Outside Reading- Week 6- Post B

Just Listen by Sarah Dessen

Section 6: Pages 275- 333

Reaction: “I wondered which was harder, in the end. The act of telling, or who you told it to. Or maybe if, when you finally got it out, the story was really all that mattered” (333). In the many pages I have read so far, this aforementioned quote proves to be the most significant yet. It phrases exactly the realization Annabel has needed to make for quite a long while. She finally realizes that while it is hard to get your deepest thoughts, feelings, and memories out of your head, getting them out is way better than keeping them to ourselves where they will remain continually haunting us. In what concerns me, the only way to move past the stuff that has been haunting us is to purge them from our mind, get them out into the open; whether we write a letter or a poem or simply, we just talk to a person we trust. Whatever the way you do it, you must tell someone in order to survive. Although it is a scary thought, it is usually not ourselves that we trust the most; it may be a parent, a neighbor, or a friend that we trust more than ourselves. And those people we trust will always be willing to help, no matter what; that is why we trust them- to have the ability to put our faith in them. Hopefully in this next and final section of the book Just Listen, Annabel will tell her sad story to her family and to Owen because only then will her life turn back to the happiness and worry-free world in which she lived before her rape incident. In my experience, it is a hard duty to accomplish, but once it is done, there are no regrets; you’re finally free!