Essay on Eating Disorders: The Weight Control
We live in a world where we make decisions every single day; I’ll eat pizza for dinner; I’ve decided to finish my homework later; I don’t like this song, so let me skip it. Even now, I have decided to finally take the initiative and start writing this synthesis essay. Sometimes we make large decisions or small ones but regardless, this points to one thing we have in life: control. However, how is that control defined and how much of it do we really have? Sure, we might have control when it comes to personal things, such as our decision, but we don’t have control over everything.
Sadly, I can’t control when the new song of my favorite artist is dropped but I can control if I listen to it or not and then decide if I like it or not. I might not be able to control another’s actions but I can control my own. When I was young and was staying over at my Granddad’s we were all rushing to get ready for Sunday Church. I remember being upstairs and huffing about wearing a dress while everyone was downstairs shuffling around to get ready. At some point, they must have decided they were all set to go and started to make their way to the car while I was begrudgingly accepting that I had to wear the dress. By the time I finally came downstairs, the house was empty with everyone being outside. The door was promptly locked by my Granddad who didn’t realize I was still in the house. Of course, I couldn’t control the fact that my Granddad had locked the door but I could control what I did in response. I simply cried in response, scared that I would be somehow stuck in the house forever. That wasn’t true, of course, as my Dad came to my rescue a few short minutes later, but my young mind thought otherwise. Then, perhaps, this points to a fact: we can’t control what others do but we can promptly build on what they decide to do.
If we take a step back and look at our life, we might see that there are certain phases. As Francis Ford Coppola notes in an interview, our lives have different genres. Not just one specific one but a mix of “horror films and comedies, and coming of age stories, and dramas” (Coppola, 2013). So do we have control of when a genre starts or ends? I don’t think so. Take, for example, the death of a loved one. Our movie then turns into a tragedy and that’s something we can’t control. Similarly, we can’t decide when we grow up. It’s more of a progressive thing that happens without our awareness. It seems some of the genres in our life we can’t control. Why? Perhaps, it’s because these genres are part of human nature. Death is part of human nature while growing up is also a part of it. So, do we only really have very little control?
Perhaps just like how we can’t control the genres that involve human nature, we can’t control nature. With everything in nature, the new will always replace the old. Maxine Chernoff’s “Under the Music” poem brings this to light as “New jasmine twines over older vines [and n]othing can stop it” (Chernoff, 2013). Even if you pull the vines away, new ones will always grow up to replace the ones pulled away. That’s simply how nature works and although we may want to change it, it’s something we can’t control.
In actuality, there is a lot we can’t control. Across the world, there are fights that are happening, poverty that eats away at so many, and the earth is slowly dying. We sit at home and see this on the news, and yet there is very little we can do to help. We may say we have control over our lives, but this statement can really mean very little. However, the fact remains that there are still some things we can control. Perhaps this gives us hope that we can slowly expand that control but until then, we are left with the weight of understanding that the control we have perhaps only weighs 10lbs in the grand scheme of things.
Works Cited:
Chernoff, Maxine. “‘Under the Music," Maxine Chernoff.” All Your Pretty Words, 27 July 2013, allyourprettywords.tumblr.com/post/56542211070/under-the-music-maxine-chernoff.
Pockross, Adam. “Francis Ford Coppola Talks 'Twixt' & Competing with His Former Self.” Yahoo!, Yahoo!, 24 July 2013, www.yahoo.com/entertainment/blogs/movie-talk/francis-ford-coppola-talks-twixt-competing-former-self-185226581.html.
