One of my fantasies growing up was that I could be a shark. I always had an aversion to water and the thought of being a feared and fierce predator was extremely appealing to me. If I had a choice of anything to be as I lived under water for 2 years, I’d want to be a cunning shark in the pits of the atlantic ocean, although it is cold, it would be fun, to come up and scare the people on the New Jersey coast, since I know I wouldn’t attack them, but they are so uneasy to the marine life that is common in more heated areas like Hawaii or Aruba where one may vacation but not live.

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My Idea of heaven is nothing short of achievable. Being that I’ve been a victim of the American foster care system I can assure you that there is a hell on earth. All around the world you can see death and pain and destruction behind every billboard and every sign. There are streets named after Ivy League schools in the most helpless parts of my very own country. Heaven, to me is just the opposite of that, where there is need it will be filled, and where there is hunger you will be fed. Where there is desperation, there will be love. After finding my own stability through working and college and starting a family with a man that I share a healthy loving relationship with, I feel that I have found heaven and that my needs that I once hadn’t been able to satisfy have been met.

I would tell him that I do not understand his ability to be content. My best friend is not necessarily lazy, but he seems to just be always content where he is in life. While this would not be too bad if it was paired with optimism, his moods are usually pessimistic. He refuses to progress life in the same manner as me, which is something that adds to the variety of our friendship. Overall, I do not think the reaction would be lighthearted, which is what often keeps people from being completely honest with each other. I think he sees the problem in himself, but me highlighting it would make it to painful and obvious.

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I really do not like the term peer pressure, because it removes responsibility from the person doing the action. While I have made certain decisions partially due other actions in life, in the end the decision was made because it was what I wanted to do. Being a rather rational person, I always had personal as well as social reasons for making that decision, and I am usually consistent with the results. While there are situations I would change in hindsight, most are based off totally unforeseen consequences with information I could not have inferred at the time. If you operate logically on the information you have, you should never regret your decisions, but you can also not blame results on peer pressure.

Related articles

• The Pervasive Threat of Conformity: Peer Pressure Is Here to Stay (bigthink.com)
• Tips on Discipline for Adolescents and Teens (socyberty.com)
• Peer Pressure (improbableoptimisms.blogspot.com)