Finding Yourself

How can one truly know who they are? It takes years of experience to understand yourself; your likes, your dislikes, your abilities, and your passions. Sometimes society will agree with these things, and sometimes it won’t. Self-identity is the result of trial and error in terms of resistance to the cultural norms of one’s society, and the lessons learned through such resistance, as demonstrated in Munro’s An Ounce of Cure and Boyle’s Greasy Lake.
An Ounce of Cure tells the story of a teenage girl, whom remains unnamed throughout the entire story, who was brought up in a small town where drinking was frowned upon, thinking that she was never good enough for her family. She had her heart broken by a boy at school and became depressed over it, depressed enough to consider swallowing a bottle of aspirins, and almost succeeding, but stopping at six. One night, while babysitting, the protagonist decides to get drunk after dwelling on the boy for months. She does not realize how much alcohol she has consumed, and eventually makes herself very sick. Her friends come over to help her, and begin to make themselves too comfortable when the parents of the children she is babysitting return home, walking in on her wearing just a slip (her clothes were drying in the bathroom after her friends washed vomit off them). The father of the children takes her home, while still intoxicated, to her parents, assuming that she was experienced at drinking because she replaced the liquor with water. The girl tells her mother the story of the night, beginning with the boy and the pills, and her mother repeats the story to the parents of the family she babysat for. Word gets around town quickly about not only the girl’s experience drinking, but the entire backstory, leaving her with a bad reputation among her peers and babysitting clients for six months. The girl learned the hard way that she was no longer in love with the boy, and that life is a series of improvised, absurd events. The