Humayra

n the book Willow, by Julia Hoban, Willow’s parents end up dying in a car crash when Willow was driving. After that horrible calamity, Willow starts to cut herself with a razor blade because it seems like that is the only cure for her emotional pain. However, when she meets Guy, a boy as sensitive and complicated as her, she starts making decisions she would never do or even think of. The pain Willow feels physically is a distraction to the pain she feels emotionally, while overcoming her greatest fears, Willow starts to change from the day she meets Guy because she realizes that cutting isn’t the only cure for emotional pain, Guy understands Willow’s problems more than anyone else because he knows how to step in another person’s shoes and understand their way of thinking.

The pain Willow feels physically is a distraction to the pain she feels emotionally. Furthermore, when Willow cuts herself, it’s not like she’s doing it to kill herself, she’s doing it because she can’t cope with what happened to her parents; she’s saving herself. For instance, when Willow tells Guy about the first time she cuts herself, she says, “‘This pain, this physical pain, was flowing through my veins like heroin, and I was numb, immune to the rest of it. I couldn’t feel anything but pain, and I knew that I had found a way to save myself,’” (p.222). This verifies that physical pain is a distraction to her emotional pain because hurting herself makes her not think about her parent’s death and not thinking about her parent’s death saves herself. Because she doesn’t feel anything else than pain when she cuts, the pain helps her calm down and doesn’t make her cry which she can’t stand. Now that she found a way to save herself, she frequently cuts in order to ...

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...f when she desperately wants to eat something. She brings herself pain just like Willow did because someone she loved died. Both characters in the end realize that bringing themselves pain isn’t the only cure in their situation. Willow and Lia struggle throughout their story but at the end, they learn a valuable lesson; pain isn’t the only thing you can give to yourself when you’ve done something horrible. In the real world, people cut themselves mostly for the same reason Willow did; to distract the emotional pain. When someone harms themselves, a chemical called endorphins, a natural pain reliever, is released in the brain. This causes people a happy feeling, just like how it controlled Willow. Everyone handles and feels depression in different ways. Willow thought she could handle her emotions by cutting, but with Guy by her side, she handles her emotions better.