The Group

become something important, which cannot happen without the group. The group provides them a huge boost in which they gain more confidence and belief in achieving their dream as their dreams are supported by the group we choose to belong. Clearly belonging to a group helps to develop your ability and make you more determined in what you do, in the process making you realize that you are more important then what you think you are.

On the other hand, the group we reject tell us much about ourselves in term of what we dislike. When we reject to join in a group, this is may be because our values and beliefs are in conflict with theirs. The poem “St. Patrick’s College” emphasizes how the poet chooses not to belong to a religious school where his mother wants him to go to .Throughout the poem, Skrzynecki repeats “for eight years” twice. This reflects his stresses for staying at a place where he doesn’t feel belonging for too long. “Like a foreign tourist,” he exposes the fact that he feels like a stranger to the school even though he has been there for a long time, the fact that he is not a part of this school for even one day. He couldn’t find any sense of belonging in this place and he created his own personality in a different way the school wants him to be. His choice of not belonging is shown clearly with the fact that he wants education, not religion, this clearly forms his own identity.

However we may have difficulty keeping balance between belonging to a group and remain our individual identity. I believe that individuals who are members of an isolated group in society tend to separate themselves from the world, causing them to be the loneliest and disadvantaged people in society. For example if you choose to belong to a group that rebels against every school rule, you tend to stay away from your own family, your teachers, you would no longer put trust on anyone rather than your own group, you may enjoy the disapproval of everyone toward you and take it as a motivation for you to keep doing the wrong thing. For this reason, bad influence may form you a bad identity, an isolated group may prevent you from belong to the rest of the word and stop you from discovering more things about yourself at another group.

On the other hand, it’s important not to belong to a group as this can leave you open to pain. In contrast with John Donne, Paul Simon expresses the idea that belong can be painful as people in the group may betray you or make you weaker. In his song , “I am a rock, I am an island. And a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries”, he reflects the reality that it’s better to be alone and be isolated so that nobody can hurt us.It is therefore correct to say that belonging can lead to self- discovery, the self- discovery that solitude and