The things I am forced to do in life keep me quite busy, and the rest of the time is generally also very full. I like it that way. Perhaps the philosophy behind it is "Blessed is he who is too busy to worry during the day and too sleepy to worry at night." (Of course, it doesn't actually work out that way.) When I was a freshman, I took the list of activities the school offered and checked off the ones I wanted to do--about half of them. Of course, I could not do everything, and the choices I made reflect parts of my personality. Or perhaps my personality was determined by them. Either way, this is the person that I am today: introverted, logical, performance-based, and concerned citizen.
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Many of the things I choose to do are self-based, and even, perhaps, anti-social, especially the ones in the time that is not devoted to anything else, and not already planned. When this rare time arrives, the first thing that comes into my head is not to call a friend and go to a movie, but to sit down with Tom Clancy or Robert Nozick, to do a crossword puzzle, or to watch Nick at Night. When I was young, my brother, who is six years older than I, was in charge of baby-sitting me, and I was often stuck finding ways to amuse myself. I am now quite good at it, and perfectly content to be alone with my thoughts. This facet of my personality often permeates the rest of my life, and I have been told all too many times that I am "too quiet," because I forget that while my brain has a conversation with itself I am silent to the rest of the world. I have come to ignore those who criticize me for this, however, because introversion is simply a part of who I am.
Logic is something I have enjoyed for as long as I can remember, in many forms, in many different aspects of my life. As a child, I would run to the magazine stand of the grocery store to hunt out the latest issue of the grid-in logic puzzles, and once it was a big deal for me because I spent $35 on them, which was probably as much money as I had spent in my life to that point. I also did mazes, jigsaw puzzles, brain teasers, and later discovered a Japanese number puzzle that resulted in a picture. Math, the subject that I find the most logically based, is also the one that I am best at, and last year I spent many Tuesdays at school past 6:00 doing problems in math club. I also enjoy reading philosophy, because it is based on a reasonable flow of arguments, beginning with something obvious, and ending up with something profound, just like math. And my favorite aspect of debate is sitting in meetings arguing with my teammates until we have hammered out a logically persuasive, cogent constructive.
Despite the fact that I am very introverted, I am not shy as many people believe, and I love to perform. Ever since I was piglet in Winnie the Pooh in elementary school I have been hooked on theater. It was my camp of choice for four years until I outgrew it, and whether the play was for Beachwood, Shaker, or Notre Dame was irrelevant. I no longer have the time for this type of commitment, but my passion for performance is carried out through debate and mock trial. I chose Lincoln-Douglas debate over Policy partly because presentation is so much more important, and it is easy for me to argue something I don't believe in because I simply consider myself to be acting. The same thing is true of mock trial, and this is why, although I originally wanted to be a judge, the idea of being a criminal litigator has rather grown on me. It is an opportunity for me to get paid to debate.
A final, rather independent aspect of my personality that is reflected through my pastimes is that I am a concerned citizen of the world. I like to learn everything I can about other parts of the world because I believe it helps me to learn more about myself, and I also care about keeping the world a nice place to live. I have hosted five exchange students from three countries in my four years in high school, traveled to four non-continental countries, and I am not satisfied. Last year and this year, school has prevented me from traveling with my mother, but I am considering spending the money I have saved from my job on a trip to Russia this summer. It seems logical that there is no use in creating a world community if we don't have a good world to live in, and so I have also joined the environmental club.
I don't know whether my personality exists independently and my activities merely reflect it, or whether they have, in effect created who I am. But I do know that they are consistent with who I am: an introverted, logical actress, and a concerned citizen of the world.
