While attending
the ALANA Welcome Back Dance, reading “The Birthmark,” by
Nathaniel Hawthorne, understanding
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and carefully analyzing “I
Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth, I related the word “appreciation”
to my everyday life. According to Webster’s dictionary, appreciation is
gratitude or thankful recognition towards something. While this is true,
appreciation to me is more about understanding why you’re thankful for what you
have or have been given. And in my situation appreciation didn’t come along
until after I realized what I left behind.
On
Friday evening I attended a party on Loyola’s campus with some of my roommates.
As soon as we arrived we noticed students engaging with one another while
dancing and talking. Although the event wasn’t filled to capacity I could tell
everyone enjoyed just being around one another. But, I just couldn’t seem to
enjoy the excitement. Watching everyone around me mingle and have a good time
only made me miss my hometown more. It made me miss my family and friends more
then I had before. These weren’t new thoughts that I had running through my
head, they were old thoughts just being brought up again.
Never
would I have thought that I would appreciate my hometown and the people in my
life as much as I do until I moved to Loyola. It’s the little things that I
miss the most. And I’m ashamed to say that it took me months to understand. Did
it really take seeing others having fun with their friends to make me miss
mines? Yes, it did. I should have paid more attention to what was around me
while I had the chance.
Growing
up as a child one of my older friends at my school use to tell me “You never
know what you have until it’s gone.” And I thought about this quote while
reading both “The Birthmark” and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In both situations a
male lover rejects and criticizes their significant other for reasons that
didn’t quite make sense to me. By doing so they caused a tragic outcome.
Although both stories didn’t say how the lovers felt after the outcome, I can
surely imagine. In “The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the male lover
refuses to marry the girl he loves because of a birthmark on her face. He
continues to tell her that he will remove the birthmark then marry her. During
the procedure to take away the birthmark, something goes wrong and his lover
dies. If he had appreciated her for who she was and looked beyond her
birthmark, she would have still been there with him to engage in matrimony.
Along with the lover in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins who
rejected his wife. He continued to lock her in a room because of an illness he
claimed she had. As time went on the narrator becomes insane and mentally
disabled. If her lover did not belittle her and forbid her to do anything, this
would not have happened. Although the lover in this story might not have wanted
to appreciate his wife at least if he tried, things would have been a lot
better.
In
conclusion, relating my appreciation to the appreciation in these stories might
sound completely opposite. Now that I have learned to appreciate what I need
to, I can go back and fix things. Unlike the men in these stories who can never
turn back the clock. But, just like the speaker in “ I Wandered Lonely As a Child,”
it took my mind time to wander before I could notice the important things. It
is completely amazing to me how things can be right in front of us and we never
even notice. But it is real life situations or events like the one I
encountered on Friday that help people open their eyes and finally notice what
was in front of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment