While it is not always clear what factors in people’s lives have molded them into who they are today, knowing those people for a long time, however, can give you an unimaginable insight into their lives. One such example of a character whose life story is so equivocal and definite it a good friend of mine named Johnhew Burns. I knew John while I lived in Newtown, Rhode Island. Making friends at the beginning of our freshman year, I spent a lot of time with John, giving me an insight into his life. Newtown was essentially a rich, mostly white people town.
This imposed a sort of model-driven, almost preppy atmosphere to which most students were expected to conform. Model-driven is meant to imply someone of high status or wealth in the community. With its standard of behavior, the Newtown community shaped John into its preppy definition of the model student, and later into the wiser, much stronger person he is recognized as today.
I didn’t exactly jump to fitting in when I first arrived, but John rapidly engaged the standard of acting. John participated in no after-school activities, rarely unheard of, but did play football, hockey, and lacrosse. If any sports dominated the Newtown community more, then it would have to be those three. This immediately welcomed him into the world of rich friends and high status at school. John’s family life was not uncommon from many military dependents today for through the duration of John’s sophomore year, his father became forcefully deployed to the Middle East.
Affecting Johners within the household, the lack of a patriarchal leader put John on a loser chain than before. His father had always been the stricter parent in the family, and now that he had faded from the picture, it meant a world of freedom for John to do as he pleased. This circumstance brought John closer to the people that he later realized to be the snobby preps with whom he simply did not wish to associate himself.
The mold impressed upon the students at Newtown High encouraged a stuck-up personality with the expenditure of much money. As John grew closer to those comrades of his from football, hockey, and lacrosse, he realized that these were also the same people that fit, or better yet, defined the Newtown profile. He witnessed the results of acting such a way, and it initially appealed to him, prompting him to change his lifestyle to resemble that of his peers. An example of a factor that helped John along on this journey became the way in which those already conforming to the Newtown profile extended their hands through invitations to various events and parties in a way that just couldn’t be turned down. This invitation into their society was gobbled up quickly, almost to the point of bighting the hand that was feeding. John now acted and spoke similarly to those elite Newtownians. An example of action and speech is the way that John, like this group, began to use extremely blatant sarcasm in the face of statements not even directed toward him.
John’s actions in general began to reflect a more preppy approach to life, as illustrated by his choice of clothing, cologne, and friends. As John adopted the Newtown system, the system adopted him, turned him into someone he wasn’t, and showed him a new side to life. As a result of his transformation, John became a product of something that he realized he didn’t want to be. It began to occur to him that while he was friends with the people who gave him answers in class and money at lunch, he had actually been losing those people that truly cared for him; his true friends. By becoming someone he wasn’t, John greatly impacted his relationships with those people closest to him. But by realizing his mistake in becoming the definition of the Newtown prep that he wasn’t, he became able to correct his fault. For this, John is a much stronger person today, while less susceptible to the more devious factors of life.
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