The Hardest Thing

This week I have been watching a TV show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s a show about a teen girl who has to save the world on a regular basis. In the last episode of season five, The Gift, Buffy has to give her life to save the world…again. She tells her sister, “…the hardest thing in this world-is to live in it…” I can really relate to this quote.  The world is a dark and scary place. People cheat and they lie. They even kill. It makes living here feel like a chore, but it’s not. The gift of life is a beautiful thing…even if it doesn’t always feel like it.
The last few months have been extremely hard for me. I lost my great grandmother on November 11, 2012. I was really close to her, so her death hasn’t been easy to deal with. There was a time when I felt like giving up. I felt that life was too hard, and it wasn’t worth living in the first place. For a while I was really depressed…and then I thought about how mad my great grandma would be if she knew I was having these thoughts. She would tell me how life was a wonderful gift from God, and it wasn’t something to be sad about. After this realization things got better. I came to terms with her death, and even found a form of peace. Then my stepdad came back into my life. He was staying at our house for a few days and it felt like my own personal “Hell on Earth.” I started to shut down again because it hurt too much to feel. I stopped talking to my friends. I ignored my family. I wasn’t eating. It was a terrible time in my life. That was when Buffy reminded me again of what it meant to live.
In a different episode in season three, Amends, Buffy tells her friend Angel, “It's hard, and it's painful, and it's every day.” She was talking about living, and her words are extremely accurate. Living is hard, but it’s worth it. She reminded me of that. After watching this, I started to get better. I started to live again. There are still days when I feel like it’s too much, but I don’t think I’ll ever return to that dark hole I was living in. I learned to love life again.
The lesson for this week is to live. There are good times, and there are hard times. There are going to be days when death seems like the better option. However, you can’t ever give up on life. It’s not as easy as some may think, but in the end there is nothing more rewarding. Living is the best gift we have ever been given, and we need to treat it as such. So, live. Enjoy the little things. Laugh. Cry. Just treat life like the gift it is.

Expressions

This week I got a new tattoo.

 While I find tattoos to be a beautiful form of art some of my family disagrees with me. A few of my family members disagreed with my choice to get another tattoo. They view people who have tattoos as destructive. However this situation reminded me of a Lady Gaga song called Born This Way. At one point in the song she sings, “…I’m beautiful in my way…” which I can really relate to at this point. Even though my family views my tattoos as ugly and destructive they make me feel more beautiful. Now that I have another tattoo my family feels that I am an even bigger disappointment. I don’t think that because I altered my body that makes me a failure. They want to pick and choose which parts of me they love, and that just isn’t how love works. You love someone despite their “flaws”. Which brings me to the lesson for this week: people express themselves in different ways,
but that doesn’t make them bad for doing it.
 There are a myriad of way people express themselves. A few people change the way they dress, or they change their hair. Some get tattoos. That doesn’t make them a bad person for expressing themselves in less conventional methods. Tattooing is just another form of art and expression. However, people with tattoos are often misjudged as criminals or hooligans. They are just projecting themselves to the rest of the world. Their choice of expression doesn’t make them a horrid human being, and these assumptions are extremely hurtful.
 When I got my first tattoo some of my family thought it was a really stupid decision because I was only 16 at the time. That wasn’t such a big deal. I had made decisions in the past that they had disagreed with, but one of my aunts said that I was no longer a good niece…well that hurt. I choose to express myself in a way that she didn’t like, but did that make me a bad person. In the end, I decided that it didn’t. Getting a tattoo didn’t change my core personality traits it just changed the way the back of my neck looks. I am still the same Alicia I just have something that makes me a little different. Just like Lady Gaga said, “…I’m beautiful in my way…” My tattoos don’t define who I am they just make me more beautiful.
 The lesson this week is that changing something about yourself or expressing yourself doesn’t make you a good or bad person. Dressing different, changing your hair, or getting a tattoo doesn’t change the person you are. It may portray a certain image to the world, but it doesn’t define you either. So, try not to make the decision of character based on the way a person looks. Their personality doesn’t directly coincide with the way they look.

First Impressions

This week I have been sick and out of school. When I wasn’t sleeping or coughing I was watching movies. I was watching A Cinderella Story, which is a modern day version of Cinderella, and something the main character, Sam/Cinderella, said that stuck with me. At one point in the movie she is talking with “prince charming” who claims that he has no idea who she really is, but that he knows that he has seen her before. She tells him, “Maybe you were looking but you weren’t really seeing.” That’s something many of us do. When we see a girl dressed in a promiscuous fashion, and most often we assume that she is exactly that: promiscuous. We make assumptions based on first impressions, but that isn’t right or fair.
We don’t know everything about someone when we first meet them. Heck, even after years of knowing someone you may not know everything about them.
I know that I have misjudged people in my life. My best friend, for example, was someone that I sorely misjudged. He came to Holbrook in the sixth grade, and I thought he was a snob. He came across as some jerk who thought he owned the world, or at least that was what I thought. Now that I see who he really is I know that what I thought was dead wrong. I was mistaken to assume I knew him because I talked to him for fifteen minutes. He is sweet and funny…and he is my best friend. I also know what it is like to be judged based on a first impression.
When I was in junior high I was weird. I was awkward, and I had a hard time making friends. I know that many of the kids I went to school with avoided me for this very reason. What they don’t know is what I was going through at the time. My mother was getting a divorce, and it really hurt me. I was twelve and didn’t know how to express my feelings, but that didn’t stop the other kids from making fun of me. I don’t hold it against them now because I’m older and they understand what I was dealing with. However, at the time they still took one look at me and thought I was a freak, and it hurt.
It is a knee- jerk reaction to make judgments about someone the first time we meet them. We just need to get into the practice of not acting on those assumptions. If we try to get to know them and see them for who they really are there will be less anger and fighting in the world. People wouldn’t have so many enemies because there would be better communication between us. Judgments are harsh and often wrong. Here’s the lesson: try not to act on first impressions. Don’t let them be the deciding factor on which people you’re friends with. Otherwise you might miss out on some fabulous, misunderstood weirdoes like me. :)

Easy vs. Right

This week I started to re-read the amazing Harry Potter books.  In the forth book, The Goblet of Fire, Dumbledore is addressing Harry and says, “…the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right, and what is easy…” I understand where Dumbledore is coming from when he says this. Life is complicated, and we are all faced with difficult choices.
 Each of us will have to make some very tough calls throughout life: whether or not to go to college, if we should major is education or criminal justice, or if we should go out with our friends this Saturday night. Though not all our choices are life altering that doesn’t mean that they aren’t difficult to make. For instance, I graduate in May and I am faced with the decision about college. Should I go away to college or should I stay in Holbrook. I know that either way I am going to college, but I have no idea where. It would be much easier to go away to college, and leave my family here, but is that the right decision. My family needs me, especially my mother. I’m torn. Though this isn’t the biggest choice I’ll make in my life time I am still struggling with it, and we all have trouble making these types of decisions.

The “easy way out” is often tempting because life can be so hard. It can be easier to not have to face an emotionally difficult decision in favor for a simpler one, but avoiding these issues doesn’t make them go away. After trying to take that “easy way out” you come to find it didn’t leave you where you wanted to be, but that’s how we grow. We make mistakes. We try to make life easier on ourselves. However, it often just makes doing the right thing that much harder. Yet we as humans often go back and do the right thing. Even if it takes years for us to correct our decision… we almost always do. 
Dumbledore taught me that we do have to make a choice when life gets hard, but what I also took from his words is that we will make the right choice in the end. He the upmost faith in Harry’s ability to lead and carry on even when is life took a turn for the worse. This quote couldn’t have come at a better time. I was losing my faith in people’s abilities to be good, but we all mess up at some point in our lives. However, it’s our ability to correct those mistakes that makes us remarkable. In the end most make the right choice, and are better for it. My lesson for the week is this: make the right choices. Whenever, however you do just make the right choice for you. You may not see the solution now, but it will come, and when it does you’ll know.