No Going Back

Teen years are some of the biggest years of peoples' lives. Its a time where someone can figure out who they really are, and start to question the world around them. When you're just thirteen, you feel like you know so much, but really its just the beginning of a unfamiliar world where people start to question themselves.

I'm reading the book Crank, by Ellen Hopkins. The main character Kristina is going through a lot in her life. She just reunited with her dad, who she hadn't seen for eight years. While visiting her dad, she started doing crystal meth, and claims to have fell in love with the boy who introduced it to her. All of these things bring out a whole other side of Kristina. A side of her she calls Bree.

I think after reading this book for a bit of time, Kristina feels like she is changing, but calls this side of her Bree out of fear of what she could become.

Kristina starts describing things that used to be familiar as a threat. After coming back from her dads house, Kristina felt like she had been exposed to a whole other world, where she was Bree, and didn't understand how to adjust back to Kristina after all she'd seen and been through. I think this is relatable. I believe that we all go through something on our way to adulthood that makes us develop more as people, or question who we are and what we really want. Between the summer of fifth and sixth grade I went down to visit my family in Virginia. When I was younger I'd had all of these fond, almost magical, memories of going down to visit them. Only when I went down that summer, my family seemed different. I started looking at people in my family differently. I learned about peoples pasts more, things that drove them, and saw all of these people who I thought I knew all about as mysteries. It wasn't that they had changed as much as I had. I saw them clearer than I had before, and I understood then that we all have a past that makes people who they are, and people exist when you're not with them.

Once you've realized something like that theres no going back to how you've looked at something before. This can be connected to Kristina. When she was with her dad she found a part of herself that she didn't know there was before. When she went back to Reno, she had to figure out how to look at home after all she'd seen before that. She describes Bree of how she truly sees things, what she wants to be; she describes Kristina as what people want her to be.

All of this makes me wonder why Kristina calls herself Bree when she's doing bad things like drugs. It makes me wonder why Kristina just can't do the things she wants being herself. But in a way, it makes sense. By creating a part of her called Bree, she doesn't have to completely blame herself for the things she gets into. She could also still be holding onto Kristina because she doesn't want to let go, like she's afraid of what being Bree would do to her.

She talks about Bree as if she's being possessed by a monster, but I think Kristina is really just going through changes and feels a need to blame someone for it other then herself. She's old enough to know rights and wrongs, she just isn't sure yet what makes her happy, and we can all relate to wanting to experiment.