Me Myself and I
... By reflecting on my summer job over the last three summers, I can communicate how this experience and my role as a caretaker, role model, friend, and employee of the Amy family, has challenged and refined my understanding of myself. I intend to show how the different self’s that I presented as a part of this job and the close relationship that I formed with this family, enabled me to gain a strong understanding of my self-competence. Social and personal identities are two aspects of self-competence that I discovered were a part of my experience with the two boys that I cared for, John and Sam. ... This relates to my initial situation in this experience, in that, I was hired as a babysitter. ... I took on the social identity of the babysitter. I made sure that the boys followed all the rules and I was very tentative in the way I acted around them. I made sure that things remained relatively in order and calm because I was hired to keep the boys safe and to make sure that they knew the difference between right and wrong. My role as a nanny was my first obligation and at first, I did not want them to see me as anything else. I was trying to fulfill the parent’s expectations as well as my own. As the first summer progressed and I develop more of a personal relationship with John and Sam, they helped me establish a more prominent personal identity. I was becoming less afraid of displaying my true personality in my actions and my care and my role as a babysitter was transforming into a stronger role as a role model and friend. ... As the long days and weeks passed, I resisted the standard roles of the babysitter and cared more about the relationship I was forming with John and Sam. In essence, I reprioritized the initial rules that I had set for myself as a babysitter. I realized the major impact I had in their life, and I learned how to present myself as the person that I wanted to be when caring for others. ... Though Lunch at Hooters and playing more video games may not seem important, I realized how important of a role I had in John and Sam’s life and wanted to assist in introducing them to some popular enjoyments of male life, within reason. ... Though this may first appear as an extreme assumption, I was essential to this family in multiple ways. To the parents, I was on-call and ready, at any time, to cater to their needs. ... I drove them, watched them, cheered for them, and then took them home. ... Furthermore, the more time that I spent with John and Sam, the more they relied upon me to be the solution to all of their problems. Whether it was with a vocabulary word or a question about girls, I was the one they were coming to and I needed to answer their questions confidently.