Some Hoops

Some Hoops

            If you know me then you would know that I use to not have a lot of self-confidence, overtime it has gotten a lot better just because of my friends and certain situations that I have been put in. This story is one of the situations that my good friend Robert helped me build up my confidence and gave me some great advice.

One night my friends decided they wanted to go and play basketball at the church gym so they sent me a text message and asked if I wanted to go. At first I was a little hesitant to go but my friends finally talked me into going. I finally got there and they had already started playing, I knew them already so I knew that they were a whole lot better than me at basketball. I was talking to my buddy Robert and I was telling that I didn't really want to play because I wasn't that good. He told me that if I tried my hardest no one could complain. So we all started playing and at first I was doing terrible but as we kept playing I started to get better and better. My team did not win the first game but we did end up winning the next one, which made me feel pretty good. He came up to me after the game with this look of I told you so on his face and all he said was, “are you glad you came now?”, I was so tired and out of breath that all I could do was give him a little smirk and a small chuckle.

This memory sticks out to me because for many reasons. The first reason is because my friend taught one of the most valuable lessons that I now know today, that no matter what it is you’re doing whether its school, a job or something as small as playing basketball, that as long as you try your hardest at what you’re doing that you cannot really be ashamed of yourself for that. I know it was a weird lesson to get out of that whole situation but now I have a lot more self-confidence.  The second was that I actually one a game of basketball which didn't hurt at all.

This did not happen that long ago but I have remembered it ever since and will remember it for a long time.

Stitches and The Psyche

My original paper about Stitches: A Memoir was about the relationships between David, the main character, and his family. My research paper is going to be focused more on the psychological impact of the types of relationships the family had with each other.  What I’m hoping to get out of this paper is that there is a psychological reason behind the relationship of David and his mother. Hopefully answering questions like why she was so distant towards David and why she hated him. And to see if maybe the pattern of abuse from his mother comes from her past with her mother and her family or if it could have come from something else. Hopefully the more I research the more I can find about where these tendencies come from and if they can be traced back to a past relationship.

 My research is mainly coming from sources from the library database esources including the Gale database and other sites. One of the sources that I have found talks about how domestic violence can affect a young child’s emotional state. It also talks about how domestic violence comes shows on the child in many things like drawings. The children’s drawings would show either their parents abusing them or how it made them feel. 

Another source that I have found starts off with some theories behind domestic violence and the impact it has on the children.  It also talks about the different types of feeling that the children have that are going through domestic violence including anxiety, fear and dread. And also explaining the fear that the children have that they might not ever escape the violence in the home and how that fear can affect the relationships the children have later on in their lives.

So the research paper is going to mainly be about the relationship between David and his mother. Whether or not that relationship had a major effect on the rest of his life.