Musical Effects

Flash Fiction

Do you remember the day it happened? The day you walked into your house to find your brother gone? How no one bothered to tell you that at age 16 your brother decided to leave his 7 year old sister? How the one person you loved, the one person who cared for you, and kept you safe was gone? How your parents told you he never loved you and he wasn’t really your family? Do you remember how you fell into depression immediately after and nobody noticed? How about when you called out for help but the one person who listened to you could no longer hear you? What of the nightmares claiming your tears each night? How you made all the voices in your head threatening to pull you under go away by listening to music? How listening to music reminded you of him when he would play his instrument everyday, and is somehow calmed you down? How listening to music created a shield around you protecting you from reality? Where you could just forget about everything and everyone around you? How without your headphones reality slowly crept through your shield threatening to pull you under? Do you remember?





Artist Statement

  My self portrait is a drawing of a girl. Her eye is closed as she is listening to music which is represented by music notes on the left side. The blue color is suspense to represent the light and the dark pink is an expression of depression and the darkness that I first got when I was young. Depression never goes away it always close by which is why the pink side is covering part of my face. I wanted the flowers on the light side to help represent the light side with the music, and I used a wave pattern similar to a wave that comes crashing over me. 

 My flash fiction is about when my brother and when he got emancipated, and I fell into depression because of that. When I found music in my life it was my way of escaping reality and forgetting about my depression. It helped me recover and it still does to this day. I wanted to voice my story of the dark side as it keeps reminding me that it’s always going to be around. 




 They Say/I say


According to professionals everyone has a bias that cannot be controlled. When people read any story they immediately form a biases based on their previous experience. As people read stories about depression, they immediately begin to treat the author differently. When people read my story they always misanalyze my intentions and assume that I’m still in a state of depression. People do this because it’s their way of understanding and analyzing why I wrote this. They do this so they can understand what is going on, but instead of analyzing that uncontrolled bias, they let it control their actions. Most people forget to analyze their own biases and often because of it act impulsively. 


In the Ted talk “How do we Overcome Bias? Walk boldly toward them.” By Verna Meyers, she talks about how our biases influence the decisions we make. She explains that you can’t help having a bias, but that doesn’t mean we can’t control what we do with that bias. She tries to help you see a different way of looking at it, “What does it take to move out of the role of bystanders and into the role of advocates?”(Meyers). Attempting to evaluate your bias by looking at another person can help you to not act rashly in different situations. In the text “I’m Right, You’re Wrong” from Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam he points out that “We’ve open to new information-but only if it confirms our existing beliefs.”(“Right”). This tags along our personal bias, because when we take in new information, we’re more likely to accept it if it fits our pre existing view on it. 


 I believe that everyone has a bias, and we let that impact our decisions instead of analyzing our biases and making analyzed decisions. While some people do analyze their biases most don't give a second glance at why they think they know someone before they meet them. Our brains are constantly trying to make sense of what's going on around us, and we can get caught up in our own white light of noise. Everything we see, hear, and do influences our biases. But this means we need to step back and analyze why we think the way we do, and how we can overcome that.