This Is Me

Alice is a seven-year-old English girl with a lot of imagination, and is fond of showing off her knowledge, and socializing with people. She is a polite, well raised and interested in others girl, although she sometimes makes the wrong remarks and upsets some people such as the creatures in Wonderland, because she is not really aware of what is going on around her. The story starts with her reading in a beautiful garden with her older sister, a history book, which really bored her. History is something to real and concrete for her, Alice is different, what counts for her, as it generally happens with kids, it is more abstract. She likes living in her own world and believes that ‘her world is better’, better than the real one. She is also fond of looking what is around her, and discovering it with her own interpretation. At some point, in the meantime that her sister was continuing to read to her the History while she was getting distracted by each thing that was around her, she sees a white rabbit running. The white rabbit was running because he was late, holding with him a big clock, that reminded him how late he was. Alice follows the white rabbit without thinking too much of what she was doing, because she was just a very curious girl, and really wanted to know where he was headed. She decides to pursue him, and that brings her into a whole. This whole brings her to Wonderland, I believe anyone who is reading this article knows what Wonderland is, because everyone has read the book, watched the cartoon, or the movie. Thus, she finds herself in this sort of upside down world populated by mad creatures, that have a completely different view of life of what a girl like Alice could be used to, since she is a girl that has been raised in a total traditional way. However, she is fascinated by this world and decides to follow each creature or person that she meets.

I personally believe that by being just an extremely young girl, she is seeking for her personality somewhere and tries to create her own identity. Indeed, anyone could compare itself to Alice because it happens to everyone to be lost and find ourselves in the situation of following some paths that take us to something completely opposite from what we are accustomed. Doubtlessly, this is part of what makes us grow up, because it can open our minds and make us discover something new inside us that we didn’t know before. On the other side, it is also something that can be dangerous at times. Anyway, Lewis Carroll ends the story by making her wake up, and realize that everything she lived was just a dream. Dream or not, it was a dream that changed her life, because she actually felt that she lived in it. It made her become a stronger dreamer.

‘This is me’. I dream a lot, not always during my sleep. Indeed, it could be anywhere, in class, in a club, in the library, at home, or a friend’s house. I enjoy it because I feel that it gives me the possibility to live a double life, even if I know that that is realistically impossible. Yet, at the end of the day, who says we cannot live by dreaming? our mind gives us the possibility to play with time how we want, which is, in my personal opinion, the most powerful force. We can say things that we wouldn’t in real life, and travel in places that we don’t have the possibility to go. Of course, all of that is not real, but we need it because sometimes it is exactly what pushes us to become a better person. Furthermore, like Alice, I am a girl quite confused, and that is why I also find it difficult describing me in eight hundred words, because who could really describe his own identity. This is why, I decided to start form a comparison, because more than being a dreamer, even if it might seem that I have a stable identity, I am still seeking for it. I feel sometimes lost like Alice felt in Wonderland, with difference that instead of creatures around me, I see humans. Starting from the White rabbit, that could be translated in my own life, as a figure of stress, because he makes me understand that time is precious, and something that I generally struggle with, is the management of time. The main character is also curious of discovering this world called ‘Wonderland’, although she doesn’t completely understand what everyone is doing around her and why, don’t we all feel similarly to that sometimes? Have you ever felt that the actions around us are going to fast and we attempt to keep up with what is going on but it becomes quite hard? Well, I did. This is me.

Edited with thanks to Muriel Marie Magon.
Edited with thanks to Elena