Tree

I feel the breeze in my hair

Shuddering as it tickles my shoulders

I feel the bark beneath my hand

Rough, tough, unyielding

The sticky sap leaves crumbs of it on my skin

The branch underneath me will hold

Never will I fear that I am not protected by its strength

I look down and see how far I have come

Each step requiring a laborious haul 

Never will I forget what it took me to get here

I look up and see all of the branches still above me...

And I freeze.

What is this reality
That we shalt liveth?
What is reality
Without you in it?
Who dost claim to know
Reality as I see it,
As we have lived through it?

Thou life has ne'er endured
The mishaps that we have known
For generation upon unfortunate generation.
The mistakes of our past wilt not end by our own life,
For our children's children will forever know our strife
While you and yours liveth day by day in castles and gowns
Claiming fame and fortune won for you
Generation upon luckful generation past
While me and mine cast our'n eyes down in shame
For we will ne'er bear those blameless names.

Might I ask for this one request?
Let me rest with whoe'er I claim as best for me
For I'd rather not waste my days in misery
Burning by the light which you cast upon all
Making us all feel worthlessly appalled
At what we will ne'er do
And ne'er have for ourselves.

I am delicate like a flower
Tough like a thorn.
I am pretty to observe
Friendly to the eye but rough to the skin.

I recognize the heat.
I feel that it is hot.
Yet I do not remove this sweater.
Underneath it all I am cold, so cold.
I am chilled from the inside out, chilled by my frozen heart.
Frozen solid, never to be thawed.

What Is Love?

Just another typical blog about love from another girl not even in her twenties yet. Whoop de do. But hey, don't judge. I just finished watching The Notebook for the first time ever (and I cried...a lot).

I guess The Notebook got me think hardcore about this whole love thing. What is love? Well, as a linguistic, I like to think of it as a verb and as a noun. In the sense of a noun, it is intangible. No one can see it or always correctly identify it but for the most part we all know that it is there. We feel it in some sense from our parents, our families, our friends and our partners. Just like we can feel happy, sad, depressed, excited, emotional...we can feel love.

Now the tricky part comes in where we define love as a verb. Love is something that we actually do. We can love our parents, our families, our friends and our partners. Hell, we can even "love" objects such as sports, jewelry, clothes, shoes, etc. Although we don't always see it in action and can't always pinpoint that the thing we are witnessing is an act of love, we know that people do it and feel the effects of it. That all makes sense so far, right? So if we can feel sad and happy and depressed and loved...why can we only love and not sad, happy and depressed? For instance, we can say "I love this game" or "I feel love". However, it would be ungrammatical to say "I sad this game" or "I happy this person", even though we can say "I feel sad" or "I am happy". By creating this obvious difference in how we can use this one word in sentence compared to how we can grammatically use all the other words in that same category (the category of feeling or emotion), aren't we creating an obvious distinction that love is more than a feeling? Yes, we feel it inside of ourselves and each person has the capability of feeling it. Yes, it is an emotion. But even down to how we use it in a sentence, we are identifying that it is so much more complicated than all of that.

Why, then, is it thrown around so easily by so many people? Why are so many people convinced that the thing they are experiencing is love? And that their love is so unique compared to everyone else's? Maybe I'm crazy for saying this but I don't think any one human on this planet can explain what love is and have a correct and ultimate definition for it. And I honestly don't think that any of us are capable of truly wrapping our minds around what love really is. It is too big and complicated a topic to use carelessly. To me, love is a word I may never understand until I meet the big man. But I know that my opinions are far-fetched and small and many people will not agree.

So, why make a blog about this? Well, I guess I just wish that people would realize that love is a complicated topic for some of us to deal with. And although I like seeing people happy and with someone they truly care about, it really bothers me when they claim that they're in love when they've only been dating a couple months or when, from the outside looking in, I can clearly see that what you are experiencing is far from love. If I ever do understand what love is while I'm here, I hope that someday I can use the word and have it mean so much more than what it usually does to everyone else. I hope that when I say "I love you" it is not taken as a passive phrase that one can overlook so easily. And I hope it isn't too late to save the purity of this word for those of us who want to understand it and get frustrated by people who think they've got it all figured out.

I see a fuzzy, fluorescent pink blanket sitting on a white, uncovered mattress, crumbled up like someone had carelessly tossed it on the bed after they had been using it to wrap themselves up on a chilly evening while they watched Netflix or read a book. 

I see a flattened black pillow with drool marks running along the sides laying beside the pink blanket. I see bits of my life thrown together on this sheetless mattress. 

My warm and bright and beautifully disastrous life. 

My equally as flat and dark and stained life. 

I AM...BIPOLAR

Now this one's a fun one for me. The newest of all of my identity traits and a big inspiration for this blog series.

I am bipolar...big time.

My diagnosis started July 4th of 2015, so a little over a month before this blog post was published.
For over almost a week, I couldn't sleep. My thoughts were racing so fast that I just couldn't let myself relax enough to pass out. My body was also running on almost half of the food intake I was used to, partly because my body was probably stressed but also mostly because I couldn't slow myself down long enough to eat. I just had to keep moving...I went from not working out at all for over 3 months to going on a 4 hour bike ride and spending over 2 hours at the gym in one day during this week. I spent two days straight creating maps on the floor of my home with objects and was sharing very sensitive and deep information with anyone I could talk to. Thankfully, I was around people that had experience with psychological disorders, especially bipolar disorder, and so I was sent to spend over a week in the coping center.

Now that's just the part where I was diagnosed. Prior to this week long experience, I spent over a year in a deep depression. I started skipping classes. I started sleeping all day and cutting myself. This cycle eventually led to my withdrawal from school because I literally thought I couldn't do it anymore. This depressive year (2014-2015), my sophomore year of college, happened right after my manic year of college, my freshman year (2013-2014). I was involved in over roughly 15 programs at my school, was taking as many credit hours as I could and working a ton, on top of being social, going out every night, getting good grades, etc. I never had to sleep and was always working, life was great. But eventually my body shut down...and led me to the coping center. That's mostly the life of a bipolar disorderly person.

See, bipolar disorder, also known as manic depressive disorder, is a (in my case, hereditary) brain disorder than effects your mood but impacts almost every other function in your body and in your lifestyle. It can ruin marriages, financial statuses, employments, schooling, relationships, friendships, and even one's own life.  Bipolar people are impulsive people...on an impulse, we could lose all of our money because we wanted to donate it to charity. Or we could lose a friend because we were in a depressive state and blew up on somebody. The sad part is, most people go their whole lives never getting diagnosed and some even go their entire lives never knowing that they have bipolar disorder. I was lucky enough to have been diagnosed at an early age, but it still cost me my schooling, a lot of close relationships with some awesome people, and put me in financial stress.

Now there's some other things that you should know about bipolar disorder. There are three types: bipolar 1, 2 and NOS (not otherwise specified). Basically, the severity of bipolar increases as the number decreases (shout out to math people, what's that called again? haha). In other words, bipolar 1 is the most severe, followed by bipolar 2, which is followed by bipolar NOS. People with bipolar NOS are typically never diagnosed. They can usually go their whole lives untreated and live relatively normally. People with bipolar 2 are usually a little easier to diagnose or can be just as easily missed on the radar. They can usually live pretty normally with the help of therapy or medication or neither one. Bipolar 1 diagnosed patients are typically hospitalized by their condition at some point in their lives. They typically CANNOT get by without medication AND therapy. Statics show that bipolar 1 people have a 25% attempted suicide or death rate...they tended to be the most impulsive and reckless of the bunch, I guess.

Anyway, bipolar 1 is the diagnosis that I've ended up with and what I'll identify myself as for the rest of my life, not to scare anyone. I am currently getting the help and support that I need. However, my life hasn't become much easier since the diagnosis. In fact, I feel as though life is harder with this whole new identity to my name. I keep trying to analyze the WHY of this situation to find some value towards my experience for the sake of the world around me and for myself. To be honest, I don't know the WHY of my condition. Maybe I'll never know. Or maybe it was simply to write this blog and let everyone know that I struggle with this one big thing that takes everything out of me everyday. But I know I'm not alone in this world. To all of you other bipolar people out there, I honor thee for being so strong with this disorder.

I AM...HUMAN

Above and beyond anything else I could say, I am human. That means that, just like you, I have needs. Just like you, I have wants, longings, and desires. Just like you, I have passions and goals and dreams. I make mistakes every single day of my life, big or small. I worry and fear and get angry and cry and fart really loud on accident sometimes and laugh at stupid jokes. You get it, I'm a human.

So if I don't get you on any other level, I at least get that you struggle, because we all struggle, as humans. Some of us struggle with very basic needs, such as finding shelter, food and water. Others of us struggle with some type of medical issue. Still others of us struggle financially or even spiritually.

I personally think that a lot of us struggle socially, especially in the good ole USA. Regardless of what you struggle with or when you struggled with it or why or how you got through it, all that matters is that you did struggle with something. And I can tell you that you struggled because you are human.

As a human, I AM struggling with a lot of things right now. But that doesn't mean that I am better or worse than any other HUMAN out there that ever lived. That just means that I have lived as a human, the same that you have. 

You know, I've been reading this book lately; really great read by Dr. Brene Brown called The Gifts of Imperfection. She talks a lot in this book about courage, compassion and connection. In this book, she generally states that "connection is something that we are all lacking in some way by not courageously sharing our own stories about how we struggle as humans." You wouldn't believe the amount of people that you can connect to just by opening up and sharing with others what you struggle with...regardless of what it is...Maybe that is why we all struggle with something at some point in our lives. Regardless of what you believe in, I believe that we were meant to connect to each other. I refuse to believe that generation after generation of people have struggled and it all be for not. Maybe we were just designed to be brothers and sisters to each other by showing small acts of courage such as telling some randos about something that makes you feel really small and vulnerable.

So as a HUMAN, I promise you that you are not and never will be alone in your struggles, which is another part of the reason why I feel so adamant now about sharing this blog with anyone and everyone who will read it. As you continue to read my blogs, contact me and share your story. I am just as happy to listen as I am to talk.

I AM ME...but WHY and HOW

Dear Followers,

I have decided to start a segments of "I AM's" on this blog. One reason is because I've had a dry season when it comes to writing (which is weird, because I love to write) but also because I have learned a lot of new things about myself...or even discovered new ways to evaluate myself, very recently. Throughout my childhood, adolescence and even young adulthood, I (and I think everyone else) have always been taught to ask the "Who?'s" and the "What?'s", the "When?'s"and the "Where?'s" about EVERYTHING...except ourselves. And after 20 years of asking those questions about the world, I think that I'm ready to ask myself those questions...about me.

Now I've left out the two most important questions in the entire world on purpose:  "Why?" and "How?". Now these questions are a little more difficult to answer and explain sometimes, but we now have the knowledge, science and technology to start asking these questions...about EVERYTHING in our lives...and that includes our own individual lives. I believe that by asking the "Why" and "How" questions about myself, I can hopefully help myself, and my followers, understand the way in which we see and experience the world in our own individual lives.

As a warning to my followers, I AM going to be honest about who I AM. But I want to work through these difficult topics/questions to help understand who I AM with the help of my fellow friends and family and all the caring people in this world. In turn, I hope each one of you will ask yourselves the same questions of yourselves, honestly. It doesn't have to be in the public, like I'm planning on doing, but maybe in your own heart, you can understand why you feel the way you feel and live the way you live and how you came to that lifestyle or mindset in the first place.

Please do not be offended by anything I write on here...and if you are, just don't read it. If you want to ask me personal questions about what I end up writing about, message me on Facebook. If you have a strong opinion about some of these topics (for or against or whatever), throw them at me in a reply to these blogs or on a comment on Facebook. All I ask for is honesty, not harassment or judgement.

Love to all,
Amanda

Cuts

"I have a good idea." she said.
"What?" she replied.
"Go to the bathroom. But first, bring that pair of scissors."
"Why? How is this going to help me?"
"Just trust me. It'll work. You'll get through this. But first, you have to do this."
She walked to the bathroom, scissors in hand.
"Okay, now what?" she said.
"This is going to be so awesome. Pull up your sleeve." she replied.
"Why? I don't understand."
"Just do it."
She pulled up her sleeve.
"You know what to do next..."
She did.
"I don't want to do this. Please, I don't want to do this to myself."
"You said you wanted to feel better. You said you wanted to wake from this hellish sleep. Baby, this is better than a pinch. It will work wonders on you. Just do it."
She closed her eyes. She opened the scissors. She squeezed so hard, her hand bled before she put the sharp edge to her arm.
Three cuts, close together. Thin and red.
She sat on the floor, crying silent tears.
"I told you it would feel better." she said.
"You were right, it does." she replied.

That Night

These nights weren't uncommon to her. At least not that first year. But now, things were different and she couldn't pinpoint why or how.

To any outsider who knew about her past, this night was just like any other. As much as she tried not to be seduced by him, she always caved in. Was it that she loved him? She didn't think so. But she had never had such strong feelings for anyone. At least that was the way he made her feel. No, the feelings were not love, although they were strong. She was just susceptible, vulnerable. But that did not make her in love. In fact, what she suffered from was a different kind of feeling. She suffered from hatred, pure hatred and a desire to hate him who had stolen her, who had taken away her everything. So as much as he hurt her, she continued to go back. Not because of some sick puppy love as everyone had assumed, but because she enjoyed and loved to hate him.

That was all last year. Afterwards, a silent summer passed. Although she lived so far away, she was still devoted to hating him. She proved this to herself by sneaking hours away from home to see him, to pretend to have fun with him. To please him. This fed her desire to continue to hate him. And she believed she would because that was all she wanted to do.

But something changed in her that summer. And when she came back to live in that town where he resided, she no longer knew how to hate him. And so, he could no longer convince her to late night sleep overs or beer around the campfire because she had no desire to feed herself into that kind of misery anymore. Was it that she was happy? She wasn't sure. Everyone else would probably say so. But she could not. She could not name the feeling that was deep down in her heart. This feeling was not hatred, and so it scared her. She put on a font, pretending to be the way she normally was, and people bought it. Hell, she even began to believe it.

So what happened on the night where her common life, her past life crept back in? Well, you might assume that she caved. But she did not cave. She was too control of the moment for this to be a fall, a cave back onto her past habits. No, on this night she turned to her past for answers. She was tired of not understanding what she was feeling, what her true emotions were. So she went to the one thing that she knew would spark something in her.

To her disbelief, she found nothing. No answers came to her that night. No emotion was sparked while she played out the actions of her former self. But it didn't take her long to realize what it all meant.

She felt nothing. Her heart bore no emotions. Feeling was gone. And she would never feel anything again.

THIS is True Love

It will never be the same between you and I
The moment you opened your mouth, you changed our lives
Why did you make that fatal mistake?
What made you decide to take it all away?

You made me fall for you right off the bat
I had no intention of loving, but you changed all of that
I was fine without you, no doubt that I was
In fact I was dandy, and you weren't even a plus

It started with that day out on the lawn
You said I looked lovely and told someone else you thought I'd be fun
To bed you took me as soon as you could
I never knew that was the only intention you had for good

At the moment I just wanted to play
Boys had never affected me much anyway
As strong as I was and as tough minded as I had been
No one could warn me of the trouble I was in

All I craved for months on end
Was to be with you, see you, and please you as more than a friend
I couldn't focus on school work at all
I didn't realize that my life had changed for good that fall

For now, I can never seem to love again
Not you or anyone, not nearly as much as I did back then
So thank you for all of that, you dirty scum
I think I hate you now, for all that you've done.

Sincerely, Broken and Repaired Me

Dear You, The Hopeless Who,

You've been through enough. You've been around the block. You've had far too many strike outs in life. When will you be done? When will life begin?
More than anything, when will you find someone who understands you?
I can't answer most of that. But I will tell you that I understand. I've been there. I've had enough, seen that block, striked out more than it takes to lose two games of life. I get it.

I understand pain and hurt, more than I ever wished I had to.
I understand the pain of an athlete that will never have what it takes to be good.
I understand the pain a student's brain goes through that just doesn't have what it takes.
I understand the pain of embarrassment for doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing.
I understand the pain of love, of love lost, of unconditional and unreturned love.
I understand what it's like to feel like no one understands at all.

I'm here to take your hand, to be your guiding force, to tell you that you're not alone.
You'll never be alone.

Sincerely,
Broken and Repaired Me

Time at a Park

Go to a park. Sit on a swing.

Take a deep, relaxing breath.

Lean back. Lean forward.

Build momentum.

Feel the breeze as it caresses your face.

Close your eyes.

Tilt your head back.

Memories of your childhood rush through your head.

Suddenly, you are ten again

Whether you are twenty or sixty years old.

Remember what it was like to fear, to stress, to worry, to ponder

Absolutely nothing.

Stop the swing. Leave the park.

Nothing important matters anymore. You feel young, happy and alive.

Which is exactly what you are.

At a Loss for Words

Staring at this blank page in front of me

My words try to escape onto the paper

But they are trapped in my head

Sitting in a crowd full of people chatting

My words try to escape into the loud noise

But they are trapped in my head

Caged, lonely soul

No way to unlock the chains that bind my words

Help me escape. Help me escape.

So much to say

But the puzzle can never be solved

Too far behind to ever connect with these fluent people

So many ideas spewing out of my brains

But where do they go?

They are lost forever 

In this caged puzzle in my head

Bad Writing

She had prepared for hours, laboring in her room, stretching her mind to unimaginable places. And the only thing she had to show for it was this piece of paper. She didn't believe that such thought, such pains, could go into something so small. Is this really what her work amounted to? She had worked as if she was Ernest Hemingway or Charles Dickens. But the truth is, she was no Ernest Hemingway nor Charles Dickens. And as far as she was concerned she would never be anywhere near that level of fame, intelligence, or creativity. It's not that she didn't love this hobby. Why else would a high school student spend days on a stupid simple paper that her teacher had assigned her?

Her biggest problem was that she acted like she was good at it. It was hard not to when all she heard about was how excellent her writing was and how good at reading she was. What could they see that she could not? she always wondered. It was so plain and simple to her. Almost too plain and simple. She hated the way she wrote. She hated the way the words sounded together, hated the way that she couldn't say what she meant, never in speech nor in writing. And worse yet, her reading abilities were just as bad. Sure she would spend hours and hours with her nose stuffed into a book. But this reading endeavor was not so easy as it seemed on the outside. In her brain, she struggled over simple vocabulary words that everyone knew. No matter how many times she looked that word up in the dictionary, it never stuck. So much for learning through reading. She also zoned out in her reading all the time. Most people never noticed that she would spend three times as long on one page as normal kids would. But even if they did notice, they didn't seem to care. All they saw was her love, her love for words and stories and language, and they praised her too much for it.

Now they expected a page. A short, simple page. She was the best in class and as so was expected to write the best paper. But she knew she had failed. The order of the words did not make sense to her but she could not fix it, no matter how hard she tried. Each revision to the paper made an even more enormous mess. Did she have fun with this process? Of course. But one can only have so much fun failing constantly. How can a musician enjoy music when all they do is fail to produce good sound? But this was all she could do, all she could live with. Who would help correct an incompetent, unoriginal writer?

It was the day to turn in the paper. Her final document laid in her hand as a cold, unfeeling, unrewarding trophy. She laid it on her desk in front of her, wishing more than anything that the words  there would shift around and morph into something they were not. She hated herself for what she had created.

When the teacher asked her to read her paper aloud as an example, her heart dropped. They were expecting better than what she was about to give. They were expecting Poe to fly out of her mouth, but all she could deliver was awkward sentences and stupid ideas.

When she was finished reading, the class stood still. She hadn't realized as she was talking that the whole room turned silent. All she had focused on was how much worse the words sounded when read aloud. She was embarrassed. She wanted to stop. She wanted to take back everything she had written and said. She wanted another day to work. When she put her paper down, the students started clapping, the teacher stared at her in awe, all this an effect of her grotesque work.

Were these people serious? she asked herself, refraining herself from tearing out her own hair. Will they ever understand how awful she is?

Restorative Justice

How can forgiveness and justice play an equal role in the same situation, especially in the case of a murder? There is one such article from The New York Times titled "Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice?", by Paul Tullis, that describes a case where both forgiveness and justice worked together to help prosecutors decide how to punish a murderer. In this case, a young man named Conor McBride shot and killed Ann Grosmaire, his girlfriend of three years after several days of fighting and tension between the two. The Grosmaire family and the McBride family were very close to each other. It has hard for all of them to deal with Ann's death so they would all meet with each other occasionally in order to be there for each other. The Grosmaire family would even visit Conor in jail.

The Grosmaire family believed strongly in forgiveness and did not want Conor to face the death penalty or life in prison. Before the trials had started on Conor's case, the family stumbled upon a term called restorative justice. This is the process of having all members of a crime come together to discuss what had happened, how it affected each person, and what should be done about it. Restorative justice is used to help the criminal come back from what he/she had done after serving punishment that is necessary to grow, and the punishment must be agreed on by everyone involved. Usually, restorative justice is used in less serious cases such as burglary or vandalism. Before this case, restorative justice had never been used to deal with murder. However, the Grosmaire's insisted that this be done to decide what Conor's punishment would be.

After convincing the state prosecutor to let them decide on a punishment together and then having the ultimate decision made by a judge, the group met and discussed. Although they could not come up with a clear decision, the general term they believed Conor should serve was 5 to 15 years. When the state prosecutor took this proposition to the judge, he upped the term to 20 years with 10 years of probation. Had this group not met beforehand, though, Conor's sentence most likely would have been life in prison or the death penalty.

Restorative justice takes into account both justice that needs to be served to the victim and to the criminal and the ability of the victim and everyone involved to forgive the criminal and gives the criminal the chance to be forgiven. Although restorative justice is not popular, it tends to be a successful method to help everyone that is involved.

Justice Across Nations

The definitions of justice is universal to everyone, no matter what part of the world you live in. However, connotations attached to justice could be different depending on where you live and what type of mindset you have. Therefore, a person's personal beliefs about justice could be very different from someone else's. Religion and the law are two things that have a major affect on what people feel that justice is and how justice should be practiced. For example, a Catholic living in America has to decide for themselves whether they believe the death penalty is truly practicing justice or not. Although it is lawful, it is against the Catholic religion to promote killing human beings.
Conflicts within and between people who live in the same area and practice the same or different religions are typical. It goes to show then that people who live in very different areas and have different laws have even greater conflicts in their views of justice. It is easy for an American police officer to associate justice with the law but what about the Nazis that followed Hitler's order? Did they believe they were serving justice? It is hard to say. Connotations of justice can also change throughout time. When the United States were putting to trial the Nazis after years had passed after the end of World War II, they were trying to bring justice to the Nazis and to the Jewish people they had killed. There are two problems with this, though. The first one is that justice had meant something different to the Nazis when they were fighting for Hitler. They believed that they were doing what was right by following orders, which meant true justice to them. That was what they considered the law. When other country's had stepped in and put an end to the genocide, the Nazis stopped following the previous law and started following the current law: that it was unlawful to kill Jews. Another reason this is a problem is that the United States has very different laws than Germany does, even now after World War II. If justice is the administration of the law and law are different everywhere, how is it fair to the Nazis to be tried under the United States laws when they were just following their orders or laws. This is just one example of how drastically different justice can be, not only across nations but across time periods as well.

The Final Round

This past weekend, I have been honored to be a part of the first group to perform a play titled The Final Round, which was written by Kara Quillard and directed by Danae Jimenez. The play is about the experiences of college roommates who test each other's trust and friendship, especially between the characters of Harley and Bianca. After a major falling out between the two, the girls reunite for a short time many years later to discuss what had happened between them. Although one wants to reconnect and regain their friendship, the other one is resistant and unforgiving.

The Final Round is a relatable show to most college students and centers around the theme of forgiveness. Had Bianca and Harley forgiven each other for what had happened between them, the story would've taken a much different path and they probably would've ended up friends. Bianca, at the end, did try to make up for not trusting Harley earlier in the show which caused a fight between the two. However, Harley could not forgive Bianca for the way she, her best friend, treated her. For this reason, Bianca has a hard time forgiving herself, just like she did for the past couple years after she found out that she had lost Harley as a friend for something that Harley had never done. This can be interpreted in the very last sentences between the two girls in the show. Bianca asks Harley "Are you happy?" and she responds with "Yes. Are you?". From there, Bianca never responds and the show comes to a close. This could mean that she is not happy with her life, which could have been a result of the guilt that was weighing her down from what she had done to Harley. Bianca has not learned to forgive herself and feels that she needs to be forgiven by Harley to release the guilt she feels. Harley's response could mean that, despite losing her best friend, she has moved on with her life and forgiving Bianca will not change whether she is happy or not. She feels that she doesn't need Bianca as a friend to make her happy anymore.

Forgiveness plays a huge role the development of the characters Harley and Bianca and thus creates a theme of forgiveness. Although there isn't a solid moral to this story, there are multiple lessons that can be learned. The moral of this particular aspect of the story and that surrounds the theme of forgiveness is that forgiving yourself for messing up in life can be just as important, if not more important, than being forgiven for something that you have done to someone else. Sometimes, people will not forgive you for mistakes you have made but you can still move on and be happy if you forgive yourself for making that mistake.

Authority Figures

Authority figures are thought to be people who carry out justice. When you think of police officers, teachers, and parents you often think of safety and justice. There are some cases in which authority figures make their personification of justice seem contradictory. For example, Adolf Hitler was an authority figure who convinced his followers to exterminate all Jews. He was setting a type of law for people to follow, yet he was not being ethical. The same goes for parents who abuse their children, teachers who rape their students, and police officers who break the law. These people are all contradicting what they stand up for.

Take, for instance, the movie I Spit On Your Grave. This is a movie about a woman who goes to a small, remote town to get away from people so she could focus on her writing. During her visit there, she encounters a gang of men who assault her. In an attempt to escape from the men, she runs out into the woods, where she runs into some hunters. One hunter, she finds out, is a police officer. He takes her back to her cabin where the men assaulted her and the men, along with the police officer, end up raping her and leaving her out in the woods to die. She trusted the police officer to bring justice to her and to those men but the police officer proved to her to be untrustworthy. In an unfamiliar place, it is easy to trust people who wear uniforms of justice or people who bear titles of justice. However, there are times when this form of judgement proves to be wrong. Although cases like this are probably pretty rare, it is a sad encounter when justice of the law is not administered by those whose job it is to carry out the law, much less be ethical in their practices.