I wrote this little 'Blog entry' in my english class, as we are studying "The House on Mango Street". We had to respond to a stimulus and I thought I'd just share my Blog Entry with you.

I recently turned sixteen and as a sixteen year old I felt like I should get a lot more freedoms. But there are those people called “parents”, who like to get their input in what I am doing. I know it sounds crazy; cause we are all individuals and should have our free will but even that is limited.

So I started to think about what limits my freedoms and I reduced it to just a few factors because I don’t want to bore you and it would take me more than one human life to complete all of that.

Before I started writing this, I actually thought that my parents are the ones who limit my life the most, but that isn’t true. They want me to do my IB and recommend me going to UNI, but if something else makes me happier, they are fine with it and until I am eighteen, Germany forces me to go to school anyways. They also say that as long as my grades are satisfying for them and me I won’t be limited in my free time. But they do it, well at least sometimes. If I want to stay out late I have to get picked up, but I guess that’s because I am a girl and they don’t like the thought of me going around towns after midnight all by myself.

All of you probably know how restricting school can be. You have to go there everyday, you have to meet deadlines and be the student teachers want to see; even though, you don’t want to. I always had problems with my opinion. I used to tell my opinion straight out to teachers but that never ended very well so I learned to give white lies at some points. I learned to be the person teachers want me to be. I am the school Lea and then after school I am Lea. It’s not that big of a difference but it clearly shows how school limits my freedom of speech.

But in fact there is one factor, which I feel like, limits our freedoms the most: Ourselves. Take a second to think about that, it sounds ridiculous, I know. How can WE limit OUR freedoms? Let me pick up the examples from before. It wasn’t actually the teachers who limited my freedom of speech but myself. I decided to stop throwing my purely honest opinion at them, because I felt it would be less stressful for my parents who had to talk to several teachers about that and me. In the end we make the choices, we might disappoint or anger someone, we might even break the law in order to live our freedoms but if we really wanted to we could. I decided to limit my freedoms, because others wanted me: my family, the government, school and so on. And please don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to tell you to go off and murder someone just because you can, I am trying to show you that those people aren’t trying to hurt us. Humans are often overwhelmed if they get a lot of choices, studies have proven that, so if people help us limit our choices we will be able to achieve the very best for ourselves, not getting confused or distracted by other possibilities, which aren’t even worth it thinking about them. Take the Garden of Eden as an example, what would have happened if Eva wouldn’t be given the choice to eat the Apple?

 Don’t blame the others for not being able to do something, if it really bothers you, think if the outcome of that, would it be worth all the consequences and if yes, then blame yourself for not having done it. - Meaningless