Blog #9

Barbara Graham and David Brooks are two great writers. Yet they are also different in very many ways. Brooks is very abstract in his writing while, Graham on the other hand is very concrete. Graham likes to give examples and tells details so that we can better understand what she is talking about, although Brooks he is very vague and doesn’t give example nor details he just kind of leaves you hanging having to read deeper into what he is talking about.

            In their writings “It’s Not About You” (Brooks) and “Confessions of a Quit Addict.” (Graham), They connect in so many ways. They talk about how life is just beyond just yourself. Life is bigger than you. Brooks stated “The purpose of life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.” Barbara supports that very well because, she moves and moves and moves, throughout the entire article. Anything that didn’t make her happy or excite her she didn’t care for it. She states “I had never been much good at doing things that didn’t arouse my passion.” In other words, anything that didn’t make her happy she was not going even give energy towards it. She later discovers after having her son, Clay, that is not the life she wants to live anymore. She had a huge eye opener. She even says herself “It had taken thousands of miles and one child for me to understand that quitting I took for freedom was as much of a trap as the social conventions we were trying to escape.”  She admits that she was searching for happiness in all the wrong ways. She later says “Over the years, I’ve also come to understand that even if I don’t go chasing after change, it will do a perfectly good job of finding me.” Right there Graham has given so much support to what Brooks meant by “The purpose of life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.” 

Like I’ve stated before Graham and Brooks are great writers. They just have extremely different styles of writing. Brooks is very abstract and that’s ok he still gets what he wants to say out there. While Graham is very concrete. Which is great because then we get examples of what she means by what she is saying rather than having to make inferences out of what she is saying like we must do for Brooks.