there I was in high school and I wanted a car and fashionable clothes, things my parents couldn't exactly afford. They told me to get a job and so at 15 I got my first job at a hole in the wall teriyaki shop. My boss was an imposing Japanese man who yelled at me constantly and never once gave me a break the whole time I worked there. After 3 months of grueling work over the oven, I quit. My new friend Aaron had pulled some strings and got me a job at the Royal Fork Buffet. It was the start of great things. The question I find myself asking to this day, and will touch upon later, is how would my life be different if that computer had randomly assigned me to sit next to a different kid that September morning. Let's see how that computer program has affected my life.

High School Graduate

In June of 1998. I graduated high school. I had played on the school baseball team, golf team, and tennis team. I worked the same job for three years, working my way up from a timid bus boy to assistant manager at the buffet restaurant. I had experienced my first kiss, my first broken heart, and some other things that I'm not proud of.

So here I was, Done; the rest of my life in front of me. I didn't enjoy school very much at all and unfortunately, I wasn't as strong as I could have been. I found that being mediocre was better than excelling. The slacker attitude was pervasive throughout my time in the Marysville school district. I had no plans after high school. I hadn't even taken the SAT.

One thing I did enjoy though was work. I have always been a hard worker. My friend Aaron: he remained my good friend through out high school. He had got me the job at the buffet and now with a diploma under my belt, I was ready to move on from the buffet and make the big bucks. Aaron got me another job with his friend working as a landscaper making a mind blowing sum of ten dollars an hour.

The Rebellious Young Working Man

 I still lived at home with my parents and they remained loving as ever. However it's obvious now that my life seemed to have gone off track. This wasn't the future I had envisioned for myself as a boy. I was working with former convicts and druggies in the rain. Nature, which I had always admired on family hikes, was now an omnipresent force in my life. The wetness now permeated my soul. I'd leave for work at 7AM, arrive and have to listen to my workmates talk about the affairs they were having, the drugs they were doing, the scams that they were pulling and ever was my rain gear dripping with rainwater. 

That year a workmate, put a book in my hands. It wasn't the Bible or a self help book. It was a novel. It was Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. It was a book about a guy going crazy. The subject was relevant because after all, half the guys I worked with seemed to be crazy and I felt that if I stayed there long enough I would end up like them. Something else about the book stood out to me. The way it was written. It was humorous. The sentences were short yet packed full of ideas that woke something in my spirit. I wanted to read more books like this. I wanted to learn to write like this man, to fall into stories where each day wasn't the same until I was bent and used up like my workmates. 

My two years stent as a rebellious and lost adolescent in the adult work force was coming to an end. I wanted to go to school. I didn't have to. I wanted to. I quit my job in the rain and enrolled at the community college. I was twenty years old. 

Undergrad

The change in environments couldn't have been more extreme. To go from an unskilled job working with men that seemed to be very immature even to a twenty year old, to an institute of higher learning where ivy grew on Old Main. It was as if I had stepped into some elvish fantasy to the house of fire, where poets and scientists were revered.

But the university has it's pit falls too. Students are young and idealistic and everything is a new experience away from family. I studied art in the art department for two years. I was going to be an artist because my brother and father were and I hadn't exactly figured out what I wanted to do with my life. I felt that the art department was mostly self centered and egotistical. A lot of ordinary kids were now wearing thrift store fashion and slopping paint on canvas and talking about politics over bottles of wine. I withered there. It seemed that I had wasted two years and a lot of money. I switched majors to English and started to feel better. After all, a novel had brought me here to university, fitting I thought that I should now study the great writers and learn to write like them.

I had experienced a lot of the college narrative as well. I had new girl friends, went to parties, sat with friends as they beat their bongo drums protesting the war. There were a lot of distractions.

I graduated in 2006. Eight years of wandering and still no clear idea of what i wanted to do.

Back to Where I started

After thousands of dollars of debt, I was back to where I started. Working for public housing as a maintenance technician. The money was pretty good and for a time I contemplated working until retirement as a maintenance technician. I was thinking about marrying my college girlfriend and saving for a house and car and living like my parents had lived. Why was life so hard for my generation but seemed so easy for their's? They didn't need college degrees and were still able to raise families and buy homes.

When my girlfriend decided to move on to more adventurous pursuits that didn't involve being married to a maintenance man, I freaked. My plans. My life! After some internet surfing, I found myself on a plane with everything I owned in two suitcases on a plane bound for South Korea. What on earth was I doing?

선생님: Teacher Matthew

As my airplane descended into Incheon International Airport in Seoul, South Korea, I looked out of the window and couldn't comprehend what I was seeing. There were gold streaks across a gray-green field of abstract shapes. I thought they were angels. It was my first time on an airplane. It was my first time out of the country and really the first time I was completely alone and unsure of what I was doing. The gold streaks turned out to be the setting sun reflecting off the countless windows far below on the earth.

I was coming to Korea to teach English. I taught for two years in South Korea. There was no teacher training just discoveries day after day. I loved it. More than I had loved anything. I felt for the first time that I was doing something that mattered that would impact other people in a really positive way.

Today 4 years later I still receive letters from some of my former high school students that are now in medical school studying medical text books in English. This was a new identity that gave me a stronger sense of accomplishment and purpose than anything before. Students would see me on the street and say, "Hello, 선생님!"

On-line Teaching

After 2 years teaching in Korea, I came home energized. The job market though was not. I had finally found something I loved, a purpose for my life. In Korea, and in many Asian countries, and perhaps here too once upon a time, to be a teacher is to hold one of the most important and respected jobs in all of society. I wanted to continue to hold that entrusted position but to influence kids in my own community. Kids that were like me. That find it hard to excel because of peer pressure and mediocre teachers like my own sophomore math teacher. How could I continue to teach at home without a state teaching certification? Well I couldn't. But I did end up finding a small teaching company started by a Godly woman whose vision it is to bring education to every corner of the globe.

She flew me to her home in Washington DC and shared her vision with me. Her dream is bigger than anything I have ever imagined but her personality and passion was so magnetic that I joined her company and went back to Korea to help her. I worked from Korea and the US as an online teacher. A rewarding job for sure, one that I have a difficult time explaining to my elderly grandparents. The world is really truly connected and small. And with a press of a button I can connect and positively impact people on the other side of the world. This to me is the most amazing thing that I have discovered so far in my life.

Who I Am. Who I Want To Become.

So how does this chain of events, I call my life form my identity. What parts of it are most important to me. This particular narrative I have threaded about my life for me illustrates that there is a purpose for my life and that though at certain points, this purpose is hidden, that if one plugs along and doesn't give up, you can be anything you want to be.

My father is the product of an alcoholic home. He isn't particularly educated or wealthy. He is just a humble man that turned his life around when a co-worker told him about this man named Jesus Christ. He cleaned up his act, got married, had children, wrote a prayer for me in my baby book. I am my fathers son. He has preached to me for years, the saint that he is, and at times I rejected everything he preached. But no matter how much I push it aside, the love of Jesus manifests itself in my life again. I am my Lord's servant.

I want to reflect again on that random seating chart in 10th grade Geometry class. If I hadn't been seated next to Aaron I wouldn't have been given the job at the Royal Fork Buffet. If I had not gotten the job at the Royal Fork, I wouldn't have met Aaron's friend who got me the job as a landscaper. If I hadn't been a landscaper and seen the hard life of those men working in the field, if my co-worker hadn't put that novel in my hand--if I didn't read that novel and become interested in literature and enroll in school, if I didn't find my way into the English writing program at the university where I met my girlfriend at the time, later to be dumped--if I hadn't wanted to get away, far away to the other side of the world...I wouldn't have become a teacher.

I am a teacher.

What do I want to be that I am not today. I want to be a Godly man, like my father was for me. And one day I will write in my newborn son's baby book:""Lord, let me raise my son to know you. Guide him and let him grow up to be a man of God. Protect him and watch over him."

Ecological Systems Theory

Now Bronfenbrenner might have something to say about random chance or a destiny laid out by God. If I analyze my identity using Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory I can give some context to the elements that are shaping my life. Because again, I am not the only person in existence but one of many in my environment bumping into each other and influenceing one another.

Bronfenbrenner's theory lays out five spheres of influence acting on the individual: 1.  Micro-system 2. Meso System 3. Exo-system 4. Macro-system 5. Chrono-system. In closing, let me take a quick look at how each system works in my life.

Micro-system. My microsystem is composed of all the people I interact with directly: my family, friends, co-workers, Facebook friends, students, grocery store clerks, etc. My biggest support group is my family. My parents, and brother are at the core of who I am. Their opinions and pieces of advice play a big role in the choices I make. Part of me felt I was too old to be at the university again but they encouraged me to come. The older I get the more I am able to control to an extent who I let in or out of my micro-system. As a new born I was helpless to control my micro-system. I was blessed to be born into the family I was born into.

Meso-sytem. My meso-system is comprised of the relationships between the elements of my micro-system. For example when my boss, a huge part of my Micro-system, asked me to go to Korea and I agreed, this impacted my family. In a lot of ways the biggest change in how people go about their lives in the early 21st century is peoples relationship to computer networks and social networking sites. Because my friends, family, and I have had to move around so much, because the nature of my job is such that my coworkers are spread about the world, we use the computer to keep us all linked together.

Exo-System. The Exo-system is something I have less if not no control over. For example, my father is a cable splicer for a cable company--has been for 34 years. Growing up, he would sometimes come home beat down, working with many of the same types of men that I worked with as a landscaper. The men at my fathers work shape him and he in turn shapes me. My mother works for the school district: an environment filled with much more positive people who have a more positive outlook on the world. My mom would come home from work much happier than my father and so my parents jobs influenced us at home.

Macro-system. This is perhaps the most interesting system to me and yet the one furthest from my control. Changing economies, technological breakthroughs, waring ideologies, shifting classes and immigration: these are all players in the Macro-system. When the economy stumbled in 2008, I went to Korea to make money. One thing I have really seen happen in just the last 10 years is the world getting smaller and smaller. This is exciting and yet a little scary at the same time.

Chronosystem. My grandfathers were married before they were 20. They didn't have high school educations. One of my grandfathers helped build the highway systems. My father married when he was 25. He has spent his life connecting wires for cable TV and Internet. I am 31, unmarried, and still in school! My grandfather went to Korea to fight in a war. My father was enlisted in the navy in Vietnam. I spent two years teaching children English in Korea. Times have definitely changed. People are marrying later, having kids later, and staying in school longer.