Pick Yourself Back Up

Pick Yourself Back Up

You will meet someone in your life who will be your best friend. You will tell them everything about you, and they will do the same. You will find out their interests, likes, dislikes, passions, and aspirations in life. In the process of learning these things about them, you will feel things you have never felt before. You will find yourself laughing and smiling at everything they do or say. You will feel that they can do no wrong. You will put their needs before your own and give them more than they are capable of giving back. In the process of loving them, you will forget how to love and take care of yourself. After all the good times spent together, their actions and feelings for you change. They will do you wrong, and you will blame yourself because you weren’t enough for them. They will lie to your face repeatedly, and you will justify their choices, saying they were just trying to protect your feelings. They will break your trust, and you will shrug it off, knowing deep down your self-esteem is breaking along with the trust. You will have given them your all, meanwhile you will be only getting a sliver. The time will come when they will say “Its not you, its me”, and it will leave you cold and empty. “Why wasn’t I good enough”, will repeat in your head over and over. The moment will come when you decide to pick yourself back up and you will eventually move on. After all the time spent reflecting on yourself and your decisions, you will understand that you were enough. You will eventually learn to love yourself and enjoy the little things in life again.

          My flash fiction is about a big event in my life that happened recently that has helped shape who I am today. It is my perspective on my toxic relationship with a person whom I loved, and how the situation affected my mental health. I made my flash fiction a little longer because I needed to get the point across about how the entire situation made me feel and show what the result was.

 My self-portrait was a picture of myself next to a mirror and one where I am looking into it. This is supposed to show that I am reflecting on myself, the decisions I made, and the situation I went through. They are in black and white to show the contrast in the situation; it was either his happiness or mine. In the first I am purposefully not looking into the mirror because I am ashamed and embarrassed of my choices throughout the course of my relationship. It also represents how I ignored my mental health in the relationship. In the second picture, I am acknowledging my reflection. I am purposefully looking into the mirror to show that I am focusing on myself and reflecting on my choices in the situation. The connection between the two pictures is to show my growth as an individual after the event took place. These two pieces connect with personality because I connected the results of my personality test we took in class to them. My personality test told me I give others much more than I am capable of receiving and I am too busy giving other people my all and I completely forget about myself in the process.

They say/I say

It is often said by people that they don’t have bias, even I believed that. But, behavioral scientists have proven that to be false. Everyone has bias in some way, shape or form. Social scientists have called this unconscious motivation to believe our way is right as “motivated reasoning”. Motivated reasoning is an emotion-bias decision-making phenomenon studied in cognitive science and social psychology. I believe everyone has a bias, but people should know when and when not to use it.
In the TED Talk "How do we overcome bias? Walk boldly toward them.", Verna Meyers states, " I leaned on bias that I didn't even know I had" (Meyers). She demonstrates that sometimes as human beings, we don't even realize we have bias unless we really think about it. Even though she believes that we should overcome bias, she still admits to having it. Also, in the TED Talk, "Why you think you're right even when you're wrong", Julia Galef introduces two different mindsets, the "soldier and scout". With these metaphors, she talks about how people do have bias, but the difference between the two mindsets, is how they overcome or deal with their bias. The "soldier" mindset tries to defend or attack an idea because it goes against their bias. The "scout" mindset has bias, but chooses to see both sides in hope to see the world as clearly as they possibly can. She also states that, "our judgement is strongly influenced unconsciously by which side we want to win" (Galef), which means our bias influences our lives and decision making, whether we like it or not. Our brain is programmed to have bias.
From this class, I have learned that everyone has bias, but we can choose to act on that bias, or ignore it and see both sides to the story. Bias doesn't make you a bad person, it makes you human. We took implicit bias tests and the results definitely changed my perspective on bias. My results found bias I didn't even know I had. I do believe everyone has bias in their own ways, but we should find out how to overcome that bias in certain situations. It is important to know when and when not to use  your bias so you don't misinform yourself or others.