My Name

My name is like black, or a dark purple, although everyone tells me that my name sounds like a pretty color, maybe light blue, or pink. In my mind blue and purple are these true, deep colors, exactly like my life, beautiful but strong.
When I say my name I hear the way it moves from the back of my mouth to the front, like the word "crisp," similar to the crisp orange leaves on a cold fall morning when your body is all bundled inside your jacket, but everything outside you is literally burning cold. My name is like a boiling hot day of summer, sometimes filled with anger and confusion.
 Isabel is a fragmented flower, sometimes blooming with joy and sometimes crumbling to pieces right when I think I found the sunlight I need to grow and change into something a little more beautiful. And sometimes that flower does grow, it picks up it's pieces and for a while I'm unstoppable, untouchable, untroubled.

I think my name is a clock that keeps ticking and ticking, and if I make a mistake I have to pick myself up again, sometimes my life feels like a race with my own time. My name dances through the the short and long hand on the clock, and occasionally when they pass each other I get squished and I have to find my balance and time management again.
Isabel is one strong word that symbolizes Mom, Dad, Chris and Sketch huddled up on the couch watching movies about robots and fat people. My name is my family, annoying parents that I love, a 16 year old boy in a gold plated coffin, my little dog sister.
I say my name so much that it begins to have no meaning, it's the life I have within my name that holds my memories, emotions, pain, and love. 6 letters, I-S-A-B-E- and L. Isabel.

The Fault In Our Stars

A lot of people who read The Fault In Our Stars by John Green might think the book is overrated. Truth is, it's overrated because no one reads the book for the meaning, they read it for the words. Words are meaningless if you don't dig for the purpose underneath. The Fault In Our Stars introduces the topic that just because you have cancer doesn't mean that you can't still live a full, content life. The main character, Hazel Grace Lancaster meets a boy named Agustus Waters at a cancer support group. While Hazel struggles with lung cancer, Agustus is just recovering from osteosarcoma, which caused him to loose a leg. The two fall in love, which proves that you can have so many privileges added to your life, even when your time is limited.

I think the message John Green was trying to get out was the reality of cancer, and life in general. He wanted to show us that we need to appreciate what we have because not everyone can be as lucky as you (I find it amazing that he expresses this through characters with cancer). He showed us this by not only writing happy endings, but also writing about pain and sadness. An example of this is when Hazel is telling Agustus the truth of what will happen in the future, because Agustus wants to be remembered after his death. She tells him that; "There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does." 

Another way he expresses reality through the book and the characters is all the metaphors and the quotes. Near the beginning of the book when Hazel goes to Agustus water's house for the first time, there are many posters on the wall that say things like, "Without pain, we could not know joy." And Agustus does this thing where he puts a cigarette between his teeth but doesn't actually light it. When Hazel asks him about it he says; "It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do it's killing."

Lastly, Hazel and Agustus have this friend named Isaac from the support group. He's about to loose his sight and become blind because of his Eye Cancer, and his girlfriend, Monica breaks up with him because it's too much for her to handle. A lot of teenage readers and young readers of The Fault In Our Stars can relate to Isaacs problems, and although not everyone looses their sight because of cancer everyday a lot of people get into relationships and can relate to him that way. This is just another way to prove that just because you have cancer doesn't mean you don't have a normal life. So overall, John Green weaves the message of reality and hope and love through the book by using metaphors, relations, quotes, and the general reality of having cancer without all the fake happy endings and instead reflects the happiness through the reality of being grateful for what you have, even if you don't have a lot because the moments you do have are worth everything.