Be you!
Author’s note: This essay will shed light upon the novel trilogy, May Bird and the Ever after, by Jodi Lynn Anderson. Pay attention to the fluent vocabulary, and paragraph transitions.
May Bird was not someone you usually saw. Short black hair, knobby knees, and she wore all black. She didn’t fit in quite well; she was bullied almost every day. May tried to fit in by changing who she was. This is one of the hard things about being bullied; you try to fit in so much, that you change who you are. Luckily, in this story, May realizes that she doesn’t need to change who she is to make friends. Miss. Bird makes friends with a very unlikely sort; Ghosts. But, they are her true friends, and she doesn’t need to act like someone else when she is around them. Our heroine of the story, May, was much like me. She and I have that in common, that we where both bullied.
In our story, May Bird is the main character. She often talks about when she tied herself to a bunch of balloons and jumped off her mother’s car, resulting in a bad scrap on the knee. May did this in an effort to make herself look cool. But, it only made the bullies come at her more. Later on in the story the author, Jodi Lynn Anderson, talks about how she brought in her cat and had him tap dance. This was also an attempt to make herself fit in, but this attempt only got her cat to look cool. In the story, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone, By J.K Rowling, the male character Harry Potter, was also bullied by his cousin and his group of friends. They have this connection, and I also have connections with the two characters. By being bullied, and trying to fit in.
Trying to fit in with a group of people who don’t really know you seems to be something that all of us do at one point. Especially in stories like May Bird and the Ever after, where we have a character desperate to fit in; this also relates to the book, Twilight by Stephanie Meyers. While the female lead in that story seems to rely on her boyfriend, she is still self conscious about herself, like May Bird. I am self conscious about myself to, and I can relate to May. Trying to fit in can be very hard to do, because often times you have to forget about a part of yourself that you love so much, just to fit in. This in most people’s opinions is not worth it, in order to make friends, be you! In a lot of situations, including making friends, honesty is the best policy. Being yourself is one of the most important things in making friends, and friends with the same type of interests as you will come to you one way or another.
Being yourself can be hard in some cases, like being pushed into something by peer pressure that makes you not be yourself. This doesn’t quite happen to our main character, May Bird, but it does happen to me. Sometimes for me people make fun of the way I dress, or how I talk, or what I read. Some of the people at my school don’t like me because I don’t like what they like. So they peer pressure me, and try to make me, well not be me. But me and May both have that in common; we don’t give in to the peer pressure. Just like May, I found my friends and I stick with them. May does the same thing, just her friends are not from this world, but they are from the spirit world the Ever After. Even though her friends may be ghost’s, that she met by accident, they are still her true friends, and they don’t peer pressure her into doing anything she doesn’t want to do. This story is all about making friends, even though they may not be where you expect them to be.
While she may be bullied in her own world, and outlawed in the Ever After for being a “Live One” May makes friends on her adventure, her true friends. Along the path of making friends, she also manages to defeat the most evil thing in that world: Bo Clevil. Her friends didn’t become her friends just because she defeated Evil Bo Clevil, they became her friends because of the person that she was, and is. In the end, May manages to come through and be herself, not this fake person that her peers want her to be. I did the same as May, along my way through life, I have made my best friends a girl could ask for, along with defeating the evilest thing along the way: Middle School. My friends helped me defeat my first year of middle school, and they are still with me every step of the way, not making me be something I am not.
