How I Survive
What are your secret survival strategies?
How I Survive
It takes a lot for me to survive in today's society. What I have done is improve. Today, I have more people I can call friends than ever before. I have gained speaking skills when I used to stumble through my words, and I’d say I have become half funny.
I have learned that it is important to make friends to get through life. At first, I didn’t find the point. I could just drift through school, get good grades, and talk to my parents at home. I later learned that there are some things that I don’t want to tell my parents, some things that they don’t understand, and most importantly, I just can’t be silent all day, keeping what I want to say inside. My unfunny jokes, opinions on teachers, and the upcoming basketball game.
Once I learned this I of course needed to make friends, but I did not know how. The way I chose to make friends was through sports. In basketball you spend hours each day with a small number of people. These people are forced to be your friends. You get to know them exceptionally well, whether you like it or not.
Basketball was a good way for me to learn to speak in a group. At this time I only knew how to speak one-on-one and never knew when to intervene with my own ideas and points. Admittedly during my first year of basketball I did not say much. During this time whether, I knew it or not, I learned how people talked and more importantly, what I should not say.
During the second basketball season I made friends. We never really talked much outside of basketball, but they were people I could talk and complain to. I could complain how I wasn’t getting playing time or talk about random stuff that stays in those rooms forever.
Track is where I made my good friends. By sheer luck I met Deven as he also does track. He has been a great friend who shares many hobbies. He is the friend I can go to if I have problems, questions, or just want to talk.
Through Deven I truly understood the use for a friend. He was kind, calming, and someone who had similar goals through track.
Both of these events were not done through my skill of speaking, but through other people being almost forced to get to know me. I have used these public hobbies to develop more friends, although it was not the initial goal.
I also spend a great deal of effort getting away from situations I do not like and there are a lot of them. When there is a topic I am not interested in, or I do not feel as if I have something useful to say, I’ll walk away. Sometimes I’ll pretend to go to the bathroom. Sometimes I’ll just get a drink of water from the farthest drinking fountain.
In this respect I have not mastered social interactions; I am helpless when I do not know the topic, I do not know what questions to ask, or when I should pivot the conversation. I am far from truly understanding what I am expected to do in social situations, but at least now I have put myself in social situations.
I wonder what will happen senior year, when Deven leaves and the soon to be Juniors will be further forced into my life. I predict that I will have more situations where I walk away as the current Juniors become more tired and frustrated, and the future Juniors become more entrenched in our school lives.
Hi Tucker! Nice essay. I really liked how you showed the reader how your social skills progressed through Uni, and what helped you improve them. I think one thing you could work on was adding a little more perspective. You mention how before, you didn't really see the point in friends, but now you do. It'd be cool if you wanted to emphasize that point a little more. Furthermore, maybe you could add a little more sentence length variance? You have a lot of long sentences. I really liked how you bring in specific examples such as Deven and Basketball. The way you describe them really brings the essay alive. Great job!
ReplyDeletehowdy doodle.
ReplyDeleteimmediate notes, there are some grammar issues, especially with punctuation, in places like 'once i learned this i of course needed to make friends' and 'during the second basketball season i made friends,' along with random other places scattered throughout. I would give it a once-over for checking punctuation.
on a more step by step read, I think there's a few places that feel awkward. The first paragraph has 'Today, i have...' to 'I have gained...' leaving a strange hesitance in the flow of the sentences. I feel inclined to suggest that you combine the two, but i'm not entirely sure. Also, the 'What I have done is improve' on its own feels a tiny bit off. I think you need to expand more before and after that sentence to have it feel more impactful, cause you grow your paragraph off of it in the following sentences. In the second paragraph, while the sentence is already long, i feel like a colon would work better than a period in between the last two sentences. For the third paragraph, besides the necessary punctuation, I think it's very abrupt to going from saying you didn't know how to make friends to immediately telling us how you made friends, and I think you need to slow down there. Also, the collection of quick, short sentences in the basketball part of your essay doesn't seem to fit the tone there. I would again suggest slowing down and combining some sentences (an 'and' between the 'forced to be your friends' and 'get to know them' sentences?) and probably also the two paragraphs imo. I was also a little lost when you just jumped immediately into track and left the basketball idea behind, since you didn't really set it up before sending the reader into it, so I think you need to at least mention it somewhere and lightly build to it before the transition while also giving basketball a more full conclusion. Some questions I had were 'was basketball an unsatisfactory sport for making friends?' and 'did you keep the friends you made in basketball or do you just not talk to them anymore?'. I think both could work for personal reflection. That said, the track section (and the short screen time Deven gets) feels like there's good stuff behind it (which is actually true of most of the essay, which I'll address at the end). I see the area near the end where you recognize areas where you still haven't figured it all out, but I feel like it doesn't necessarily have to be as long as it is, especially as you're trying to close out this long essay. I feel you could definitely make that whole part shorter and then make the section where you reflect on your possible social future a little deeper and longer.
As a whole, I think the essay is a lot. You really get at your entire growth process of learning to make/making friends at Uni, and while I think it's cool, you do take a vast swath of material and sort of chip at the surface. I think the essay might work better if you narrow down your focus (maybe your experience in basketball or track or your friendship with deven or full focus on your growth) and then go deep on that, getting some good personal reflection in with it too. I also wanted a lot better structure/pacing/flow in the essay throughout, as it seemed to jump through a lot of topics quickly, and closed awkwardly. However, I do believe there's a lot of good stuff behind all this, and you just need to dig at it. :)
thank you for the detailed reply
Delete