Keala Joan Settle's This Is Me

Kewauna used perseverance, passion, and courage to succeed in college. Firstly, Kewauna used perseverance to graduate from college. For example, Paul Tough: author of How Children Succeed shares that Kewauna stayed after class to get extra help from her professor. As you can see, Kewauna persevered by getting the help she needed. Kewauna used passion to succeed in college. For instance, Tough states that Kewauna went without sleep for three night’s straight to prepare for finals. Therefore, her passion enabled her to be ready for finals. Thirdly, Kewauna used courage. To illustrate, Tough tells that Kewauna made the step to make friends to get help if the professor was not there. Hence, Kewauna got the help she needed by

People throughout their lives are constantly discovering who they are and who they want to grow into. The same statement accurately describes Maya Johnson, a strong woman who wrote about her life in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. As a little girl, her mother’s ex-boyfriend raped and she had to rediscover herself whilst navigating through the grim veil of trauma - a process that burdened her for many years. Throughout her life, she encountered many different people, some good, others bad, but they each helped her eventually discover her identity. ‘Identity’ is how people define themselves as a human being, and, therefore, nobody else can dictate it. Maya’s experiences throughout her childhood and “adulthood” convey the idea that nobody can dictate someone else’s identity except the person themselves.

Katherena Vermette’s novel The Break, is centered around a sexual assault. Through the perspective of eight narrators the story unfolds over the day leading up to the attack, memories triggered by the assault, and the recovery of all those involved. The novel’s two strongest themes are a juxtaposition of gender disparity and the strength and resilience of the women and girls involved. Gendered performance is common throughout the book, for both men and women, although the focus is on the female characters. This essay argues that the gendered performance of the characters is due to Linda Nicholson’s biological foundationalism as explored in Interpreting Gender (1999). The differences in reactions between the men and women of the story are not

As a result of maturing and learning new things, perspectives on people usually change. This is what happened with Jeanette Walls in her novel, The Glass Castle. Her initial attitude towards her father, Rex Walls, is loving, supportive, and faithful. However, when she is able to process how many times her father has let her down, her tone in the book changes to being very critical and clinical.

Faces by Sara Teasdale is a sorrowful poem. The speaker is talks about the masks people wear to hide their pain. The “disguise” hide a person shame and embarrassment that is underneath the “city’s broken roar.” When the speaker states, “the meeting of our eyes,” she is express that the stranger can see through her mask just as she can see through theirs. The main theme of the poem is centered on the masks that we wear in society, but the poem digs deeper than the simple statement, ‘we all wear masks’. Teasdale presents the insight that when we are walking on the sidewalk, surrounded by the chaos of the streets, we delve into our own thoughts and the mask lifts. Because we are among strangers rather than coworkers, family, or peers, we do

If I were to describe the life of Charlotte Charke in one word, my word of choice would be “odd.” Her autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, describes in great detail the abundance of situations where Charke acted in ways that greatly varied from the perceived norm, which I believe played a massive role in the formation of her identity. Her personal narrative perfectly depicts how identity is constructed through a combination of factors that were outside of her control, as well as the things she could control within her life, or in other words, the situations were agency was involved, and the ones where it was forbidden.

In the story “So I ain’t no Good Girl “written by Sharon Flakes. I felt like the scene was very realistic, the characters made the scene very realistic by the way they were acting. The author described the scene pretty good when she said: “if I scream at him the whole street could hear me”. I can also relate to the scene in my everyday life. A boy and his girlfriend where at a bus stop with some other girls, And Raheem starts to act a little flirter with the good girls who made his girlfriend kind of upset about the situation, so she tries to talk about it, but he got mad at her and ended up making out with the good girl.

Finding one passion could be tricky. Sometimes we confuse passion with skills, passion is something that you do and enjoy no matter how tired or even if it doesn’t make you a millionaire. Skills are something that you are good at but you don’t enjoy, one will continue on this path because we need to pay our bills. This doesn’t make it right or wrong but we should be happy with ourselves doing what we enjoy.

In, “ Pay Your Own Way (Then Thank Mom)” Audrey Rock-Richardson brags about herself and puts down others, saying that all who attend college should be able to fully support themselves, without any help, just because she did it back in the year of 1998 in Utah. Well I’m living proof that it is impossible to do that in the year of 2015! Though I do work, my $400.00 checks every two weeks barely support the cost of living. If it weren’t for government assistance, I would not be able to attend college. Even though I receive financial assistance, it does not mean I do not take my schooling seriously because I’m not paying for it myself. But Rock-Richardson still tries to argue that those who are getting help from the government or their parents

‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’ is a documentary designed to let the audience view the ‘Other side’ of Nina Simone’s career. From her beginning of stardom, to her gradual collapse, this shows that not all music careers are easy. Through being abused to being the abuser, it shows that music can take a toll on anyone. This documentary film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary and was a winner of five awards including “Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary” and “Peabody Award for Documentary and Education”. Directed by Liz Garbus (Also known for ‘Bobby Fischer Against The World’ and ‘The Farm: Angola, USA’), through her journals, interviews, and stock footage, the film covers as the audience watches the downward spiral of yet

the first stanza. Symbolizing adversity, she tells the reader “I think by now the river must be

The hippie movement is arguably one of the most famous culture movements from the twentieth century, made widely famous in pop-culture involving romanticized images of overly friendly people clothed in bell-bottom pants and flower-print button down shirts. The romanticization of this movement allowed for a widely accepted and skewed view of the true events that happened during this time. The reality is much darker than publicized to the ignorant generations that followed. It can be maintained by many that personal experience and firsthand knowledge provides the most accurate depiction of the true happenings of the time period. Through vivid imagery and impersonal diction, Joan Didion offers a critical unveiling the mayhem that she witnessed during her various firsthand immersions in the developing culture of the 1960s.

Rejection can make one feel alone, helpless, and out of place, and it’s a feeling that can make someone feel like they are no good, or that they aren’t worthy of a good life. All throughout the story, we are given examples of how the young girl is shamed and rejected. She was never accepted for who she was and this made her do things, sometimes extreme to help out her family. She knew she would never fit in, and her actions proved just that.

With Mulan, Disney opened a number of controversies about questions of masculinity and gender roles. Why is the main character a woman who is cross-dressing to be a man in order to save her father from the troubles of war? Why is she taking a role of a soldier? How is her behavior depicted? The codirector of the movie stated: “What I like about Mulan is not that she changes herself but it's really that she changes society and their way of seeing her. That's what allows her to be accepted in the end. She ends up being accepted for who she is which is a pretty universal want for a lot of different people.“ (Ward, 2002, 95) Like in Hercules and Tarzan, obviously the main theme is finding the true self. However, in order to be accepted by the society, the protagonist must go through some changes, of course, to reach the acctualization.

This stanza focuses on the tough life she has been living through as a kid, which is characterized by those strong dudes who are fighting always; implementing the fear in her Veins, but the outside world still doesn’t scare not even a bit.