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The "self" Good or Otherwise

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The “Self” Good or Otherwise

When going through life, we all have the option of blending in or standing out from what everyone else are doing or what they look like. This is commonly known as conformity. Conformity is the ability to blend into society without standing out in your own way. Most people will choose this path because it is the easiest one to do while others try their hardest to stand out from the crowd. Not one of these is the right thing to do, it is just the choice we have. Sometimes, however, these are problems in your life to make it very difficult to conform to society. The Graveyard Book and Aftermath are perfect examples of the way things get in the way of people trying to conform to society.

Throughout The Graveyard Book, there are many instances when Bod has the opportunity to conform in many different settings. When he first goes to the graveyard, he does not have the option to conform or not because he is just a baby. He has to conform because his family is gone, and he has nowhere else to go. WHen he begins to grow up however, there are many things he has to think about. He learns that he is really alive while the people that have been caring for him are not. This would be a hard thing for anyone to find out. When Bod found this news out, he knew he had to make the decision to continue to conform to the people around him, or go the opposite way and try to conform to the people that he should be around. He made his decision to try to live his life in the graveyard even though the people around him were so much different from him. When he could live in the graveyard no longer, he had to go from one set of people to the people on the outside of the graveyard. He now had to conform to a new set of standards in the real world. Before Bod left the graveyard, Mother Slaughter said, “You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it” (p. 298). This shows that people are always conforming to the different situations they are put in, and there is nothing they can do about it. When you change you have to just be the best you that you can be.

This leads me to the story Aftermath. This story took a different approach to conformity, but they both have the same concept. In the story, Susan J. Brison believes that after surviving something traumatic in your life, you will not be able to be the same person. In the reading, she talks about some events that shows how people went through certain things and cannot function the same as before the trauma. It is not uncommon for someone to go through a big trauma at some point in their life. Whether you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, or simply going about your day as you would normally, you never know when you will encounter a trauma.She describes a time when she was on a peaceful walk when she was attacked from the back, sexually assaulted, and left for the dead in a creek bed. She did not wake up thinking “something is going to happen to me today,” she just wanted to go for a walk and ended up having one of the worst days of her life. After the attack,

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