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A paper I wrote for school on SI |
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A quotation essay To quote is to repeat a person’s exact words, to identify purely with their thoughts, their logic. To do such is to risk misconstruing the original intention of the speaker’s words, by implementing your own thoughts and your own logic upon their quote by using it. However, we the unquoted, take this task of interpreting and using the words of the famous upon ourselves. To ruin, to wreak havoc upon the most simple of phrases, our minds so desperate to find the ability to configure a statement worthy of quoting pick apart and destroy the simplistic beauty of words. And yet to be quoted is said to be an honor. It is this honor that I wish to bestow upon the group To Write Love on Her Arms by using their quote, “Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” This quote, simple in appearance and easy to understand provides a deeper significance and appreciation to those who lives are affected by the message that the group To Write Love on Her Arms offers. The group To Write Love on Her Arms is not intimidated by the elephant lurking in the room and openly embraces the taboo topics of self-injury, depression, suicide, and addiction. This group is a symbol of hope to the seventeen million men, women and teens in America who suffers from depression, of which seventy-five percent do not get the help they need. I am one of those people. Approximately one in ten American teens self-injure, I am one of them. This group, their message, their quote affects lives everyday, lives like mine. It is a message for those who are judged by the cuts and burns on their arms and wrists, for those drowning in hopelessness, for those who turn to drugs and alcohol for self-medication, and for those who’d rather take their own life than live another moment. And in a moment of my own indecision between the people I love and the objects I need, I read the words “Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” and instead writing on my arm in an ink more permanent than a sharpie I wrote a poem called “Frankenstein”. . “Frankenstein” is a poem about depression and self-injury, depression does not care about how old you are, how much money you make, the color of your skin or if you’re a boy or girl. But depression and self-injury change you. Clinical depression can range from moderate to severe, but both if left untreated can lead to self-injury or suicide. Self-injury is a taboo topic in most communities, inflicting bodily harm upon oneself for the relief of mental anguish to most seem foolish. But in reality those who self-injure often have no other way to express the way they feel. They self-injure not because they are emo as society would label them but for the control it offers. To be able to decide how much hurt they have to feel and when or if it stops. They self-injure because physical wounds are tangible. They hurt, they bleed, and they heal. They self-injure to feel something, rather than the nothing they normally feel, to remind them they are still alive. Self-injury is commonly thought of as cutting, but it is not. Self-injury is so much more, it is burning, hitting oneself, breaking ones bones, anorexia, bulimia, or pulling hair. Self-injury is a serious issue that not only is misunderstood, but mistreated, made fun of and rejected. Self-injury can be helped by the love and support by ones friends and family, but there is no magic cure for it and because each person who self-injures does so for different reasons, treatments, such as therapy and hospitalization hardly ever work. To witness someone withdraw from everyone or everything they ever cared about or enjoyed is to be a friend of a self-injurer, to feel it is to be a self-injurer. And after that you are left alone, alone with you and a knife. “Frankenstein” is about my self-injury presented as one side of a conversation between myself and a knife. The poem specifically talks about body image. Frankenstein is an allusion to Mary Shelly’s fictional monster, which is created from the bodies of others. A man whose skin is, sewn together, mismatched, broken. A skin, a body, a life that he has no control over, because it is not his own. This feeling of not belonging in the skin you are in and knowing that others will not approve of a skin with scars and seams is an important message in the poem. That regardless of what in beneath that surface layer, it is the surface that you are judged by. For me and for any other self-injurer it is the scars we create ourselves as we try to find who we really are that creates who we are. So it is the life we are given that we must shape and mold ourselves, with scars or without. The ability to change yourself or others is no farther from you than the reach of your arm. But it is the choices we make that will decide the person we are to become. This poem, this quote it is not just about how we look, it is about how we feel. How there is justification for everything and nothing you feel is obsolete. How because you are a cutter or bulimic or anorexic it does not mean that you are less than human. “Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” And being a self-injurer won’t change your system of values, it won’t change your heart and soul. But it will change how you live; you will fear warm weather because you will have to expose your arms and legs. You’ll push away the people who love you because you think they won’t understand. They won’t. You will dream about the time before you started cutting or not eating and you will want to go back to the time before you made that first cut or skipped that first meal. But you won’t stop what you do to yourself, every time things get to hard, or a painful memory is brought about you’ll lock yourself in your room with a knife. And as you use it on your arms, your legs, your stomach and you know for a minute everything is alright. You tell yourself you will never do it again, but you will. As you do it you have someone, something that can appreciate every thing about you. The knife will love you, use you, and abuse you. And you will do the same all the same things for it. And as much as you love your knife you will hate it, it is that abusive relationship you can’t bring yourself to end. You will realize no matter what people say that you are not Frankenstein, you are not the monster. And when you finally start to see the light and throw away the knife, you count the days. And each day that you leave the monster alone is another day that you’ve created for yourself. You found the knife, which for weeks or months or years was your life. But when you throw the knife away you create peace for yourself. And this peace you made by yourself, for yourself is who you are. A life, a person not found but created.
The Magical Mellophone · Fri Oct 02, 2009 @ 04:07am · 0 Comments |
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