dreaming away

I found Kristi's letter to Charlie to be very well done. I though it was interesting that she extended into the next year and made a guess as to what was going to happen to Charlie. At the end of the book, it seemed that things were beginning to look up for him. Clearly, he had reached a low point after going into the hospital and going through serious therapy. Also, at the end of the book we are led to believe that Charlie does have a good friend in Sam and that they will keep in touch. However, I also felt at the end of the book that Charlie would have a difficult time making friends in the coming year because of the opinions people already had about him as well as his somewhat udnerdeveloped social skills.

I think, though, that Charlie has undergone a significant change by the time he writes his last letter and I think that he will be more willing to cope with his problems. I liked that Kristi included a new book for him to read and that it is a slightly more challenging book. It seems that reading books helps Charlie gain experience of going through confusion and emerging better off, which helps him. In the site that Kristi links to about The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, it says that "the novel has heavy undercurrents of suppressed emotions and buried values." Charlie, by this point, will hopefully be able to see that and it will help him refrain from supporessing his own emotions. Kristi does a great job of showing that Charlie is thinking about what he does and consciously connects himself to the characters in the book.
Overall, I think that Kristi does a great job of showing that things are improving for Charlie but at the same time he is still dealing with some difficult issues of his own. According to her letter, though, he does still have people close to him who care about him and want to help. Also, because of what we know he went through over the summer his family is hopefully more supportive to him.

If I were to change one thing in Kristi's entry I would add that Charlie is more happy now. Here is a paragraph I would add to the letter:

I have some good days and some bad days. I see the therapist a lot more, but he says that I had a breakthough over the summer. I'm not quite sure what that means but I think it's good. I feel better for the most part, but my brother and sister are still sad that all that stuff happened with Aunt Helen. I told my therapist about what Sam said the one time, about doing things because I want to and not because it will make other people happy. He said she was right, and I think that's what Bill means about "participating." That's what I'm trying to do now, but it's hard sometimes because I still miss Sam and Patrick and my sister and everyone.

Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I'm tired and I
I want to go to bed

Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
And then leave me alone
Don't try to wake me in the morning
'Cause I will be gone
Don't feel bad for me
I want you to know
Deep in the cell of my heart
I will feel so glad to go

Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I don't want to wake up
On my own anymore

Sing to me
Sing to me
I don't want to wake up
On my own anymore

Don't feel bad for me
I want you to know
Deep in the cell of my heart
I really want to go

There is another world
There is a better world
Well, there must be
Well, there must be
Well, there must be
Well, there must be
Well...

Bye bye
Bye bye
Bye...


This song is of great importance to Charlie in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Not only does he listen to the song himself, but he also tries to share the song with other people he cares about, giving mixed tapes to friends. After reading the book and reading through these lyrics, I see why Charlie associated and identified so much with this song throughout his freshman year in high school. After his friend Patrick committed suicide, Charlie had a very difficult time battling depression and anxiety because he felt partially responsible for Patrick’s death. The lyrics in this song might give Charlie comfort because of the message they send. If Charlie were to believe that Patrick felt the same way as the speaker in the song, he could believe that Patrick “will feel so glad to go” and that Charlie shouldn’t “feel bad for me.” Furthermore, Charlie himself might identify with the mellow tone of the song, a significant aspect of his first year of high school and fitting to the tone of the book. Also, by giving his friends this song and sharing it with the people he cares about he might be sending them a message as well. At the end of the book Sam tells Charlie to stop living his life trying to please other people and to live on his instincts. In this song, however, the speaker is trying to please other people, as Charlie seems to do throughout the book. Hopefully, by the end of the book Charlie understands that he does not need to always do things to make people happy, but that he can do things because they are “deep in the cell of my heart.”

Teenhelp.org

This is a website that I think would be incredibly beneficial to Charlie for several reasons. Teenhelp.org is a website that contains several different opportunities for teens to cope with their problems. Some of the ways teens are able to do this include:
Support Forums - Our support forums are a community of thousands of teens from around the world. You can post your own questions or help others here!
HelpLINK - This is an anonymous e-mail help system, with nearly 100 mentors to answer your questions!
Live Help - The newest addition to TeenHelp.org, our live one-on-one help system. You can chat with a mentor in real time about a problem you need advice on.
Chat Room - We alternatively have a chat room available for advice as well. You may want to look into this if nobody is currently available in the live help system.

The site also includes several different resources about such issues as depression, suicide, eating disorders, etc. The topics within this site that would probably prove most helpful to Charlie are depression and suicide. Under the depression/suicide link, there are several more links that contain information and contacts for anyone with questions about suicide, such as the Yellow Ribbon Program or the Depression Alliance. This area of the site might prove helpful to Charlie because of his issues related to Patrick’s suicide. Also, Charlie mentions that his psychiatrists in the school feared that Charlie himself was suicidal for a while. Charlie could use this site to learn more about what Patrick might have been going through and to understand that it was not his fault. Some of these resources could also be useful for Charlie to learn about his own anxiety and possibly find ways to help control it.

The overall outline of the website would be beneficial for Charlie because it is a place for teens to share their own thoughts and opinions, as well as fears, with other teens and helps them discover that they are not alone. Several times throughout the book Charlie mentions that he liked talking in a group situation, but he never seems comfortable opening up to others. We see that Charlie liked being able to write letters to a person who he didn’t know and that he valued that his letters were anonymous. This site also allows him to write anonymously to others who are able to respond back.