"Swiss Miss"

        In Amanda Thompson’s personal essay, Swiss Miss, (2015), she suggests that it’s not all the bad when someone figures you out and wants to try to socialize with you, even if it may scare you at first. The author develops her stance by recalling an experience she had when she was younger. Thompson wrote this essay in order to demonstrate that showing feeling, breaking out of your shell, and letting people figure you out a little is totally okay. The intended audience of Thompson’s essay was people who may be socially awkward or apprehensive of making friends with others.
        I can relate to Thompson’s essay in so many ways. I myself can appear nonchalant most
of the time. This leads to many people misinterpretation of who I actually am. Unless someone
is my friend, they tend to think I have a “I’m too good for everyone” type attitude. I realized
when somebody fully understand you, they start to develop negative judgement of the kind of
person you are. I feel that’s because we’re only human. We always have to understand and
know everything. The girls on the bus for example. They couldn’t understand Amanda’s stoic
personality; they thought Amanda hated them. Towards the end of the essay, they came to
their own conclusion of her, trying to make sense in their mind of her passive behavior.
       Everyone knows at least one anti social person. This personal essay was written as a way to get people to better understand a person’s decision to separate themselves from others, at least a little bit. In the text we can see that in the time that Thompson took for herself, she was simply thinking. “... I refused to participate when I wasn’t needed so that I could observe and think about the things that piqued my interest…”(Thompson, 134) However, because this behavior is not seen as normal, she was often misunderstood. When they were on their trip, the girls that were roomed with Thompson tried to identify what ever emotion she was feeling that caused her to appear mute and separated. This is because that sort of behavior is always paired with a negative emotion. The girls finally realize that Thompson would rather just stay separated from everyone as to not get too involved, however they still made an extra effort to make her feel included. “Regardless of my apprehension, i continued to spend time with the very people i had once detested...”