Analysis Of Suicide Note By Janice Miikitani

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APOLOGIES Suicide Note by Janice Mirikitani, is a heartbreaking poem of a young woman who commits suicide. All of her feelings and emotions are left behind in her last note. As thoughts of not feeling worthy enough over take this young girl, she writes her final thoughts and apologies to her mother and father. As such a catastrophic event happens Mirikitani’s use of metaphors and descriptive writing take you to the young girl’s final moments. Making you wish you could reach out and stop her from jumping off the ledge that icy winter night. The young girl is full of not feeling good enough and being overly critical of herself. In line three you see her self-doubt come out with her writing “not good enough not pretty enough not smart enough.” …show more content…

In line ten she writes “if only I were a son, shoulders broad”. Is something her parents said to her to make her feel this way, or maybe it was that they didn’t praise her accomplishments at an early age. Mirikitani’s own background may have some justification on these statements of self-loathing. As in Schaefer 2 many Asian families being born a girl isn’t always a good thing. As we read in lines thirteen and fourteen she states “the golden pride reflected in my father’s dream.” Did her self-loathing begin long before she wrote this note? As the girl grows older she tries to overcome the initial disappointment of being born a girl by trying to over compensate in her life. Even in her accomplishments she never seems to find praise, all that stands out are her failures. Sometimes making mountains out of mole hills in her failures. As stated in line twenty-five “each failure, a glacier”. Lines twenty-six thru twenty-eight seem to describe more of those epic failures “So I have worked hard. Not good enough” lines twenty-nine and thirty go back to her feelings of doubt and depression. Many times the person depressed learns to mask those feelings of self-doubt. No one sees those signs of depression until it is too

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