When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning It Was Friday Analysis

The environment around a person is a huge social determinant of the way a person views them self. Environmental factors condition identity through some internal factors like love and also through external factors like friendship or just any relationship you have with someone. For example, In “Son” by Andrew Solomon, he contemplates the ‘self’ through a person’s relationships and different experiences with people, particularly his own. In his early childhood, Solomon is conditioned to think negatively about himself because of an external factor, being gay. In “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday” by Martha Stout, the mental disorder of her patients, called dissociation, is a result of the traumatic relationships or experiences they

He becomes conditioned to think of his being gay as a flaw and eventually falls victim to this mindset that the outside world has about him. Solomon explains a small part of this phenomenon by saying, “Because prospective parents have ever-increasing options to choose against having children with horizontal challenges, the experiences of those who have such children are critical to our larger understanding of difference. Parent's early responses to and interactions with a child determine how that child comes to view himself. These parents are also profoundly changed by their experiences” (Solomon 373). Solomon is told from the time he is born by not only his parents, his mother in particular, but everyone around him that being gay is wrong and evil and eventually he begins to think so himself and he ends up hating himself for it. In this case, it is clear that Solomon begins to hate himself because of the drastic measures he took to try and "fix" himself. Solomon explains some of these experiences stating, "You were supposed to keep switching girls so your ease was not limited to one sexual partner; I remember the first time a Puerto Rican woman climbed on top of me and began to bounce up and down, crying ecstatically, 'You're in me! You're in me!' and how I lay there wondering with anxious boredom whether I had finally achieved the prize and become a qualified heterosexual" (Solomon 380). It is clear that the oppressive opinions of Solomon's parents and peers rooting against him stayed with him through a pretty significant part of his life, thus proving the early interaction of people with a child determines a big part of how the child comes to view himself. This sort of conditioning of a child to be a certain way is a huge piece of what comes to be self and it is a perfect example of the external world acting upon that view of