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Personal growth and development essay
Personal growth reflection essay
Personal growth reflection essay
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No matter what task is at hand, no one can do it alone. Even small daily things like working and handling a restaurant require more than one person. The short story “Pancakes”, by Joan Bauer, follows Jill, a waitress, and how her normal day suddenly goes wrong in the Ye Olde Pancake House. Jill is a perfectionist; she always strives and wants the best out of herself and others. She believes any task can be done with perfect work. However, one waitress is not enough for the masses of people coming to the pancake house. Being overrun with customers, Jill finally cannot handle it all and realizes that perfection is unattainable. Even though she is dependable, Jill is bossy and too perfectionist, showing that expecting the best can lead to the worst.
Jill’s dependability is the reason of her confident approach to all of her tasks. During her job interview at the pancake house, Jill sets the tone, assuring the owner over and over again about her capabilities. She is also very confident in explaining her system of order and her knack of alphabetizing condiments. Hearing this, the owner, Howard Halloran, remarks that he would die happy if Jill was half as competent as she looked. After the whole conversation, the owner replies, “ ‘You’re hired,’ Howard Halloran said reverently, and put me in charge of opening and setting up the restaurant on Saturday and Sunday mornings, which is when nine-tenths of all pancakes in the universe are consumed and you don’t want some systemless person at the helm” (Bauer 196). Jill is familiar in being a crucial part of success, and she is ready to step in and achieve it. In her childhood, Jill moves quite a lot, and being organized and orderly becomes her way to adapt and have some stability. She always ...
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...not knowing the trouble he’s caused me” (Bauer 201). Jill, always wanting her customers to be satisfied and the restaurant perfect, takes the time to talk to the customer and even bring it back to the chef. Jill prides herself on being perfect and believes in herself, but being perfect takes too long in her case.
What seemed handleable at first spirals out of control, and through her dependability, Jill’s bossiness and perfectionism become more prominent as they lead to her eventual demise. Each of her individual traits builds up to attack her from the inside as she becomes more and more flustered. Using Jill as an example, author Joan Bauer shows how perfectionism is unattainable and can become a nag to attaining goals. Although Jill has the right meaning, her expectations are set to impossible heights and thus topple on top of her as soon as one thing goes wrong.
Anderson’s incompetence with language and household problems were due to the translation and understanding of a new culture. Barbara’s confusion of flour with sugar caused her meat loaf to be a disaster. The two words were very similar in Denmark. She also failed to understand the use of a timer. Her incompetence was a blessing because it showed she couldn’t be a threat to the community. The chief pilot’s wife, who had eluded attempts of an interview, agreed to one and also offered personal cooking lessons.
When nothing is going right in life, what do you do? Do you just quit and hope for the best or do you pick yourself up and work even harder to succeed? Iliana Roman, a single mother of three children and an owner of a hair salon, kindles the message that individuals who face adversity can still persevere in life. According to Roman’s memoir “First Job”, it is never too late to turn your life around. At seventeen years, old Roman unexpectedly became pregnant. This event led to Roman’s life changing completely causing her to drop out of high school. She was nearly to the point of no return, she simply could not hold down a proper job, and the only way to support herself and her child is working three to four odd jobs every week. Roman presents her message of persevering in life by incorporating hyperbole, repetition, and pathos.
Throughout a person’s lifetime, an individual will have encountered an array of people with different qualities that make up their personalities. In general, people who are characterized as strong-willed are the one who have the initiative and they are risk takers. Also, they deviate from normalcy by looking for something new, different, or other ways of doing things because of the tedious situations they wound up in. As once Philosopher David Hume stated two hundred and fifty years ago that unlike those who deviate from the world of normalcy and clichés, most of the people go on with their lives in a “dogmatic slumber… so ensnared in conventional notions of just about everything that we don’t see anything; we just rehearse what we’ve been told is there” (Rosenwasser 4). In the anecdotal piece “Terwilliger Bunts One”, Annie Dillard has expressed her feelings and emotions towards her mother. Writing from the first person point of view, Annie Dillard also explains to her audience the attitude her mother took through many different circumstances and anecdotes that Dillard revealed thus admiring the personality of her mother as a child. By mentioning the qualities that her mother possesses, she is putting the spotlight on the impact her mother has made on her life using her parenting philosophy. The first parenting philosophy Dillard’s mother has taught her is to be very expressive in everything using surprising and strange-sounding words as part of the observation to other people. As Dillard recalls in her story, it happened when her mother heard the announcer on the radio cried out “Terwilliger Bunts one” and she started using this phrase as part of her “surprising string of syllables… for the next seven or eight years” (Dillard). ...
She has a secret dream of writing romance novels that no one, except her teacher, Mr. P, had known about. The book explains, "People just don 't live and hide in basements if they 're happy" (Alexie 39). Mary was not happy where she was at, she would not let anyone read her pieces of writing. Skip downing states in his article, “ Victims are people who do not feel they are in control of the outcomes in their lives” (Downing 42). The way she acted made it seem like she was not confident in what she had been doing. Victims, like Mary, feel they are stuck and that they have to support which makes their ability to reach their goals fall short. Mr. P explains, "She always thought people would make fun of her" (Alexie 37). All this has shown that being in the basement and not pursuing her dreams had taken a toll on her. Mary never acted different than
For so long she has been around what she saw as the destination for her life, which was success and happiness, in the lifelong family friends the Lowells. She assumed they were just given this life without ever thinking they had to work as hard as she did to get there, consequently envy and resentment ensued. The resentment started with the whole family and then got more intense and personal when it came to the daughter of the Lowells, Parker, someone Andrea could identify with on a personal level. This story illustrated for us the unseen factors and repercussions that too much ambition to be accepted by anyone can have one's long lasting development into their own person. This journey to prove who you are to others can lead to intense emotions and motives that aren’t normal yours and can cause you to lose sight of the very person you’re trying to prove that you
It’s a beautiful sunny morning in New York City; families and couples wake up, shower and tend to their daily responsibilities. All the husbands across the world go and wake up their children, turn the coffee maker on and start making homemade pancakes for everyone. The wives wake up and immediately check their work emails, hop in the shower and suit up for the day of work that lies ahead of them. The wife kisses her husband on the cheek, grabs a pancake with her bare hand, grabs the coffee that her husband made her, her briefcase and is out the door with a blink of an eye. The husband stays behind in the kitchen, cleans the dishes from breakfast, makes the kids lunches, sends them off on the bus and then retreats back home to start some cleaning, laundry and make dinner. Now, majority of people may be reading this and think, “Wait a minute, this
The husband was also selfish in his actions. With good intentions, the wife had planned a surprise for him, but he was not pleased. “Instead, he was hotly embarrassed, and indignant at his wife for embarrassing him” (13). When the narrator describes the husband at the beginning, he has a “self-satisfied face” (3). Embarrassment is a result of feeling self-conscious. Because of his self-conscious nature, he assesses first how the few people in the restaurant will view him because of his wife’s actions. He does not prioritize appreciation for his wife’s effort and care, but rather sees the worst in her misguided actions. The husband’s selfishness causes him to be prideful, which in turn causes him to destroy his relationship with his wife through his actions.
Her husband rejects the idea of her having any social interaction and does not allow her to have contact with anyone other than himself and Jeanie. She attempts to write for entertainment but she becomes too tired and soon the only source of entertainment for the Narrator is the wallpaper. She begins to look for patterns to ease her
She continues in this sequel to talk about the abuse she faced and the dysfunction that surrounded her life as a child and as a teen, and the ‘empty space’ in which she lived in as a result. She talks about the multiple personalities she was exhibiting, the rebellious “Willie” and the kind “Carol”; as well as hearing noises and her sensory problems. In this book, the author puts more emphasis on the “consciousness” and “awareness” and how important that was for her therapeutic process. She could not just be on “auto-pilot” and act normal; the road to recovery was filled with self-awareness and the need to process all the pieces of the puzzle—often with the guidance and assistance of her therapist. She had a need to analyze the abstract concept of emotions as well as feelings and thoughts. Connecting with others who go through what she did was also integral to her
Charlotte will never be anything but a wife and mother with no room to become a writer. Dependent on her husband for emotional support as well as financial support, Charlotte did not outwardly disagree with John's diagnosis. Without much protest, Charlotte stays in one room for fear of being sent to Dr. Mitchell's for the Rest Cure. (4) Trapped in a room with no aesthetic pleasure, she was left to her own thoughts. Societal norms said th...
Loud.” The staff was not comfortable with her habit of singing at the top of her lungs, bossing other, more experienced women around, and extolling to the crew how great her abilities were in the kitchen. The old crew clearly had certain norms that each member followed, and disruptive behavior was not one of them. In short, these factors adversely affected kitchen staff morale and performance. The staff harbored great resentments toward the management, fellow personnel, and the new allocation of tasks.
Social pressure to raise pleasant, good mannered children who become grounded and productive adults has been a driving influence for many generations. If our children do not fit into this mold then we’re considered failures are parents. Emily’s mother is tormented by the phone call which sets off a wave of maternal guilt. Emily’s mother was young and abandoned by her husband while Emily was still an infant so she had to rely on only herself and the advice of others while she raised her daughter. After Emily was born her mother, “with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, (I) did like the books said. Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed.” (Olsen 174). Then when Emily was two she went against her own instincts about sending Emily to a nursery school while she worked which she considered merely “parking places for children.” (Olsen 174). Emily’s mother was also persuaded against her motherly instincts to send her off to a hospital when she did not get well from the measles and her mother had a new baby to tend to. Her mother even felt guilt for her second child, Susan, being everything society deemed worthy of attention. Emily was “thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blond replica of Shirley Temple.” (Olsen, 177) she was also neither “glib or quick in a world where glibness and quickness were easily confused with ability to learn.” (Olsen 177), which her sister Susan had in
The first thing readers see on a novel is its title; therefore, its significance cannot be neglected. First and foremost, it grabs readers’ attention immediately. Why does Carrie Mac use “the opposite of tidy” instead of “messy”? Messy means dirty and disordered, while “the opposite of tidy” gives readers room for imagination. It can be interpreted as dirty, chaotic, disorganized, both physically and mentally. Since the original title covers a much wider topic, it is obviously better than one word “messy”. In addition, this title foreshadows the the importance of self-control: it decides your life. If you make the same mistake as ...
The Perfectionist is the oldest child. Miss Perfection has been the center of attention since the moment of conception. The parents just know that this child would be the smartest, most compassionate, most beautiful child ever born on the face of the earth. The parents then pour all their energies into making sure this is true. The child then decides that this is what life is like. The oldest child believes that their hair has to always be perfect with a hair bow that is the exact shade of their carefully chosen ensemble. Their schoolwork reflects th...
The store is famous for selling fresh burgers, fries, chilies, and above all, frostys. Hierarchy is presented in the store, due to the general manager being the “top dog”, the shift managers being under, and then the crew members. The managers consist of 4 females and one male. Gender role is prominent in this fast food environment as well. Each male and female is assigned to a specific task in the store, simply because of their gender. The male and female differences clearly involve both physical and emotional factors. Certain influences may arise from psychological factors, such as the upbringing, or physical factors, such as a crew member’s ability to perform a certain task. More commonly, males perform task such as mopping the floors, taking out the trash, picking up heavy items and operating the grill. On the other hand, females are more prone to interact with the customers, such as cashier, drive thru order take, and remembering to keep a smile on their face. All roles completed by both male and females contribute to the success of the