Rhetorical Essay- This Is Who I Am

“Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.” This quote by Franklin Roosevelt speaks to the core of my personality. A positive attitude and pride in the things you do make for a happy person. Growing up in Queens, New York I have learned this lesson time and time again. It is easy for a person to loose themselves amongst all of the influences of city life. That is why I have always felt blessed to have grown up in the family that I did. Currently I reside in Virginia Beach, Virginia, but I often think back about the things that made me who I am.

One of the most influential personalities has been my father. He was not always around when I was a child because he worked long and hard hours. Never once did I hear him complain about the way things were. I remember when we would have family picnics how much joy he took out of spending time with everyone My father would take all the kids with him to collect fire wood and play games with us to make it fun. The ways that he took care of his family, through the good times and bad were an example of his pathos.
When I was sixteen years old, I made the choice to run away from home. For months, I did not contact my family. When I finally did call, my father simply asked if he could come and talk with me. At this point, I honestly thought that I was going to get my ass handed to me. My father taught me a lesson that day all right, but it was a lesson in ethos. Something that I never knew was that when he was seventeen, he also ran away from home. Just hearing his story was like looking into myself. He proved himself a credible source on just how difficult a path I had chosen. My father said to me that day “I am scared for you, because I know how much you will have to face.” I was not made to come home that day and never did live with my parents again, but after that, I knew that I could trust my father with anything.

There are times when people need encouragement, times when they need to hear the truth, and times where they just need comfort. At the age of eighteen, I was just graduating from high school. With the whole world at my fingertips and my life ahead of me, I received the news that I was going to be a father. I remember growing up there was never a Sunday that my mother missed going to church. She would tell us “you need a good moral center, without it you are lost.” My mothers moral leadership was an example of ethos as a caretaker and educator. Talking about premarital sex and underage, unwed pregnancy was not a conversation that I wanted to have with my her. We were in the kitchen, meatballs were cooking in pasta sauce, it was warm out but there was a cool breeze that made the curtains in the window blow up. I can remember every detail about that day. There was a lot of whining, blabbering, tears and then I let my mom talk. All she did was hug me. I cannot imagine how this news came across to a devote catholic but I do now that the emotions that she showed that day were of a mother loving her child. In later days, I would hear more of her thoughts on the subject but at that time she taught me an important lesson in pathos, as it pertains to being a parent.

In recent years I have matured a little. Learning from mistakes, I am able to take the stubborn New Yorker, loving father, hard worker and combine them into who I am now. This did not come about without a fight either. A close friend of mine caught me at a time where things in my life were spiraling out of control. For a long time I lived my life as though I was not going to wake up the next day. He showed me why certain things are the way they are. He used logos to teach me how to accept what I could not change. I learned to see things a different way. One time I was given a group of tasks, half were tedious and half were enjoyable. Although it did not seem like it, they both took the same amount of time to complete. He showed me that our minds could play tricks on the way we look at work, and that I like to procrastinate a lot. Everything leads to something else so there are never any closed doors. With him being a senior officer in the Navy, he would later use logos to teach me the technical knowledge I needed to advance in rank. This was an example of logos as an instructor. Using facts, he taught me to take everything with a smile and move on.

Every event in our lives changes us some how. I do not know who has had the greatest influence in my life, but I am glad that they have lead me to where I am. We all hope that our children do not make the same mistakes as us, but if they do than we will be there to influence them as positively as possible. The real question is if you are not bringing a positive attitude and happiness to the things you do, than who are you influencing?