"Friends"

Flash Fiction:

Hey you, don’t walk down those stairs, towards those people you call your “friends”. You think that your “friends” are good “friends”, but would good “friends” hang out without telling you and then make up excuses as to why they “forgot” to invite you? Are they really your “friends” if they talk shit about you behind your back then say, its just for a laugh? You think that good “friends” would delete all the pictures with you in them and when you ask they say it was because they looked bad in them? Or would your good “friends” say no to going somewhere because they don’t like it even if it's to celebrate you? Bullshit. You don’t deserve that, you are so much better than them and you won't be manipulated, you are so much better without them. So don’t walk towards them, they don’t deserve you.

Artist Statement:

My image and my flash fiction is based off of my personal struggle with bad friends and their negativity, but also how I was able to overlook their negativity and realize that I deserve better. The story is very personal to me because it is based off of personal experience and I just used the picture as a virtual representation of the story. I also wanted my pieces to be relatable for other people because I know that my experience isn’t special it happens to a lot of people but I wrote it to be relatable because personally I hate pictures and stories that have a “deeper meaning” so I chose a topic that I knew a lot of people could relate to. I also partly wrote mine as a way to express my inner anger and sadness about the situation, but then get it out in a healthy and artistic way, instead of taking it out on the people that hurt me.
Because my image was based on my writing I wanted to represent what I felt as I walked away from the situation. I used the black and white filter to symbolize the negativity surrounding the situation, but then I used the bright yellow color surrounding me because I wanted that to symbolize the happy feeling I got from finally being free of the negativity and because yellow is associated as a happy color. I used the positive  words surrounding me as a way to express the thoughts and feeling I had walking away but I also used the words in the negative space as a way to show what I was walking away from, most of those negative words are things I heard or was told constantly when I was in the friend group. Two other symbols that I used was the backpack and walking out of the door. Walking out of the door was a more obvious symbol, it was just me walking away and opening the door to a new chapter in my life, but the backpack is supposed to symbolize the emotional baggage I was leaving behind. In conclusion with both the writing and the picture I was trying to connect an experience in my life to my personality and how it has helped me to overcome negative situations.


They say, I say:


Most people would say that not everyone has a bias. Science has proven this opinion wrong, in fact everyone has a bias its just a matter of whether people openly express it or not. Biases can influence the way we treat people and how we go about our lives, our lives are heavily influenced by our thoughts on other people. Personally, I think that everyone has a bias whether it be conscious or unconscious.
 In the TED talk we watched in class titled “How do we overcome bias? Walk boldly towards them.” Verna Myers talked about how we have conscious and unconscious biases and that instead of trying to be the perfect person and have no bias, we as people need to start recognizing our biases and we need to take steps towards dealing with them the right way (Myers). One of the takeaways of the TED talk and some of the activities we did in class is that we have biases that we sometimes don’t even know existed and it helps shape how we look at people, sometimes we look at people poorly,  we are judgy and closed minded to other people that are different from us and the fact that people are different from us, influences the way we go about our day. In class we also took some implicit bias tests and I was surprised to learn to most of us had biases we didn’t even think we had, which was surprising (Implicit).
I think that everyone has a bias. First of all, it has been scientifically proven that most everyone has a bias, But my own personal experiences have shown me that I have one as much as I hate to admit it. I am not racist or anything but my bias involves politics, and I am pretty outspoken when it comes to that bias, it’s definitely a concious bias I am not afraid of people knowing I have. My biases help contribute to what I believe in, an example of this is that I am mutual towards African Americans and white people, so personally I believe in equality and the fact that everyone is equal no matter your race or gender etc., however this opinion of mine could be different for many people and it affects the way they may think of me or other people.