Overall Reflection
I started the first project having no idea what I was doing, not understanding the prompt and feeling unsure about which community I should pick. I realized that I wanted to do something about being LGBTQ, but I knew that whole community would be far too big of a topic and wouldn't really be possible to contain within such a small, specific essay. I started thinking about the things that inspired and comforted me that were a part of that overall community, and I realized that most of those things were art, such as comics, books, and movies. Before I even fully grasped the prompt, I had figured out that I wanted to make my project about young queer women and our representation in art, and what that meant to me. Blue Is the Warmest Colour popped into my head right after I decided this, as it is a film that I have loved ever since the first time I watched it, and it perfectly fit the category. I wrote my first draft mainly focusing on the concept of community, genre, and my chosen text, writing what was essentially an analysis of the movie with no trace of myself anywhere. After meeting with my professor, he explained the prompt to me again, telling me that my paper was not bad, it just was not a personal narrative yet. After my meeting, I worked on inserting myself into the narrative, adding in personal stories and anecdotes about my experiences with this film and the topics tackled within it. I tried to cut back on the analytical language that I often use in essays, as I know that this style of writing does not belong throughout an entire personal narrative paper. I also worked on portraying my reason for writing this paper, the drive behind my words, which is mainly that I want to support LGBTQ content creators and even possibly become one myself, continuing to create positive queer stories for generations to come. This project definitely made me think more about my specific subcommunity and my place in it, along with the experiences that my group shares. It was interesting to write something personal, as I feel like I never get to write essays involving myself. I enjoyed the process, and I hope that my message comes across as strongly as I believe it does.
At first, I was extremely concerned about the second project, as it took me a long time to figure out exactly how I was going to write about what I wanted to write about. I knew that I wanted to write about veganism, as I had been thinking about becoming a vegan for a long time, I just did not know how to incorporate a local community and focal text into the research that I knew would not be difficult to find. After meeting several times with Mat, I realized that my community did not need to be anything official like a club, and I settled on my small community of vegan friends in Tallahassee. My focal text for the paper ended up being my interview that I conducted with my friend Amaranth, more of a conversation than an interview really, which worked to my advantage as the interview accurately represented the point of view of the community that I was considering joining. Through my sources, I found a way to exemplify the way that the members of my small community communicate with each other, along with an answer to my question of whether I wanted to go vegan or not. Entering this paper, I was not sure how much I would learn. I thought that I already knew a lot about veganism and vegan communities, but the more research I did the more I realized I was not as informed as I once thought. I am glad I had the opportunity to really think about veganism and what it means to me, as this whole process has made the decision to commit to this lifestyle easier to see myself actually doing.
For me, the third project was enjoyable and not too difficult, which I think was mostly because my topic choice was the perfect one for a more creative project like this. I was able to do something that I’ve always been interested in trying out, which was making one of the vegan food videos that I’m always watching on YouTube, so it didn’t seem as much like an assignment to me as something that I probably would have already done on my free time. I’m glad that I picked veganism and I’m glad that I challenged myself to actually follow through with it, and I really do think that going through all the research for the last project along with making something of my own for this project contributed to my desire to commit to veganism. Although I knew I could have picked “easier” genres, I knew that I wanted to actually make something that I would be happy with in the end (I’m a ridiculous perfectionist) and I’m glad that I did the video and the recipe, even though they did take a decent amount of time to figure out and film.
If I’m being completely honest, this class wasn’t the most difficult or interesting thing in the world for me, which I’m sure is not an unpopular opinion. I took countless English credits in high school, not to mention the writing classes I took at my last college, and I wasn’t very happy that I would have to take yet another required writing course. However, I do think that I was able to get something significant from the class by pushing myself further than I knew I really needed to. This kept things interesting for me, and the loose prompts did allow me to put in a decent amount of effort to write papers that I was actually interested in and fairly proud of once they were finished. Although I did really enjoy writing my first project, I think that my projects on veganism were the most significant, as they actually did help me make a change in my life that I had been wanting to make for a while. I think that this class taught me that I’m good at making things work for me, and that although my obsessive, overachieving tendencies get me in trouble all the time, at least they make me a good worker and someone who actually cares about what I put into my work and the world.