Nostalgia
Life cannot be life itself without the emotions created, the memories made, and the people who are placed in your life to make all these factors shape who an individual will become. People do not just up and have the personality they possess. Who someone will be in life, and how they are especially personality wise, all are factors that are determined by the stages of their life.
The very first emotion I experienced was being jealous of my little brother. Before he was born my mom would always brush her teeth alongside with me and sing Barney songs. The first week my brother came home from the hospital she still tried , but one morning my brother started crying and my mother told me that I was a big girl and that I should just show her my "pearly whites" when I finished . From that day forward, I experienced the emotion of being jealous because I realized how much attention he got compared to me and I wasn't use to that. As silly as it is now as a three year old I can say that I may have not knew the word envy but I understood what it felt like to envy someone. This I believe would be a reference to Erik Erikson’s 8 stages of life; I believe that I had entered the autonomy vs.selfdoubt stage. I didn’t possess self-doubt because I knew I could do it by myself , it was just the fact that I wouldn’t being doing it with my mother anymore .
The next stage I had reached after review all possible theories of child hood development had to be Sigmund Freud’s Super ego. I say this because at this time period I started to understand the basis of morality. At the age of 5 was the day I met my first best friend. My father had just moved us out of the bay area to a suburban neighborhood at the time known as Stockton, California. As we were setting up our house and my brother was playing basketball a young boy about my age approached us talking trash to my other brother whom was twice his size about beating him on the court. I was uninterested and I guess he noticed that and told me he had a twin sister who needs someone to play with, before he could finish explaining here comes a girl whom look identical to him on a bike. Now up until this stage, I had never really had someone I called my best friend because I did not understand it. But something in me always knew what to look for , and sure enough she was bubbly , super friendly , and seemed to like all the things I liked ; she introduced herself as Nyia . From that day forward, Nyia became my very best friend. We did everything together; we were so close that I even went on family trips with them and vice versa.
At age 7 I remember crying to Nyia as if I were a grown adult talking about my family life. I had just found out that I was moving to Georgia because my parents were getting a divorce. I remember being so sad because I was about to go to the fourth grade and Nyia and I finally got to be in the same class. As soon as I told her Nyia started crying and we pledged to best friends forever and I just knew that we weren't really going to move. This particular stage of my life, I would agree with Freud about how the childhood stage of life was important. I felt like a lot of my child hood I was forced to grow up and for that I have always taken a lot of things serious, instead of thinking what others my age would call a joke. Finally, March 5th 2005, my dad was taking me my mom and little brother to the san Francisco airport I couldn't believe it was real, a part of me hated my parents for not being able to make it work and having me to secretly deal with the pain because as a child, I was always told to stay in a child's place. As we arrived at the airport, I didn't think anything of it, I was just ready to get a move on and deal with this next stage of my life, but suddenly my dad broke down crying. That was the first time I had seen my father cry, and he was crying like a little baby. He cried up until our plane was about to come and I don't think I have ever cried so hard myself just because seeing my dad crying hurt me just as much .
At age 8 two months into living in Atlanta, Georgia and I was still adjusting. I talk to Nyia almost every day and cried almost every day about how much I hated it. Georgia was different, filled with a lot of trees nothing like California. We had been staying at with my aunt and uncle at their apartment, because my mom was waiting on our apartment to finish. I had been enrolled in a school where I had to wear uniform and my mom went from working as a nurse in the hospital to working at the deli department in Publix. Adjustment was an understatement. When we eventually did get a place to stay it was an apartment, which I was not use to because in California I was living in a 4 bedroom house , with big pond and garden in the backyard . I wasn't use to living on the first floor in an apartment complex .I felt like an adult at 8. My mom worked the morning shift at the deli so I was the one getting my younger brother ready and making sure we both got to the bus stop. I was also secretly still adjusting at school to find my niche because I was still the new girl. Eventually just as I started to get adjusted a year and a half later, my mom said we were moving.