I was basically looking around and thinking what was interesting and important. I determined some major things about myself based on my personal appearance, and based on the things that I took for granted which were told to me by people around me, such as my parents and my peers. Now I was faced with making some conscious decisions about the things that I had some control of. The older I was becoming, the more controllable things became part of my decision making process. I was more and more in control of saying to myself who I was. Still internalization of ideas of other people greatly influenced my own ideas about the existence and self-concept. Some of the primary factors that played major role in determination of self-concept were cultural influences, ethnicity, gender, and my personal trends, which were adopted by me from people around me.
In my communication experience with my e-mail partner, although many things were not being clearly spelled out, I was instantly able to pick-up important aspects of my pal's dimensions of self-concept. I could tell, even just by stile of writing that I was communication with confident person, who was willing to explore uncharted territories in communication process. Starting first conversation that we had via e-mail we both stated sending messages about each other's personal self-conceptions. We were willing to share things that were valued and important to us as individuals, what was acceptable or unacceptable, favorable and unfavorable, what were the things that we thought that were right. Of course those things were primarily self-centric, were my partner and I had tendency to put our own qualities of self-concept over our counterpart's qualities. We started to compare ourselves one to another on how similar we were. Surprisingly enough although we were living in same part of the world we probably had 90 of variation of how we viewed ourselves as a person.