A way that Meredith Grey exhibits evidence in unconsciousness is how she handles her relationship with Derek. Coming from a mom who was never really there for her because she was always working and a father who left when she was only 5 years old and never came looking for her. You can tell she unconsciously sufferers from fear of abandonment.

Meredith doesn’t like to fully commit to her relationship, she doesn’t talk to Derek about her problems and every time he tries to help her she walks away avoiding any talking or pouring her feelings. She is harsh sometimes and without knowing she hurts those who love her and pushes them away. Throughout the series she shows a defense mechanisms to protect herself from any emotion that might damage her even more. In an episode her mother calls her completely ordinary and hurts her, when she goes in surgery she thinks she poked a hole in a patients heart which she didn’t but her mothers opinion influenced her work and thinking.

This show also shows a lot of denial. When hurtful things happen like when Meredith’s mother dies she keeps repeating that she’s fine. She acts like nothing happened and doesn’t talk about it with any one not her boyfriend, or even her best friend Cristina. Meredith repeats that she is fine so many times as if trying to convince herself. You can tell she’s not fine because as the episode begins it starts off with her dreaming about her mother and waking up sweating, gets the ashes from the back of her closet and puts them in a plastic bag.

 

Before You, by Amber Hart, is a book based on a love that is based on hope, hope is what keeps them together through everything and it’s what helps them live their lives together taking off each others masks. Faith and Diego are very different people yet so alike. Being from from different roots and different worlds they both know, they don’t have a chance. Diego’s perseverance lures Faith into his world, and Faith’s mask which Diego can see through intrigues Diego to figure out the real her, something that no one except her best friend Melissa has done. Diego acts like a tough guy outside, having a dark secret that has haunted him from Cuba to the States. Like Faith, who hides a past that no one knows about. Without imagining it, her and Diego have more in common than they thought.

Diego’s care slowly breaks down Faith’s walls letting him see parts of her that she doesn’t let anyone see. Shes dumbfounded. How could it be possible that this guy breaks down her walls? Diego also figures out that Faith isn’t just another guy. Shes special. Together they let each other explore their worlds, letting each other in. Hope, something that they both see in each other. This reminds me a lot of the real world. As humans we have that desperate need to search for something in someone else, sometimes it’s love, because some of us need someone to love us because we can’t love ourselves. In this case it’s hope. It’s like the air, you can’t see it but you can feel it. Together the felt that hope, and by reading it I even felt that hope, the sense of need they had for each other.

I think the way the story shifted in the end was very unpredictable. I for one did not expect the book to end the way it did,  thought it was going to be another happily ever after. But the way things ended, it felt unfinished like there needed to be more. I think that’s the only thing I didn’t appreciate about the book, I felt a void at the end, but happy to see them together. I wish it was the same in real life.