Christopher Gonzalez

Professor Rosen

ENG 1121

3/2/2023

I grew up a very shy and timid young boy who had no social skills or talents to speak of.  I lived a very sheltered lifestyle growing up because of some overbearing helicopter parents who micromanaged most aspects of my life and never really let me experiment with anything that was outside of what they knew or understood about the world around them.  This led to me being very outside the loop on most things that were pop culture during the time of my upbringing.  For example, in middle school, while everyone was talking about the latest rap artists, teenage tv dramas and reality tv shows, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea of what they were talking about or how to add to any conversations relating to those things because I didn’t watch or listen to any of that stuff.  My parents were very devout Christians who controlled all the media I consumed, and they didn’t like me looking at any of that stuff that they thought was bad for me.  This combined with an extremely introverted personality led me to sitting alone during lunch every day.  I did have one or two friends, but that was because our mothers were friends or we just go to the same school and have the same classes, circumstantial stuff like that.  It wasn’t until  I discovered a very engrossing video game that my life’s entire routine changed for the better.

I had been a gamer for many years by the time I discovered this little niche within the gaming community.  I played nothing but Nintendo games because they were kid friendly and my other friends and relatives played with me when they came over to visit.  Those moments were momentary and didn’t happen all the time.  Then, my childhood friend introduced me to a popular MOBA(Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) called League of Legends.  It was the first online only PvP(player vs player) game that I have ever laid eyes on.  I had received a personal desktop computer from my dad that was capable of running this game, and my friend let me play with his group of friends for the first time.  Safe to say I was terrible at it, I had never played a game like this before: I didn’t know the rules, I had never played a hardcore PC game before, it was difficult transitioning from playing with a controller to a mouse and keyboard, and I didn’t understand any of the terminology used within this gaming community.  They said things like, “freeze the minion wave,” or, “I’m going to counter jungle this guy.”  It was all very new and scary to me.  I had never played a game that was so serious and involved me having really good team coordination with four complete strangers.  Luckily, I was with my friend’s group and they were patient with me learning all the ropes.  I played the game, died many, many times, and inched my way closer to better understanding of my surroundings and the rules that governed this game.  I realized that I liked to play either tank characters, those that have a lot of defense stats built into them and made to be characters who defended their team, or support characters, those that enhanced their team’s abilities in some way.  I was neither skilled nor confident enough to play as the characters that carried their teams to victory by doing the most damage to the enemy players.  Soon enough, this game became a major time investment; over the course of a few weeks I realized I wanted to just keep playing this game.  I sank so many hundreds of hours into it in order to get better.  And it took years to truly become just a good player, this game was not easy.  By the time I reached high school, I had a dedicated group of friends who I played this game with day in and day out.  It was our afterschool activity, our weekend activity, our vacation activity, it was amazing how much we loved playing this game. Despite all the losses, we were just really competitive and wanted to win badly. 

  I grew attached to this game, and realized I was really a part of this community and all of its content.  It felt nice to be a part of something you enjoyed, gaming is a huge umbrella, and under that umbrella were countless communities revolving around different genres of video games and different individual games specifically.  I had found mine, and I was glad to feel such a sense of comradery with people who I didn’t even personally know whenever I played the game by myself.  I was addicted to it for many years, and it’s the one game that has stuck with me for being the catalyst of increasing my ability to be social with other people.

My time at City Tech has been a reluctant one.  Needing better chances at a fulfilling life I was convinced by a friend to choose computer systems as my major since the tech industry has no shortage of jobs and I hoped that I could snag one that could offer me enough money to live comfortably in whichever way I chose.  I needed money, I wasn’t satisfied with the state of my life up to this point and I didn’t have any better ideas for pursuing a career.  I knew that I was going to be stressed out entering a completely new field of education that I wasn’t fluent in, and it definitely ended up causing me way more stress than I wanted it to.  For my first semester, I was taking my first ever coding class in Python, a certain coding language.  I was caught completely off guard with both my teacher’s method of explaining to us the material, and how difficult the information was to absorb and remember.  My first thought was how foreign I felt in this class, surrounded by a few people who were at least far more experienced with coding than I was.  It was not a good feeling, and the anxiety was mounting.  

Thinking back on it, those moments of me feeling like such an outsider with what I was surrounded by but trying my best to really acclimate to it reminded me of Amy Tan’s story called “Mother Tongue,” in which Amy Tan recounts the time in her life growing up in America with her mother; during that time she saw all the hardships her mother had to go through being a poor English speaker in a country that didn’t respect those who were like her, “the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and in restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her”(Tan 3).  I felt similar to this, I felt like I was just some guy trying to bullshit my way through this class in a room full of seasoned individuals who knew so much more than I did about the subject.  I didn’t feel like I belonged here and probably felt like I was going to be ostracized for being so dumb.  This language that they used in this class was far beyond what I have ever been taught in any of my time growing up in school and it scared me.  I understood that I was a beginner, and that it would take time to fully understand what I was learning. The point of all this was to at least get a sense of what I am learning so that I can one day be fully acquainted with this new language that I was being taught.  Similar to the story of “HERS” from the New York Times, the medical student told of her time learning the language of doctors and said, “These special languages contribute to a sense of closeness and professional spirit among people who are under a great deal of stress”(Klass 1).  My mission was to learn the language of IT professionals, and if I succeed I’d be able to also grow closer to other people in that field just like I did when I was playing League of Legends.  

It’s always difficult at first learning something you don’t know anything about, but with time and constant practice the hope is that I can become fluent enough in this language that I can finally start to feel like I belong here in these computer classes and finally feel good about what I am doing here in this college.