Walking in Someone's Skin

In her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee wrote, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

” I completely agree with this quotation. Sometimes when people are in a certain situation, they forget to consider the opinions or feelings of the other people around them. Most people don’t think about how their actions can affect the people that they care about. I am very often a culprit of this. A lot of the time, when I have fights with my parents I forget that they know more than me, and that they are only looking out for me with my best interests in mind.

I think that a lot of the time when people disagree with each other they automatically assume that the other person is disagreeing with them because they want to hurt them. Sometimes people disagree and give you a hard time because they love you. A few months ago I had a fight with my best friend. I hadn’t invited her to hang out with me because I was hanging out with some other people that she doesn’t like. When she found out that I was hanging out with them she was angry that I didn’t invite her. I tried to explain to her that it was because I knew that she wouldn’t want to come, but she was still upset about it.

After I thought about it for a little while I realized that she had a right to be upset. I shouldn’t have just assumed that she wouldn’t want to go. When we talked about it again she said that she wasn’t angry anymore because she knew I didn’t mean any harm by it and she wouldn’t have wanted to go anyway. I also told her that I understood why she was upset and that we wouldn’t ever have that problem again because now I know that she does want to be invited when I hang out with that certain group of people. At first I was really annoyed about the situation, but then I thought about how I would have felt if she hung out with some friends and didn’t invite me.

If Tom Robinson’s jury would have thought about this when they were deciding whether he was guilty or not, I think that the results would have come out very differently. If they would have considered how they would feel if they were wrongly accused of a crime and then put into jail and sentenced to death for it, they would have been more sympathetic towards Tom. If people put themselves into each other’s skin I think that they would understand each other a lot better.