Finding Meaning in a Stolen Life Essay

It is said that all deportment does indeed involve damage but it is what we make of this suffering that will settle whether or non we develop significance in our support. One moldiness look within and around himself to create meaning in her life one can finding meaning by creating works or doing deeds, experiencing things or encountering throng, and choosing ones attitude towards the suffering in her life. in that respect will always be obstacles in the way to meaningthe tragical triad of pain, offense, and finishbut one must use this to employ nonice your drive to find meaning by maintaining tragic optimismfaith, love, and hope.M either people lead difficult lives, how of all time, some find meaning and others choose not to. In the memoir A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard, Jaycee Dugard is put through and through and through what she describes as an intolerable situation, but manages to make meaning of the suffering in her stolen life. Jaycee Dugard has experienced tra gic triad pain, guilt, and death. She deals with pain through turn up the entirety of her archeozoic life. The main source of her pain and suffering was Phillip who kidnapped and put her through snake pit on earth.Jaycee recalls the sidereal solar day Phillip took herthe first painful experience she had with the man that would parapraxis her of her innocence. Jaycee recollects what was legislatening through her mind at the time of her traumatic abduction soul is dragging me and I am being lifted. My limbs get like they matter a ton. I try to ext balance and try to push off from farther into the bushes. The paralyzing feeling returns accompanied by a strange galvanic current zapping sound. I am helpless to resist for some reason. (9-10).It is not long after her abduction when Jaycee is put through an even great affable test. She has been s naive machinee and alone since she was taken from her world on that faithful day and now Phillip would only make her more than than scargond and alienated. Phillip does to Jaycee what nobody should ever have done onto them. She experiences pain physically and mentally when he rapes her and she remembers him severe to justifying her suffering He shows it would be easier on me if I didnt resist or struggle so a great deal next time. He says it wouldnt hurt as much.I think to myself, if you didnt do it in the first place then it wouldnt hurt at all. only if I am too f powerfulened by his act to say a thing in objection to him. (31-32). Jaycee feels her first sense of guilt in her new life when she is given a kitten. Her kidnappers brought her home a kitten and she was happy but says, I have begun to feel punishable for asking for her in the first place. I should have thought or so the place we were going to put her. This is no place for a kitty. He says his aunt is an animal lover and will take her. (41).She does not wishing the kitten to stay in the little room with her because she knows it is not j ust for the kitten to not have a lot of space to run around and be happy. Her giving the kitten away makes her feel erupt because she knows it is not good for the kitten to be stuck in the room of suffering. She manages to sw release over this guilt but soon she is faced with a greater obstacle. Jaycee experiences death for the first time. It is not that of her own life but the death of one of her animals that brings her greater suffering she notes, Blackjack lived a long life.Toward the revoke I took primary care of him and I was the one that set him when he died. It was very hard for me. At the time, I had made a stray enclosure which he would go in at night to carry on safe, and thats where I found him one morning I cried a lot for him. (160). Jaycee was an animal lover and for her to find the cat she took care of loose was very hard for her. However, all of these experiences made her a stronger person. Jaycee did not allow the tragic triad to keep her from making meanin g of her life. She unbroken searching.Jaycee Dugard was on her way to countering with dickens of the three parts of tragic optimismlove, and hope. She had children at a very young age and although she did not indispensableness them from Phillip or at the ages of fourteen and seventeen she loves her children very much. She loves both of her daughters, she did not essential to give either of them up, stating, I did it because that was the only thing I could do. I would do it all again. The most precious thing in the world came bulge out of it my daughters. (110). Her love for her two daughters fueled her positivity towards her adverse life.She was a very hopeful person all through her young life and her daughters gave her more of a reason to hold fast. Jaycee was constantly hoping that she would one day be emancipated. When she is first placed in the room out keister, she hoped soulfulness was spirit for her and that they would find her one day to take her from home. Although she had a rough life from the age of eleven until the age of twenty-nine, she kept a very confident(p) attitude by doing work and keeping busy. She found greater meaning in her suffering by creating works. She started a businessa create companywith Phillip who has put her through endless torture.Over time she intimate how to do it on her own and does most of the work for the company I work up a design and he takes it to the costumer and gets it approve when he brings it back to me, I print them on cards. The job turns out great and I am very proud of myself Phillip says that he thinks I should do the workups and he will get the jobs and help with the printing. (127). Instead of weeping in sorrow for herself that her childhood and beginning of her adult life were taken away from her, she does work to make herself productive.This is good for her because instead of living in the existential vacuum, she feels like she is accomplishing something other than watching television every day like she used to and she feels important. . It takes a very positive person to find meaning in the kind of suffering Jaycee had to stay, and she embodied this person. She chooses to have a positive attitude towards being captured and enslaved. Throughout the time she was taken she kept a journal and instead of always writing most how much she misses her mom and wishes she was not with Phillip and Nancy, she wrote, 10 things that make me happy 1.hearing someone laugh 2. when my cats are near me 10. knowing someone loves me. (183-184). Instead of cerebration of all the bad in her life, she chose to stay positive and think of things she appreciates about life. Not everyone can do that, but she learned that staying positive is more meaningful. All life involves suffering as the main character Jaycee Dugard would know. She suffered a lot in her life from the time she was kidnapped up until she was saved eighteen years later. She suffers the first day she is taken. I demand my mo mmy.I want time to reverse itself and give me a do-over, she cries about the situation she is in (10). Then it gets worse. Jaycee describes what is going on when she was impel in the back of the car and taken to Phillips house where her suffering would begin A blanket is thrown on top of me and I feel a lot of freight on my back, I feel as if I cant breathe. I hear voices but they are muffled. The car is moving. I want to get out of the car. I twist and turn, but something is pinning me down. (10). She goes through a scarring experience as he puts her through the greatest suffering she will have to endure in her 18 yearshere. A few days after kidnapping Jaycee, Phillip takes advantage of her, he stands back up and takes off all his clothes. I do not want him to do that I feel so helpless and vulnerable. I feel so alone. He lies on top of me. I cant stop crying. (31). She was raped and had to suffer through it because she had no other cream as she was too afraid of what he would do if she did not cooperate. unconstipated after being raped and impregnated, she had to make she was not the mother of her children. She says that, on the roof I felt like my pulse was going to bear out of my skin.I wanted to grab her and hold her. (154). Phillip and Nancy wanted Jaycee to pretend that they were the parents of the children she gave birth to and that she was just their sister, but Jaycee did not want that. Jaycee wanted to be able to take care of her children and it killed her that she had to allow Nancy do it. However, she did overcome the situation. When she was found and reunited with her real family, she wanted to meet with Nancy, I wanted to see her for more different reasons, the biggest being closure. Telling her that what she and Phillip did was not okay in any way. (243). Although her kidnappers took most of her life away from her, she still stood up to them in the end and wanted them to know she was a stronger person. Although Jaycee suffered a lot she did not let it get the best of her. She has made meaning of her life. However, it did not happen right as she was freed as she said, my growth has not been an overnight phenomenon. Nonetheless it has late but surely come about. (261). She is doing well now and both of her kids are in high school. She reunited with one of her friends from her childhood and now they are actually close.She knows what they did to her was wrong but she said she got the most precious things out of it and that was her two daughters whom she loves a lot. She stays clear of living a provisional founding while she was captured and even after she was liberated, she didnt go through deterrent example deformity and bitterness. Sometimes, Jaycee looks at her life and thinks she thinks, I dont deserve it. (267). Jaycee was a self-determinist and believed she had free will to make of her life what she wanted it to be. She apply tragic optimism to resolve the tragic triad she had to go through.Jaycee kept a positive attitude towards her life and used this to create work and endure the experiences she had to go through and to find love, the greatest way to make meaning of ones life, in the children she was forced to bare. She now knows that, its the simple things that count, and she has used that mentality to make meaning of all her suffering end-to-end her whole life (268). Citations 1. A Stolen Life Dugard, Jaycee. A Stolen Life. N. p. , n. d. Web. 22 may 2012. 2. Mans chase for Meaning Frankl, Viktor E. Mans Search For Meaning. N. p. Beacon Press, 2006. Print.