Lifting the Fog: Finding Freedom in Light of the Sociological Imagination

I have noticed that as time goes by, my inner urge to go against what society deems correct grows. It is almost as if I sense that there is something wrong with the way things are. It would be selfish for me to say that they seem wrong for just me; I think that they are wrong for the majority of us. How did I come to this conclusion? I was not always like this; nor did I wake up one morning a changed person. This change occurred over a period of time and I do not believe that it is yet complete. The most dramatic of that change occurred after I achieved a degree of clarity. Prior to that, other issues in my life served as a fog clouding my perceptions. Though I could not clearly "see" it, I knew there was something not right. I could hear it, taste it, and feel it. I guess it relates to what Oliver Sacks said in his article on "Neurology and the Soul" (Cahill 2-6), when he introduced Heraclitus' concept of the stream. "I do not feel alive, psychologically alive, except insofar as a stream of feeling--perceiving, imagining, remembering reflecting, revising, recategorizing--runs through me. I am that stream--that stream is me" (Sacks 5). Somewhere along the same lines, I sensed that there was something wrong with the "stream's" flow. As if something was causing it to not be what it could have, or perhaps what it should have, been. There was once a time where I was oblivious to the impediment in the flow of the "stream," and the "stream" itself for that matter. A time where I wanted very much to conform to the guidelines set by society. During that time I was very much concerned with my looking-glass self. In the article, "The Self as Sentiment and Reflection," Charles Horton Cooley defines the looking-glass self as being a social self in the sense that "the social reference takes the form of a somewhat definite imagination of how one's self--that is, any idea he appropriates--appears in a particular mind; and the kind of self-feeling one has determined by the attitude toward this attributed to that other mind" (Cooley 25). The looking-glass self has three aspects: 1. How we imagine others view us; 2. How we imagine they judge us as a result of how we imagine they view us; and 3. How we feel about that judgment. It is also possible that as time and experience shape and change us, our looking-glass selves can change as well. It mattered to me a great deal what I thought others thought of me. The fact that this was so important to me played a key role in providing the conditions that allowed the blinding fog to form and maintain itself. I wanted to do what was expected of me or what I perceived to be expected of me by my family, teachers and friends. Everyone feels that way at some point in his or her life. whether the looking glass self is particular to the society we live in today, or a part of what Jerome Bruner (Cahill 71-5) calls "human universals"--the concept pretty much captures my experience here. I was exemplifying the looking glass self by wanting to do everything in the order which was deemed "proper" by society: Go through grade school, then college, then a career, then marriage and a family. I think everyone shares those feelings as well at some point or another in their life. It is another sentiment thought to be universal among humans. with the universality of this sequence of events, coupled with my humanity, I had my mind set on following that prescribed order, even if that meant not being myself, whoever myself was, whatever being myself meant. I was not exactly sure why I wanted to do things that way until very recently, when I achieved the clarity I spoke of earlier. It not only allowed me to see more clearly that something is wrong with society, but it also helped me to see that something was wrong with me. I am still not exactly sure what all of the reasons for my wanting to conform to society were, even though I have a few ideas. One of these have to do with the realization that the course of my life was not merely a "natural" process, but one shaped and form by the culture I live in. …