Essay On Marjane Satrapi's My So-Called Life

Creator Winnie Holzman’s show “My So-Called Life” and Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis both highlight the immense changes that surround adolescences in their relationships with others as well as how they perceive their own identity. It is during the stage of adolescence and emerging adulthood that young people are dealing with what Erikson refers to as identity versus confusion, in which adolescence are doing a lot of re-visitation to past stages of their life, and are constantly at battle with understanding truly who they are. Holzman’s show follows an adolescent named Angela Chase, who is a high school sophomore trying to discover and assert her identity. Satrapi’s graphic novel depicts her hardships with being an adolescent in a new country away from her family, and how she struggles with understanding her true self.
In “My So-Called Life,” the show begins with Angela and how she distances herself from her parents and childhood friends, and befriends two new friends, who are radically different and far less conventional. She dyes her hair bright red, trying to change herself, and gets numerous mixed reactions from her peers. There is one night
There are countless of cases where adolescents cannot have this stage of emergence, be it because of teenage pregnancy, or because they need to acquire a job right out high school to support their family. If various adolescents are not able to go through emerging adulthood, how does this impact the rest of their lives? Is this why certain adults go through a midlife crisis? If this is true, is there a way in which society can change in order to allow these people to be able to go through this developmental stage? It is important that adolescents go through this stage in order to truly understand themselves, as well as go back and reanalyze past