Magic Eight Ball

When I was a little girl, on my fifth birthday, I got this awesome magic eight ball. When I came home from school, after seeing a cute boy on the playground, I’d shake my eight ball and ask it if he liked me or not. I’d ask the magic eight ball if I was going to get the Barbie Doll Dream House from Santa Claus for Christmas that year. I’d even shake it to tease my older brother, asking the eight ball if he liked the girl up the street. Of course I would always just shake it again if result was not the answer I wanted, over and over again, until I was satisfied. As I grew older, however, I realized the reality of the magic eight ball. I never realized the emphasis of the word “magic” on the box. It was just an illusion I had always been fooled by, something that made me actually think that I could change the answers with one shake of a silly little ball. Oh, how I wish to go back to the naïveté of my childhood. I grasped the reality that there are just some things you cannot change.

My dad died when I was nine, this, I obviously could not change. This tragic event affected me in ways I cannot even begin to explain. How I longed to just shake the magic eight ball, and ask, perhaps, if it was just a dream. I would shake it hard, until the answer I wished for came up. Things change. The hard part is adapting to transformation and moving on in life. My family has had to overcome a lot of change, end of story. How have I become who I am today? The answer is simple: change. When my dad died, we all adjusted to this new lifestyle. We were more careful with our money, we were more conscious about each other’s feelings, we were more caring, and we generally watched out for each other because we knew that we were all going through the same thing, together. Of course we would fight, we would bicker, and argue, but when it came down to it, we all blamed the change we were not yet adapted to and forgave each other for our disagreements.

I have become the young woman that I am today simply due to the theory of survival of the fittest. Though I do not believe in most aspects and ideals of Darwinism, I must strongly agree with Charles Darwin when he says “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” I have changed because I saw it fit. In order to move on in life, I had to change myself due to the ever changing world around me. The world will always change, and because of that I cannot explain what has shaped me into being what I am today. Nor can I explain what will shape me what I will become of tomorrow. The only thing I can exclaim about how I became the person I am today and how I will become the person I am tomorrow is merely myself, forever changing.