A belief of mine that influences how I see myself and how I live my life each day is treating everybody equally. I personally think that someone should only be judged on how they act and treat others, not something like race or religion. I think this is very unfair because why should you treat someone differently because of their race or gender, which is something they cannot control, or practicing their religion, which they have the free will to do and should not affect how you see them as a person.

I personally have not experienced much inequality in my life regarding my race or religion, but there have been moments in my life when I have felt unequal because I am a girl. When I was young it never occurred to me that boys and girls were different or should be treated different, but as I began school that changed. I started hearing people refer to things as girly or your doing something like a girl when it was week or they were doing a bad job, and I would think to myself about why someone would say that when I myself, and other girls I knew were really good at these things.
 

As I got older I continued to see things like this happen. One time in particular that really upset me was when my middle school principal said my friend and I could not do something, but the boys could, because we were not strong enough. At the time, we were in the setup crew at my school, and we had to move many desks into a classroom. Doing this would have gotten us many  service hours, which we needed, so we were eager to do this. When we got to the classroom, the principle told us that our help was not needed, even though there was very few people helping moved the desks. We asked him why and he said that we were not strong enough to move the desks and it was a job for the boys.

We both knew we were strong enough to help, because we had helped many different things in the past. But we knew that the only reason he had said that was because he assumed we were weak because we are girls. This stereotype is constantly being used against girls, just like many other stereotypes are used against people of different races, religions, ect. This is why I think treating people equally is so important, because many people make assumptions and judge other without truly knowing who they are.