TOW #10: I Nearly Died. So What? (written, non-fiction text)

Grievances and adversities sometimes happen in life and people manage to overcome those hardships or recover from their failures. After these recoveries, most people realize their past mistakes and better themselves. However, Meghan Daum claims these realizations are people’s deceptions to the world and perhaps to themselves, come from the spectator’s expectations. With uses of her anecdotes, Daum, who has recently survived from a severe case of deadly bacterial infection followed by near-death coma, claims that nothing really changed for her. Although grateful for her fortunate case, she admits that she is the same “whiny ingrate” (16) she was when she was healthy. She claims that people really don’t change, including those who claim that they have obtained a kind of epiphany from their hardships, but are eager to meet the expectations of the society that anticipate redemption. She claims that “we’re obsessed not just with victory but with redemption” (17). Daum wants to criticize those who are so obfuscated by society’s expectations to the extent of not realizing that they actually had not become better persons. Daum also uses repetition of the word person to emphasize how the modern society stress what kind of person the survivors of some kind of adversities have become. She claims that she is “not a better person. [She is] the same person. Which is actually kind of a miracle” (21). When people refer to someone as a same person, people imply a slightly negative connotation as same means no progress. However, Daum eliminates this negativity that travels with the term same by adding that it is a miracle that she remained the same because she was not influenced by the society’s pressure and stayed adamant about her individual beliefs. Daum refuted actions that we believe we automatically do by stating that these actions are not so uncontrollable but are driven by our need for “stories of triumph over adversities” (17). Although her argument could have been very controversial, Daum’s use of anecdote and certain words made readers ponder about their tendency to succumb to the belief of popular culture.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/opinion/sunday/i-nearly-died-so-what.html?ref=opinion