Category: Junior Literary

Comfort zones are malicious and evil; they envelope you with a loving kindness, wrapping tender arms around your neck. Then, without you even realizing it, the grip fastens, and you’re choking. After a while, there isn’t a lot of hope for escape. You’re just another victim to comfort zones.
Living in middle-class suburbs all my life, I have seen the crime countless times. I’ve seen my parents disappear into it, and they aren’t here anymore. Not them, not really. For abandonment of your wildest hopes, passion, and ambition simply dissolves your true self. That’s not you when you sit in front of the television screen, phone in your hand, contemplating whether the effort of overindulging in food all the way in the kitchen is worth it. You’ve lost yourself when you only learn when taught, when you’ve convinced yourself your quest for passion has reached an end, and that this is where you will stay for the rest of your life.

Humans were not built for luxurious lifestyles and laziness. We can travel farther than horses, lift cars with adrenaline, and sail across the world; most of the population squander this potential in favor what is easy and entertaining.
Even if you are “successful,” you are never truly living to your potential. No one is, and it’s not possible. However, life is not about reaching some endpoint or point of prosperity, but rather the journey that never ends. Passion should be instilled into your everyday life. It is terrifying to take an unknown leap into what you do not know. To become a doctor rather than an artist is safe, but it is the comfort zone that makes the decision. Some would rather live a plain life than taking a chance on struggling.

Can you feel it now? Can you feel the tingling in your bones you’ve been ignoring to get up, do something? Can you hear the whispers of your true self, your adventurous and daring self? Can you feel the comfort zone smothering your spirit now? Will you do something about it, or has it killed you already?

Comfort zones are exactly what they sound like. A place for serenity and peace, a bubble of sorts. Comfort zones are places for people with anxiety, those who aren’t risk takers, or small minded people. Places are contentment are great and used more than you know, in every day life, at all times actually. On one hand, comfort is an amazing life gift.

On the other, comfort zones can hinder you from greatness, from progression. If you’re always sitting in your bubble and never taking any risks to be a better you, you’ll miss out on life. In the end, the choice is always yours, but choose wisely.

I love music, always have, always will. For a lot of people, music is a safe space, a place of comfort and security for when days are bad or times are tough. For me, music is home. There’s never a time when I don’t at least have some little tune stuck in my head. In my mind, music is always playing, even when I can’t hear it. It helps me to think, it helps me to write. It helps me to be me.

With all that music I listen to, you’d think it’d be hard to pick favorites. And it is; I have playlist upon playlist of songs I love enough to call favorites.

But some songs are too good to be just any old favorite. Some songs can reach inside you and twist your insides around and leave you on the other side a different person than you were before, and they still manage to leave that twisty feeling every time you listen to them.

My favorite songs are relative, superficial; but the songs I need to breathe are more important and real than anything else in the world. These songs often come from the deepest parts of ourselves, the parts that we don’t often let other people see. The songs that we hold nearest and dearest to our hearts are the ones that let themselves in without even needing to pick the locks on our hearts because we’ve opened the doors the moment we heard the first line. The songs we come to love wholeheartedly are the ones that help us the most. We discover them at times of high emotion, where that be euphoria or dysphoria or anything in-between. They stick with us, and we stick with them.

The songs that I fall head-over-heels in love with come from nostalgia and reminiscence and longing. They come from isolation and destruction and despair.

But they also come from joy and love and hope.

These are ten songs that came to me at the point in my life when I needed them most. Some are new, some are old, some are dark, some are gold.

But these songs are the ones that continue to make me who I am.

1. starlight // muse
2. oasis+savannah+baby // relient k
3. secret for the mad // dodie clark
4. i wanna get better // bleachers
5. she lays down // the 1975
6. saturn // sleeping at last
7. rivers and roads // the head and the heart
8. home // edward sharpe and the magnetic zeroes
9. hey jude // the beatles
10. heathrow // catfish and the bottlemen

Gently closing the book and calmly sitting back in my desk was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, especially when all I really wanted to do was throw the novel across the room and scream. “I’ll Give You the Sun” is by far the best thing I’ve ever had the pleasure to put my hands- and eyes- on. It left me excited about the future and what life could hold for me. Jandy Nelson effortlessly conveyed the idea that, yes, you will make mistakes in life, but it will not be the end of the world. The characters are written to be examples of the different ways people deal with grief and loss. The main characters were extremely relatable in the way they handled the different situations Nelson threw at them throughout the novel. When faced with different problems and circumstances in my life, I often think of how the different characters in this particular book would react and if they would go towards the problem the same way I do.  Referring this novel to me during a hard time in life was a blessing that my friend did not even know she was giving me. Being able to see the real-life scenarios that went on throughout the book was a nice change from the fantasy that is usually incorporated into such books. Since my first completion of the book, I’ve read it another five times. It’s my go-to at 3 a.m and the first book I grab when I’m headed out of the door. It’s the book that I read when I’m in hopes of having just a few minutes of free time during the day. It has a certain quality about it that every time you read it, it can give you another piece of advice, most of the time it’s the kind that you didn’t even know you needed. There has never been a book that makes me feel like maybe life isn’t all sharp edges and that just maybe things can eventually start to look up. Multiple times while I was reading, I caught myself smiling or scowling at what the characters were doing or saying. It is truly a rare thing for a book to be able to affect me in such a way. I happily recommend “I’ll Give You the Sun” anytime someone asks and I encourage everyone to read it. I believe everyone deserves to experience the wonder that this book really is.