What do the objects represent to you?Or…… You may interpret the phrase the things we carry with us as the lessons learned or the feelings recalled from an event that greatly influenced your life.

Personal EssayTopic: The Things We Carry With UsLength: 300-500 wordsAs Tim OBrien (1990) reminds us so poignantly in his novel/autobiography of the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried, what soldiers carried was their property and their selves (literally and metaphorically), both of which accompanied them into the present:First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha (p.1)…The things they carried were largely determined by necessity (p.2)…To carry something was to hump it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps. In its intransitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive (pp 3-4)…What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty (p. 5)… What they carried varied by mission (p.9)… Other missions were more complicated and required special equipment (p. 10)…They things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition (p. 13)… they carried USO stationary and pencils and pens. They carried Sterno, safety pins, trip flares, signal flares, spools of wire, razor blades, chewing tobacco, liberated joss sticks, and statuettes of the smiling Buddha, candles, grease pencils, The Stars and Stripes, fingernail clippers, Psy Ops, leaflets, bush hats, bolos, and much more…For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. (p.19)My question to you is What do you carry?To carry means to hold or to bear; to transport or to transmit. Carry means to communicate, to express, to hold, or to be capable of holding. It may also mean: to be pregnant with, to give impetus to, to take further, to keep in stock, to compensate, to cover or advance beyond.You decide how to interpret this question. You may choose to describe what you carry with you at all times whether it is the contents of your backpack, your purse or the contents of your car. What do the objects represent to you?Or…… You may interpret the phrase the things we carry with us as the lessons learned or the feelings recalled from an event that greatly influenced your life. Describe how you continue to carry this event within yourself.