There is a very fine line between good and evil, between pain and pleasure or sorrow and happiness. In fact, the lines are not only thin but blurred. All of humanity becomes who they are in that mess of lines, life is an undefined thing. It is wild, messy. It is utterly and completely unpredictable, but out of all of this, what defines people? It is not happiness that will become the most important aspect of growing up, instead, it is pain. Trauma, because if happiness is a wisp of summer breeze, then pain can be anything from a grinding agony to a stinging slice. It is slow or quick, but it is the most important thing in the development of your entire existence. More than anything else, people instruct one to push, push through life, through
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Is it the shockingly sweet buzz of candy on one’s tongue? Is it the calming warmth of sun on skin? Perhaps it is, but is that memory clear, or has it been blurred? Now, think of something painful, think of all the small series of events that flew across nearly every person’s mind when experiencing a tragedy. What did it mean? Even if the memory itself it not clear, the lesson is--pain shapes people. Collier wrote in her story, “Marigolds”, “Perhaps we had some dim notion of what we were, and how little chance we had of being anything else. Otherwise, why would we have been so preoccupied with destruction?”(107) So maybe humans are a bit like cookies and maybe those traumas worked almost as a cookie cutter might, pointing thoughts down paths they would not otherwise have gone down, and making one into something they do not necessarily wish to …show more content…
Usually something along the lines of, “It is character building, it is good for you!” So, though cruelly put, cannot trauma good for one? Can it not build a person’s character in it’s difficulty? In a story that was recently read, the author writes,“For nearly a year, I sopped around the house, the store, the school and the church, like an old biscuit, dirty and inedible”(Angelou 53). The background of this story is that this young girl was abused by someone outside of her family, which caused her to almost stop speaking altogether. At the end of the story, however, she learns that she has a voice. Before, she was just a normal girl who spoke when she needed to, but after the Trauma she had been transformed into someone else. Someone, who had finally seen her voice--that she had neglected to use for almost five years--as an instrument, something beautiful or weapon-ish. The effects of a trauma--no matter what size--can leave one for better or worse. It could simply be stated as a positive thing in the sense of change, but that was not the question. What is the most important thing in growing up? What changes or shapes someone as a person the most, again, for better or worse. Trauma, loss, pain, no matter how much or what
Is it the shockingly sweet buzz of candy on one’s tongue? Is it the calming warmth of sun on skin? Perhaps it is, but is that memory clear, or has it been blurred? Now, think of something painful, think of all the small series of events that flew across nearly every person’s mind when experiencing a tragedy. What did it mean? Even if the memory itself it not clear, the lesson is--pain shapes people. Collier wrote in her story, “Marigolds”, “Perhaps we had some dim notion of what we were, and how little chance we had of being anything else. Otherwise, why would we have been so preoccupied with destruction?”(107) So maybe humans are a bit like cookies and maybe those traumas worked almost as a cookie cutter might, pointing thoughts down paths they would not otherwise have gone down, and making one into something they do not necessarily wish to …show more content…
Usually something along the lines of, “It is character building, it is good for you!” So, though cruelly put, cannot trauma good for one? Can it not build a person’s character in it’s difficulty? In a story that was recently read, the author writes,“For nearly a year, I sopped around the house, the store, the school and the church, like an old biscuit, dirty and inedible”(Angelou 53). The background of this story is that this young girl was abused by someone outside of her family, which caused her to almost stop speaking altogether. At the end of the story, however, she learns that she has a voice. Before, she was just a normal girl who spoke when she needed to, but after the Trauma she had been transformed into someone else. Someone, who had finally seen her voice--that she had neglected to use for almost five years--as an instrument, something beautiful or weapon-ish. The effects of a trauma--no matter what size--can leave one for better or worse. It could simply be stated as a positive thing in the sense of change, but that was not the question. What is the most important thing in growing up? What changes or shapes someone as a person the most, again, for better or worse. Trauma, loss, pain, no matter how much or what