Brave New WOrld
Images
Am I thin enough? Pinching at my sides, staring at unwanted fat, disgusting thighs. It wasn’t always this way, but that was before the magazines made us question our appearance, before the t.v. attracted attention to the waist, before the posters made illness beautiful. Perfect people wearing perfect bodies, laden in layers named desire and gross effort. Imperfection lies within only myself, it seems. The others smiling in ecstasy, their bodies, faces, clothing, granting euphoria. It wasn’t always expected, being brought up into perfection. But, that was before the beauty turned us ugly. Before the truth was written out of our lives and replaced with arsenic, replaced with disgustingly sweet lies. But I can’t think this way. Am I pretty enough? Posters of models decorate the walls, lips plump and lashes long. Not a pore on their face, not a flaw within sight. The word desire isn’t strong enough to compare to the feeling. Iridescent eyes. Crimson lips. Porcelain skin. Delicate neck. Perfectly thin bodies beautifully adorned. Glass fingers. Smooth legs. Mile high heels. It’s not a want anymore, it’s no longer a desire. It’s a craving, it’s a need. You can’t ignore it. Am I good enough? Perfect head for a perfect body. Flawless beyond belief. Driven into a beautiful madness by expectations forced into reality. Little red lines hidden by white lies, undiscovered by ignorant truth. Of course the sound of all of this silence is overwhelming, but you can ignore it once you look again at the posters lining the walls, flashing on the screen, bodies creating misshapen lines on the street. This is society. This is our way of life. Euphoria in a reflection. I am I, and I wish I wasn’t. So I will not be. |
Project Reflection The greatest challenge in this project was finding ways to relate this book to the world currently, so I could find something to attach to in the book. Brave New World was a complex book with hard to understand sentences and a strange writing flow, so it was hard for me to find a word or a phrase I could relate to and connect to. When I’m reading, I have to find a character or a theme in the book I can relate to or see currently in the world. And yes, in Brave New World, there were televisions hanging off ceilings, and we have televisions like that now. But it’s not the same as feeling something. For example, I read the quote, “I am I, and I wish I wasn’t” and that clicked in me and made me want to keep reading, and keep reading. I struggled in the first four chapters up until I read that line. So I had some sort of motivation to continue reading.
I feel like I have grown as a student through this project. Through having to meet deadlines and have to create journals and all of this work I had to do, I was able to learn a lot of time management skills and figure out how to do a certain thing and juggle another thing. I feel like I’m a pretty good student here, but through this project, I’ve been able to feel more comfortable in the classroom scene of just sitting there and reading, and writing my thoughts, and analyzing them even if I didn’t completely enjoy the content. I didn’t really enjoy parts of Brave New World, and didn’t really want to read into anything. It seemed silly to think too much about something I didn’t enjoy. But I had to give thoughtful information I gathered from this, so I had to kind of take a deep breath and do it, so that’s what I did. I learned to go into depth with things I never really wanted to go into depth on, and I feel like that will really help me in the future with just about anything. When I return to Animas as a sophomore, I really want to remember that you can find aspects in books or in pieces of writing or just about anything through shifting your perspective slightly, or catching those subtle hints that almost lie between the lines. I based my project off of body image, and that was suggested in Brave New World as a very important thing. You always looked good, were young, felt good. You were never ugly. And so I related that back to our world and how we struggle to be this image of beauty, and was able to really create something I’m proud of through finding those “hidden things” within the book. I was able to create a poem I’m really proud of, and an art piece I produced through saying, “I feel like the end of my poem results in suicide” and was able to create that charred suicide note. I really want to remember that perspective is the largest part of any project, and that will not only help you enjoy it, but also help you create beautiful and thoughtful work. hen I return here next year, I really do not want to step into humanities and just see what’s on the surface; I want to read into it and I want to discover more and more about it all until I feel like I’ve analyzed everything I could. I don’t want to forget that. I am most proud of finding something I feel strongly about and translated that into this project. Brave New World is not about body image, but a theme in the book is an image based society. I pulled that straight out and analyzed it all. I am most proud of my poem and the fact I was able to make a piercing piece of writing where I really could spill out my emotions and my thoughts, and also have that as a project and something anyone could look at and read. I was at a loss of what I wanted to do at the beginning of this project, and I love writing poetry, so I decided, why not? I drafted an emotional piece and took it in to the classroom, feeling really self conscious about it. I was afraid it was silly. But when I was praised on it, I felt that, yes, I can do this. So I just jumped at it and created something I am really proud of. All the struggle I went through and all the work I put into this created a really beautiful piece of work that I’m very proud of. |