PART I: Zoom Out
When I think of my writing experience in college so far, I never think about myself first. I always think about someone else: the people I am writing for, the teacher I am writing for, or the college I am writing for. Never once have I imagined writing a piece of literature simply for myself to express my own thoughts and views. It is always asked of me to glue together a paper from a mess of arguments that rise in temperature and boil over until it is left as nothing truly meaningful.
That is not to say I am entirely ungrateful for the writing experiences thus far in my college experience, but I do not believe they were the most beneficial for me for a myriad of reasons. Even if I thought the writing was boring, unimaginative, uninspiring, and overall lackluster, it kept my brain active and was at least useful in that sense.
Going back in time to my first writing class in 2021 which also ended up being my only writing class until now, it was clear to me from the start that I was meant to write in a certain manner. I was not to write for myself nor for a specific audience, but for the teacher instead. The writing was required in the sense of a grade, but it also felt required in the sense that I had to take certain steps and processes to guarantee a grade I would be content with. I was not able to volunteer more effort and be more imaginative because it simply was not in the rubric nor was it encouraged. Teachers always say, “Try your best and work extra hard, go above and beyond!” However, there is an extreme disconnect between what the teacher desires and what the teacher encourages. Despite the desiring of me and my peers to write extra and create truly beautiful writing, there was a lack of encouragement and a huge lack of creative freedom. Why would I create a paper that goes above and beyond if the “above and beyond” are in terms that do not help me grow me as a writer and learner in this world? The teacher-to-peer conferences would tell me nothing other than my writing is “convoluted” or expresses ideas in too many words. I felt as if I needed to push my writing to something less personal and instead to something more robotic that did not feel like my own work. My brain was active and I was actively completing these assignments, yet it felt lifeless and dull which also encompassed how I generally felt during this time period.
A bright-side however was that I would regularly engage with my peers as we all found something in common that led us to becoming friends. We were all students of marginalized backgrounds and identities whether it was being first-gen, low-income, POC, or LGBTQ+. We found solidarity in our shared struggles, trauma, pain, etc. When we would inevitably peer-review each others essay, we gave each other genuinely useful life and writing advice and consoled each other in our personal struggles. While it did not necessarily affect how I wrote for the class, it did give me more of a sense of community in the class and made the overall process much more bearable. However, the bearability was still only such a small component, so the course still felt like a bit of torture.
For most of the papers I completed in the class, they were intended for a general audience that may be interested in health and healing. I tended to take the approach of looking at trauma from a social standpoint on how it is important to acknowledge the differences and nuances of people. Due to this take, I would mainly engage in materials that were not necessarily scientific in nature. I used mostly magazine and blog articles while researching for these papers to help justify my own views by mentioning and explaining similar views by other writers. It was not always the most insightful as I was expected to use the same viewpoints to explain my viewpoint, but I did enjoy that aspect of the process. It was enjoyable to witness others with struggles similar to mine and held the same outlook, yet I wish I was able to provide more variety in viewpoints without making the teacher think I am trying to invalidate my own viewpoint. It felt extremely limiting as at the time, I recognized that some of the greatest growth in understanding, compassion, and knowledge can come from looking at viewpoints that differ and seeing how the nuances and changes between people can affect their outlook on things.
During this period of time, one of the main environmental factors that influenced my writing was COVID-19 for many different reasons within itself. One of the most drastic changes in my life that affected my writing was when I became slightly estranged with my family. I moved to Los Angeles during the height of COVID-19 against the wishes of my parents. However, I was facing a suffocating amount of stress as they expected me to be able to work in an environment with a lack of internet, lack of resources, and stay content being in a timezone that put most of my classes late at night. The last reason also led to my family staying up much later than they would like as I would be awake completing homework and attending classes. I did not want to have my relationship with my parents ruined any further, so I took the money I had from financial aid at the time and moved by myself to Los Angeles all the way from North Carolina. Being free was great, yet my writing did not improve much if any at all due to the changed environment that was still suffocating due to COVID-19. I was in a city with countless infections spreading rapidly daily. I was expected to stay calm indoors and avoid getting sick yet as many people already know many luxuries such as delivery for food or groceries are too expensive if you are a broke college student. I missed the comfort of security in housing and food from my parents, yet I did my best to not regret any of the decisions I made. My writing at this point in the writing class was subpar or average at best. The assignments were uninspiring and if my circumstances are dire, then how is it reasonable to expect me to produce something I can be proud of? How can I look past my own environment that I see daily? I could not look past it. In a sense, it felt ironic that I was taking a health and healing writing course. I was at some of my lowest points in my life, yet I was taking a class dedicated to writing about the world of health and healing. It was almost comical to a sad point. I do believe if circumstances were better and if COVID-19 did not impact the world so harshly then my writing could have improved much more, but atlas, things happened the way they happened, so I have learned to take my poor experience in my first writing class for what it is a face-value and not limit myself to what happened in there. I realized after that class that my writing could be so much more and I should not be forced to limit myself in the ways some class structures cause.
PART 2: Zoom In
While my experience with the writing course I took in 2021 was overall a bad experience, I did create one piece of work that I enjoyed that stood apart from everything else I created in that class. One factor I did not include about my environment was that I was in my first long-term relationship. It was a new experience for me and led to a great variety of growth, pain, happiness, and much more. From this relationship, it inspired one of my essays.
Specifically, this essay was an analytical essay meant to focus on something personal in my life and how my experience differs from those around me. It took a lot of searching to figure out what I wanted to analyze, but eventually I chose something extremely personal to me. For my essay, I chose to compare the familial relationships between myself and my family versus my partner at the time and his family. The idea was very important both to me and my boyfriend at the time. I wanted to understand his background and family values a lot more, so I thought it would be the perfect experience to do such. Overall, It was a very informal essay meant to dive deeper into both of our personal experiences of family and how that health and healing can easily be taken for granted if you are used to having a loving and caring family.
While thinking about the paper some more, it was almost like an open-ended letter to myself and my partner about our various struggles and how despite our huge familial differences we were making happy memories at the time. Despite the seemingly limited audience intention, it was also meant for anyone else in similar situations whether they are in a relationship or not due to the nature of talking about family issues. I wanted to highlight the various differences in family dynamics specifically when it came to LGBTQ+ identities and relationships.
I started off strong by reflecting on my own personal experiences with my family. I was raised in a southern family, yet I was somehow lucky enough to be blessed with a family that was open to change and open to learning about a variety of identities. Being the only LGBTQ+ person in my family was extremely tough, so I wanted to highlight that even with a great support system it can still feel isolating and tough since you are essentially navigating these waters by yourself. I also wanted to bring to attention how many LGBTQ+ children in traditionally heteronormative families are looked at as sort of an educator on the matter when in reality, there is a large amount of differences between LGBTQ+ people and they all do not feel nor think the same way. To contrast my own experiences, I brought my ex-partner’s family into the picture as he was raised in a complete different environment. He grew up in a family with values that expected everyone to be straight and not deviate from the “norm.” He eventually came out to his family as bisexual, yet they refused to support the side of him that liked men. With that in mind, he inevitably hid all relationships he had with men from his family. He did not want to deal with the backlash of telling his family he had a boyfriend, so it ended up being better for him to just hide it.
With the background of the text in mind, it is clear that this paper for me was a means of reflecting on differing family values and experiences. I wanted readers in that moment to reflect on their own families and how their values shape how they perceive differing identities and whether that makes them feel loved and supported or unwanted and afraid. I wanted readers to also acknowledge how no family is perfect no matter how supportive they may be or seem.
While this paper was reflective in nature and could be applied to a wide variety of people, I did intend for this to be restricted to those who are open to LGBTQ+ values or who are LGBTQ+ themselves. My thought process going into this was that if you are not open already to the idea of LGBTQ+ relationships and all, then this paper would serve of little value to you. In general, I just really wanted to create a piece of work that was personally curated to my own life story and provide a differing viewpoint in the form of my ex-partner to acknowledge how drastic the differences can be within everyone’s lives.