Flipped By Wendelin Van Draanen

In the fourth chapter of Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak entitled All the Way Down, Palmer is addressing and discussing clinical depression and the discoveries he made during this time. Disconnection and mystery are both explicitly covered to accurately explain the run and feeling of depression for the individuals that have never experienced the disorder. One of the main ideas that is addressed is that one of the only ways to get out of depression is to use knowledge of the heart and the choices that lead to wholeness are expressive of personal truth rather than calculated and intended to achieve a goal.

In order to earn her degree in creative writing she needed to complete a novel or set of short stories. She intended to write her memoir but ran into some issues. The emotions about what had happened were still too raw and reliving her memories was too much for her to handle at that time. Instead, she wrote an autobiographical novel. The events that happened in the book all happened to her, but the presence of a fictional character to represent her helped create tolerable distance between her and her experiences. This novel prepared her to write her memoir. Writing her memoir allowed her confront her past in a new way. It required her to revisit her memories as a writer rather than as herself with all her entangled emotions. Examining her life through a different lens allowed her to heal.

In life we may go through hardships that take us down a path that benefits us in the future and make us stronger individuals. These hardships can influence a person’s life by making us face obstacles we don’t want to face and

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them”, says Maya Angelou, an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. This quote reflects to Sarah’s journey in the novel Sarah’s Key by Tatiana De Rosnay, since the main character, Sarah, faces events that affect her well being, as they make her both weaker and stronger. These events causes her to lose her innocence, makes her persistent, and then eventually drives her to be pessimistic. Sarah experiences traumatic events through her journey, which leads her to change both in a positive and negative way.

Depression placed a dark brooding shadow over my mind. I was weighed down, oppressed by the burden of having to carry on with life. In my mind, there was a crushing sense of hopelessness that I have never felt before. The only therapy I found was taking that beautiful, freshly sharpened razor to my left arm. A sigh of relief departed me as I watched the bright red blood drip from my vein. The only burden I had was going to school and hiding my war scars. Each day, the darkness spread through me like cancer. My body withering away, I needed an escape route from this crucial disease. This all continued until the day I saw a light and the darkness began to fade

Reading the novel She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb has led me to think about my own challenges, which helped me better comprehend the book’s themes. Throughout the story, protagonist Dolores Price deals with a variety of issues, which includes appearance, constant mistakes, and amends for those mistakes to understand her purpose in life. Although Dolores’s problems are different from mine, I could relate to her struggle. Because of this, I was able to better understand myself and the themes of transformation and coming of age.

O’Brien describes that memories can affect one’s emotions in a detrimental way over time. Reflecting on memories that one felt affected them negatively can be bad for the mind and cause them emotional turmoil. O’Brien describes a “hard story to tell (O’Brien 172).” “For more than twenty years,” O’Brien, “had to live with...the shame.” O’Brien had been “trying to push (the memory) away,” The event O’Brien reminisces on

Working through – exploration of unconscious material and defenses. Results in resolution of old pattrerns allows clients to make new choices

Throughout the novel, the author voices the idea that the mental and emotional burdens outweigh the physical

Everyone has obstacles in their lives that hinder them from living life to the fullest. In Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, the main character Tayo—a World War II veteran— has many obstacles in his way to a living a normal and productive life. He struggles on a daily basis with the guilt of surviving the war where his cousin tragically died, the guilt from leaving his elderly uncle behind, and the irrational guilt for “causing a drought”. Additionally, he does not improve the situation by trying to avoid his problems and drowning his memories in alcohol. However, the biggest obstacle that keeps him from a normal life is the very disorder that the aforementioned obstacles stem from, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. All of these obstacles contribute to hindering Tayo from living a normal life because they either fail to address his problem or constantly preoccupy his mind, causing him to live dysfunctionally and

Throughout the course of life, we are all faced with hardships that cause inhibition, self-doubt or depression, all of which take its toll on our mental capacity. Through the autobiography ‘Chinese Cinderella’ written by prominent author Adeline Yen Mah, it is continuously demonstrated that mental strength is necessary to overcome adversity. The book is written to imply that Adeline needed her mental strength to survive her childhood, some ways she proved this is how she overcame her cognitive torment, how she continued to stay positive throughout the entirety of her childhood and how she became a successful adult.

Janine Shepherd was an Australian cross country skier who had dreams of winning a winter Olympics gold medal. While she was training on a bike with her fellow teammates. A tragic accident happened: she was hit by a speeding truck and became paralyzed from the waist down. Her life was perfect until she had gotten into that tragic accident and broken every part of her body, and she didn’t want her body anymore because it was hopeless; however, she improved and learned how to walk but also learned how to fly. “A broken body isn’t a broken person.” Janine talks about how she didn’t want her body because it was broken and there wasn’t no point, but she makes a decision to give herself a second chance even though she has to rethink everything in

In one’s life, events happen every day. At times these events can be good, getting one’s license, birthdays, the birth of first child, but other times they are bad, death of a loved one, tragic accident, or getting a bad grad on a test. The good and happy feeling events are the ones that people would like to remember the most and the bad ones are the ones that people try to forget about. Unfortunately, the worst events are the ones that stick in one’s mind and continue to come back up. Throughout “I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part,” Church shows that the past does not always stay there; sometimes past thoughts, memories, or even events can come back to the surface and it can be hard to get over them.

Gwendolyn McEwen’s poem You Cannot Do This, opened my mind to more than one interpretation. My first initial thought of this poem was that it was about the experience of war and how it affects not just the soldiers but also the women left behind. However, upon reading this poem a second time I received a more befitting interpretation. McEwen’s poem is about aristocracy. It comes from a cynical view that expresses how aristocracy is being overturned because the upper classes are challenged by lower classes, resulting in the uprising of insurrection.

In everyone’s life there is a moment that is so dreadful and horrific that it is best to try to push it further and further back into your mind. When traumatized by death for example it is very natural to shut off the memory in order to self-defense suppresses the awful emotional experience. Very often it is thoughtful that this neglecting and abandoning is the best way to forget. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, memory is depicted as a dangerous and deliberating faculty of human consciousness. In this novel Sethe endures the oppression of self imposed prison of memory by revising the past and death of her daughter Beloved, her mother and Baby Suggs. In Louise Erdrich’s