Moment Assingment

I feel like throughout my life I've had many little moments that might have seemed insignificant to some people but had a much bigger impact on my life. Having to just pick one was hard but I sorted through all of them and picked one that I felt I could share. About two years ago I spent the summer with some family. At the time I was in a pretty bad spot in my life. People are always joking about how teenagers have it pretty easy but, in today’s world I think that it's harder to find yourself when other people are always telling you how you should be. So I was fifteen and struggling with that pretty badly and I think that I was just pretty angry at everyone and everything. My Aunts sister in-law saw that and understood. On a side note I hate how people are always trying to fix things or people by making them talk about. My Aunts sister seemed to get that and on the day I left to go back home she handed me this notebook and told me to write whatever I wanted in it. The journal was leather and inside there was recycled paper without lines. After I left I thought about what she said and I started writing in it, random things, things that didn’t really make any sense, but made perfect sense to me. Just being handed a notebook seemed like not a very big deal but the actual writing in the notebook changed everything. Things like how I felt about the world and how I felt about myself and how people relate to one another. It's weird to think how if I had never been given the journal I might still be mad inside or how without the journal my entire perspective would be totally different.

Things Fall Apart Reflection

Why do you think Okonkwo kills himself? Please address the pressure/standards that Ibo culture imposes upon him i.e., how the story sets him us “as a fish out of water,” also consider how these standards do not seem to prepare him for the challenges that confront him as a result of encountering the British.
I think that Okonkwo kills himself because everything just built up inside of him and so he decided to give up. Okonkwo probably knew that he was going to die anyway because of the man he killed and he knew that the British wouldn’t allow him to live after that. It could be argued that Okonkwo killed himself to prove a point, becoming a martyr of sorts but I feel like the pressure of being exiled and then the dissapointement of coming back to things that aren’t the way they were before or the way they were supposed to be got to him and he felt like life wasn’t worth living anymore.
Okonkwo is set up like a fish out of water because his traditions, traditions that have been around for years and years in his culture are ending and changing. So like a fish out of water speaking metaphorically Okonkwo can’t breathe because things are changing and falling apart and there’s nothing Okonkwo can do to fix it. The Ibo culture is so fixed on tradition that there’s no room for a little give or take. I feel like not having the ability to adapt and the pressure of the Ibo society helped contribute to Oknokwo’s death.