Read All About It

I had a few ideas for my first ever blog, but they were all garbage. I had a lot of work to do and I was getting nowhere so what do I do? I put my earphones in and block out the world with one of my favorite songs, Read All About it by Emeli Sande. The song was in the middle of "if no one ever hears it how we gonna learn your song?" when a light bulb went off in my head. 

This week, in class we discussed the book The Glass castle, written by Jeannette Walls. Walls portrays to her readers her past through her writing; the poverty, the alcoholic father, the sexual harassment, everything. After years of hardship, Jeannette was finally able to build up enough courage and escape to New York where she gets a fresh start; a new life. There, she wrote and published her memoir, finally ready to let the world read all about it. A group of young talented dancers, using a shadow theme, choreographed a play on the song Read All About It. 

 The connection between this song and the memoir is that both the protagonists express their struggles through storytelling and use resilience to lead a happy life. They turned their sad memories into a work of art. Also, they portray that unless you are not human, there is always going to be a point in our lives where we are faced with a difficult choice or sacrifice. What we must do is stand our ground and face it. Just deal with it. In the play, the wife loses her husband in a war and is left alone to raise their child. Though the mother is broken from the inside, she does not let it eat her whole. Instead, she and her daughter "sing away the blues" and stand up to the wind of hardships. In this shadow theatre, the war signaled the end of a life, but also the start of a new one. The mother used her traumatic experience as a life lesson and found a solution to surpass it. Finding strength and comfort from each other, the mother and her daughter used "the light to fight the shadows". 

In one of the TED talks, a man writes how " life will throw you your share of curve balls all the time. But it is your choice and reaction that you can either get hit by it on your face, miss it or lean into it and whack the hell out of it" (Sayeed 9). Do something, but do not give up (I know that sounded cliché, but I do believe that it is accurate), or else it will be like you are giving in to your fears. Life is too short to be wallowing over something, just confront it and get it over with.