The Race Against Oneself: Opening Up to Overachievement Using A Sociological Imagination

As a child, I was a firm believer that it is better to go beyond expectations than to fall short of them. I have ever since carried this concept with me until today. I became morbidly afraid of failing, and found new ways to push myself to accomplish anything that was expected of me. A mixture of negative experiences, expectations, and outside pressures led me to believe that nothing is impossible if you try hard enough. I stretched myself thinner and thinner until the day finally came that I failed to accomplish a series of goals that I had set for myself. It was my second to last year of high school when I began to realize that my goals were unrealistic and that, sometimes, we become subject to things that are beyond our control. Though I am no longer as hard on myself now, I still very much deal with the relentless, overachieving attitude that I carried with me throughout my childhood and teenage years. When I was a child, school was the first place that the overachieving mindset was manifested. Looking back, I can see that it had a lot to do with my older brother. We were born a little over a year apart. I remember being three years old and being praised continuously for having been potty-trained before my brother. I also learned to speak before him, and I watched him struggle with his words when he was four years old. My older brother was also very clumsy and curious. He would fall down flights of stairs countless times and even once, urinated on an electrical socket, which caused a fire. My parents were harder on him, and praised me for being well-mannered and behaved. Entering preschool, I remember putting great effort into being recognized as the most well-behaved child in my class. The reward for good behavior in preschool and kindergarten is praise and special privileges. I became sociologically mindful--alert and aware of the world around me--taking into consideration of others. I became mindful of my peers, of the rules and regulations, social expectations, and what was expected of me, so that I could be rewarded for being 'good.' These simple observations, however, opened up my eyes to a reality that I could not yet understand. In the article "Sociological Mindfulness," Michael Schwalbe warns, "The kind of awareness that sociological mindfulness produces can be unsettling because it sometimes forces us to see things we would prefer not to" (2005: 4). I lived in a neighborhood and went to a school that was predominantly Latino. There were Hispanics everywhere, and I was mortified by the stereotypes that were given to them--stereotypes that many of the Hispanics around me often supported and projected. Many of the kids in my elementary school did poorly on their schoolwork and tests, did not put much effort into their work, were very rude and disrespectful, and bullied me for not being like 'them.' Prudence L. Carter interviewed 68 students and demonstrates in her article, titled "Straddling Racial Boundaries at School," how African American and Latino youth understood themselves and others to be of a certain race or ethnicity. In the article, she mentions names that are used "to express disapproval of members who appear to have rejected an affiliation with their respective racial or ethnic communities" (2011: 377). I could not speak Spanish and so I was labeled as a 'gringa,' which is a disparaging slang for 'white woman.' Carter also found that the participants she interviewed "explicitly discuss[ed] the idea of ... acting white in terms of linguistic and dress styles" (2011: 376). Many Hispanic kids are expected to dress in the same urban attire that everyone else wears, but if they do not, they face the fear of being made fun of for "wanting to be like someone else." The problem, however, is that some kids, like me, simply do not like wearing the urban style of clothing. Being Hispanic and expected to speak Spanish is another struggle altogether because every Latin American country has its own dialect. …