Being true to yourself is not always as simple as it sounds living in the modern world. Conflicting cultures, expectations, values, beliefs and the mindset of your peers are all obstacles to maintaining personal independence.

Sometimes the world that we are brought up in to puts limits on our ability to do what we want to do. For example, in Take Me Away Please, Lily Chan explains how she has been brought up living and working in a Chinese restaurant. “Getting to work wasn’t an issue, but getting away was, as our small living quarters were attached to the shop.” Not only did she have to deal with school then working from 4:30 onwards 6 days a week, but there was no real escape for her as she basically lived at her workplace with her parents. Living in this constant working environment with no real place to relax and have time to one ’s self would greatly affect the development of a person’s independence.

Personal independence is about being true to yourself and acting in a way that is not dictated by the people around you. Peer groups often play a big role in a person losing a sense of who they are in an attempt to fit in and feel accepted by others. In Sticks and Stones and such like, Sunil Badami is made fun of at school for his culture and his name. In an effort to fit in, he decides to “change” his name to sound more western, so he calls himself Neil. While this may make Sunil feel more accepted at school, it means that he is sacrificing a big part of who he is and his heritage.

Trying to pursue your own life whilst being brought up under ridiculous expectations about how you should act, think, work, live etc is particularly hard to do. The choices and values that we hold in life are usually greatly influenced by our parents and how they have raised and taught us. However, in the long run the only person who can make the choices about how we live is ourselves. This can be hard in situations where our parents have expectations of us. Do we want to do what we think we should do or try and respect our parents’ wishes? In “5 ways to disappoint your Vietnamese mother,” Diana Nguyen’s mother makes it very clear that she is disappointed in the way that Diana is acting. She has a boyfriend, mucks around in school and makes her own choices. She is doing very well in school, although in comparison to her mother’s expectations/hopes she isn’t doing very well at all. This makes life quite struggling for Diana as she has to juggle her mother’s wishes with living her own life.