I Lost The Most Important Man

On May 11th 2013, my grandma passed away due to pancreatic cancer. A little later that year on September 25th, my mom received a call from my aunt in Guam that my dad had passed away in his sleep. Then on May 14th 2014, my grandpa passed from complications of an allergic reaction to a medication. So within a year, I was left to deal with three immediate family deaths, one right after another. Losing such important figures in one’s life could leave someone depressed and unmotivated to move on with their own life and to rise above those challenges is difficult, yet possible. During this time of hardship, I grew discouraged and saddened, but over time I became motivated to set aside these struggles and make a change.

Since the dawn of time, women have been judged based on their looks. In today’s society, women who are conventionally beautiful are seen as less capable than the rest of the population, especially men. As a girl in today’s society, I’ve been judged based on my looks since the day I was born. Every woman on television, in movies, or in magazines is harshly photo shopped to fit the standards society has set for physical beauty. When you grow up in that sort of environment, you have no say in whether or not that affects you. Orual, Redival, and Psyche are experiencing the same situation in Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis. In their own ways, each girl’s thoughts and action were determined solely be the world’s impression of them.

In puberty a classmate delivers a cruel blow by telling her "you have a great big nose and thick legs" (Piercy 223). Here we see the beginning of a conflict that will plague the young girl for the rest of her life. Although a girl can be healthy and intelligent, it is not expected for her to possess the physical qualities of "strong arms and back, abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity" (Piercy 223). These traits typically being male, the young girl sees them as being unnatural and negative. The girl feels as if she owes society an apology for possessing these characteristics. Piercy drives the point home by writing, "everyone saw her fat nose on thick legs"

The older I got, the more pressured I felt to fit into society's idea of ‘beauty’. My friends

Our project focused on how females conform to the expectations of society. Body image has always been a big idea to women. Most men are doctors, surgeons, or in control of major businesses in the world. Living in an

If every woman has the same idea of beauty, then they all have goal that they work to achieve (Ferrante, 2014, p. 28). Nonetheless, this underscores the fact that women come in a variety of shapes and sizes, which make achieving this goal difficult, if not impossible (Ferrante, 2014, pp. 201-202; Shaw & Lee, 2011, p. ?). So, while having gender ideals in a society was likely meant to promote social order, it in turn created another form of disruption. This unintended disruption, or latent dysfunction, is what can be recognized as poor body image. Not only does poor body image foster insecurity within an individual, it causes women have hostility towards each other.

Entering my last fall semester at Umass Dartmouth, with hopes and dreams to finish strong and graduating college. Starting the semester losing my last living Grandfather, from my mother’s side, was a hard way to begin. It is hard on all my family, but harder for me because I haven’t seen him for eight years. Never got that chance to say goodbye. Most of my mother side of the family lives half way across the world, in the Cape Verde Islands in the West Coast of Africa. I can’t believe it, when I got phone call from my sister living in Portugal, saying “Manny grandpa just passed away in Cape Verde.” How can it be when he was just recovering from a sickness

Why does America have so many girls who struggle with body image? Body image is the way one sees oneself and how one imagines how one looks .(7)Having a positive body image means that, most of the time one sees oneself accurately,one feels comfortable in one’s body and one feels good about how one looks.(7)In today’s time Americans are vain in one’s appearance,meaning we feel having a thin body we are more accomplished, successful and beautiful. Growing up in a time where appearance is everything to an individual can easily make a young girl self-conscious of her body image. There are three parts that make up body image: the mental picture one has of oneself: our belief of how others see us; and how comfortable and confident one is in one bodies. (DiBattista)In our society people associate thinness with beauty, power, and health, as well as self worth.(DiBattista)In America there are too many girls who have negative judgement on their bodies, which causes low self esteem and other dangers such as eating disorders.

Over this period we lost most of what my family refers to as the “generation of greats”. In the span of a few months like a terrible chain reaction my grandfather, great uncle and two of my great aunts passed away. Recently, our celebrations of Christmas and Easter have had a somber undertone arising from the unfamiliar absence of our loved ones. I am thankful for this solemn tone. It reminds us to remember our family members who have passed away. Paradoxically, these reunions have also been a happy time. A time filled with story telling, laughing and a nostalgic longing for the “good old days” that I never was a part of. Though these tragedies have hacked at the roots of our family tree, we are growing back stronger and more tight-knit than before.

No one that I’d loved so dearly had ever died. The whirlwind experience of waiting for my parents to come home, watching my parents, aunts, and uncles plan a funeral, and then missing school for both the wake and the funeral was exhausting. The jam-packed schedule did not give me time to contemplate and understand what had happened. In fact, those first few days after my grandfather's death were the easiest as they were a distraction from the truth. Attend a wake, accept condolences, attend a funeral, accept more condolences, and then go home being too exhausted to have any further thoughts than “I want to go to bed”. It was the calm after the storm that hurt me in the long

In “The Beauty Myth,” Wolf explains “Contemporary standards of feminine beauty have devolved to a point that can only be described as anorexic, and America’s young women are paying the price through a near-epidemic of bulimia and anorexia” (486). Girls today do not feel comfortable in their own skin and try so hard to become somebody else. She says, “The beauty myth tells a story: the quality called “beauty” objectively and universally exists. Women must want to embody it and men must want to possess women who embody it” (Wolf 488). Women should want to feel beautiful, but not for herself, but for the approval from the male population. In this essay it talks about how women must also compete with other

Again, it was the media content she had been viewing instilling those preconceived notions of beauty upon her. It is essential to teach our young girls and boys that you are beautiful no matter what shape or size you may be.

More and more women across the world are being judged by themselves and by our society because of their body image. In this article girls are being criticized over their body image written by associated press of the newsela staff. Various women around the world are being judged every day because of their weight and how they look.

It's true that we shouldn't judge people off their physical appearances, but it's just in our human nature to do it. Whether it’s a stranger on the street or a close family member, we are always judging them from our first glance at them. In this day and age, where more than half of the population uses some type of media, we can see an increase in the importance of body image. Body image is how a person perceives their own body. It can be perceived positively or negatively through many factors some of which are, social factors, cultural factors, and a person's own experiences. Gender and race play roles in the way body image is perceived as well. Even if a person feels confident with their body image, society believes that there is always

Quick Write September 12th, chapter 5, What Beauty Sickness Does to Women I included the author's message “when Taffy writes that last sentence explaining how a woman's body is everyone’s business but her own, she means that a women knows the ‘ideals’ or ‘norms’ of a perfect body for a woman and she is constantly changing it or alternating it in order to please everyone around her… it is brought up how one study showed that when college women spent just a few minutes viewing a magazine advertisements that featured idealized images of women, their body shame increased”. My understanding of body image has really changed my perspective because I learned if I am constantly thinking about what others think about my body then I will never be happy. I