To This Day Summary

Shane Koyczan, the author of "To This Day", presents a narrative on names and the powerful impact these names or labels may introduce to a person's personal life depending upon the context. He describes the evolution of these negative labels throughout an individual's lifespan and the inner turmoil and challenges these labels bring about not just in the present, but in the future as well. We are his audience, every one of us, have been or could have been shaped and alienated through these labels, nicknames, or titles.

Shane begins utilizing the features of "A Well-Told Story" right off the get-go with his own story. A story in which he describes, as an overweight child, how the name, pork chop, became his label early on; and the very deep impact it had on his childhood to the point where he, in fact, hates the food "pork chops" to this day. From there, he describes how his point of view was not unique to just him, but to countless others around him who were negatively labeled based on certain physical characteristics such as birthmarks or even more personal facts--such as adoption. Shane then progresses the narrative, in descriptive detail, of the personal struggles children faced climbing through the ranks of school due to this form of …show more content…
For example, he briefly tells the story of a girl and her facial birthmark--that takes up a little more than half of her face being tormented by kids insinuating that the mark looked like a wrong answer that someone tried to erase. Furthermore, he describes how this same girl, as a woman, doesn't think she is beautiful despite the fact that her own kids see her as beautiful, which by very definition, to them, starts with "Mom"; because they see her heart before they see her skin as she's only ever been amazing. He goes on to describe another kid as a broken branch grafted onto another family tree as way of describing his