During her childhood, Diana, the daughter of a lowly paid worker, found herself in two very different situations. She was living in a society in Sydney, which was surrounded by posh and ordinary houses. Diana was living a dual life between two identities, but she couldn’t cope properly. She lived between apartment buildings crammed with clothes hanging on the balcony, and on the other side, sophisticated clotheslines.
She was like moving from one destination to another, searching for her origins and longing for an environment that connected with her professional aspirations. The search for identity was the central issue for Diana. She was a bit confused, but that 23-year-old girl was now more determined to find a way out.
Meanwhile, she got fired from the retail store she was working for, so she had to return to live with her parents in Parramatta. There she reunites with her childhood friend Joe and begins a journey of reconciliation with her roots. Joe was a photographer who saw to it her world didn’t collapse altogether, so he started giving her tips on photography.
In that search for identity, Diana felt there was something wrong, such as accepting oneself with defects and weaknesses. Diana also felt that coming from a place like Sydney Center brought her weaknesses to the surface. Now that she finally reunited with her friends, and felt she could tell the world who she was.
She was more confident about life, as she could reconnect with her roots. She thought, “I belong to this neighborhood and I can verify the difference between the two different worlds, the culture. Actually, there are too few people in the world that understand the reality of life. Very few people understand their neighborhood, or at least they try to do so.
Diana could now understand the situation of her friend Martha’s experience. The feeling of Martha was that she also didn’t fit into her homeworld either. Now she knew why their friends laughed at them. At no time did we want to say that any people were bad or good people in our neighborhood.
Teach self-denial and make its practice pleasure, and you can create for the world a destiny more sublime than ever issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer- Sir Walter Scott
She gradually started to understands it better when her photographer friend made her believe they were really friends and wanted to help her. Martha probably doesn’t know that if she wants to get where she wants to go, she also has to change the way she moves in that world. Here, that search for identity might confuse her, but once she understands the fact that the neighborhood inspires us a lot. Once you change the way you look at things, things change the way they look.
Diana thought, “We have both made that journey of self-acceptance that involves taking out a lot of our shame and facing our weaknesses. We see, for example, the way our parents live. This is no good for getting the effort they have made to pay for the studies that allowed her to do what she does.
Diana now knew that her former friends, whom she looked down on with disdain, have been her refuge. “The wonderful thing about adolescence is that you become friends with people that later when you are an adult, you will no longer make friends,” explains
The relationship between the ambitious photographer and these two girls was now uplifting their confidence. Diana was feeling more normal now.
Don’t you think poor women are as normal as any ordinary human beings? All of us talk and think to be rich, but not all of us achieve that goal.
We often think outside our limits, but isn’t that normal? We often consider that there is someone sitting in our mind that forces us to do something different, beyond our capacity.