\u201cI don\u2019t like showing my emotions. I would rather keep things neutral. If I let my emotions get into it\u2026 control can all fall away. Being able to control, that is my real strength.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was a quote I really connected with. I used to be really ashamed of my emotions growing up. Thinking that having any would make me seem weak and stereotypically girly, I used to bottle up my emotions\u00a0and push them away. I wanted to be seen as stoic and independent to my family and friends, and\u00a0I still do sometimes, but I have come to realize that pushing those emotions back doesn\u2019t get rid of them. In fact, pushing them back is what makes them worse. That\u2019s why it really upset me to read that this incarcerated youth sees bottling up his feelings as his real strength. \u201cControlling\u201d his emotions, as he sees it, isn\u2019t what is helping him, in fact it\u2019s what\u2019s killing him. If he would just let out his emotions as they come instead of letting them boil up inside of him, he might not be in the position he is in now.<\/p>\n
I also\u00a0found it very powerful that the faces of the youth were blurred out or covered in most of the shots. While this was probably for legal reasons, I thought it added a lot to the artistic value of the pictures as well. The fact that they are faceless, at least for me, emphasized the fact that incarcerated\u00a0youth aren\u2019t usually\u00a0seen as individuals to the outside world. They are typically\u00a0clumped together and stereotyped as \u201cbad kids\u201d who are in the situation they\u2019re in because of the dumb decisions they made.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cI don\u2019t like showing my emotions. I would rather keep things neutral. If I let my emotions get into it\u2026 control can all fall away. Being able to control, that is my real strength.\u201d This was a quote I really connected with. I used to be really ashamed of my …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2997,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[44423,44425],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2016","category-reading-reflections","column","twocol"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7RVTr-eq","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/storytelling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/storytelling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/storytelling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/storytelling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2997"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/storytelling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/storytelling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/storytelling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/storytelling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/storytelling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}