Archive XXX: How Change affects the Self or A Summer with a Pencil

Hello, once again. It is I, your ancestor, Julia Furman. This archive will discuss my opinions on change. I usually don’t like change, as I am (well, in this case, was) one who liked to follow a routine. The only kind of surprises I liked were the kind you get on birthdays and Christmas, and the twist endings in mystery novels. However, in retrospect, some changes had a very good effect on me as a person, making me the lovable (yet EXTREMELY quirky) person I was at the time. However, I know for a fact that some aren’t so lucky, and a change can completely ruin their lives.

I know an example of one of these life-changing moments, but it didn’t actually happen. Not in real life anyway. It happened in The Yellow Birds, a novel by Kevin Powers. Before I go into the details, I would like to give some background on The Yellow Birds. The novel follows Private John Bartle and Private Daniel Murphy, two soldiers in the Iraq War, and the bond they formed during their time together. The book has received a lot of praise in my day, but I personally found reading the book very soul crushing and torturous. I was really sensitive, and reading through the more graphic sections were painful for me. For example, a soldier and an old woman were killed off in the first chapter, and it didn’t get better from there. However, I do like the way Kevin Powers described the scenes. They had a poetic feel to them, which I admired. I also appreciate how it displays the mental effects of being in a war. This makes sense, since Kevin Powers himself was a soldier in the Iraq War too.

With that out of the way, the change in this case is the death of Murphy, and the effect it has on Bartle. Spoiler alert, Murphy does die. It’s actually revealed very early in the book. Anyway, Murphy’s death had many impacts on Bartle. Two of them are the deterioration of Bartle’s mental state and the new sense of responsibility he felt for the life of his fallen friend. In the beginning of the book, Bartle made a promise to Murphy’s mother that he would bring her son home safely from the war. While he didn’t take it very seriously at first, after Murphy died, he felt more at fault for the life he promised to protect. This caused him to feel guilty (obviously), and on top of the stress that comes from fighting in wars that I can only imagine, Bartle’s mental state started to deteriorate. There was literally a part where he imagined himself dying. I take that as him thinking that he should have died, which is not a sign of a sane mind.

This change just happened to have a negative impact. Change can also have a positive impact. For example, I have a personal story about how a change in my world impacted me in a positive way. The story is about how a knee replacement and a boring summer helped me make progress on my personal writing projects. For the record, I was not the one who got the knee replacement, my mom did. The story starts, when my mom was 14. She tore cartilage in her knee. After two surgeries to remove the torn cartilage, one at 16 and another at 21, it was time for her to get it replaced. For the first couple weeks, she couldn’t really get in her car, so we didn’t really go anywhere that summer, and we hung around the house a lot. I helped mom around the house, but when I wasn’t doing that, I did small things to occupy my time. As I mentioned before, one thing I did was write. I had just started writing novel-like stories the January of that year, when I was in eighth grade. The project I was working on at the time, and that I’m still working on at the time of this recording, is a series based on the popular sandbox video game, Minecraft. I won’t go over the main plot of the series too much, as there are other archives that go into more detail. However, it features the main characters solving the mysteries of their home while fighting to save it. One particular mystery is that of the red dragon, which was extinct for years until a baby red dragon hatched at the end of the first book, A Legend Reborn. Fun Fact: The red dragon was planned to be in the actual game, but it was removed. The series has 28 books in total, and over the course of that summer, I managed to finish the first and second ones, and start the third one. I feel that the experience has made me a better writer, and I am grateful for the progress I made.

This is a rough draft of the second book in the series, Miners of the West Sea. For more information on what I wrote, see the other archives, if they are not extremely popular in your time. Otherwise, you can probably easily find them.

As you can see, I believe that change has many effects on the self. Change can be negative, but it can also help one grow, or even discover or improve something about themselves. I wonder how much the future has changed since my time, as I most likely won’t live to see it. Honestly, I worry about the future a lot. I suppose if one, the earth isn’t destroyed, two, we haven’t been invaded by aliens, three, robots don’t rule the world, four, the country isn’t composed of a capital and 13 districts and every year, a young boy and girl are gathered to fight in a battle to the death filmed on live TV, or five, any other dystopian future scenarios thought up by us in the past have not come true, I’m sure it’s not that bad.