WP4: A New Writing Perspective
I’ve always found writing comes easy to me. I love the methodical process of it. It just makes sense to me. A clear outline and thesis is something I love to get lost in. I felt in my academic writing career I learned something new from a paper, from trying to prove or discern something.
Writing has always been academic to me: a thesis, a research topic, endless academic sources that point to an obvious outcome and general conclusion. Writing became a challenge to me this semester in this class. For the first time in my academic career I was forced to sit with the uncomfortableness of being uncertain about what I am writing about. I had to be okay with finding out in real time what I thought and what I wanted to tell an audience as I was writing or doing the project. There was no preconceived thesis or idea to base my writing about. This was hard for me. To be completely candid, it was extremely frustrating. Writing about myself and my experiences were foreign to me. Much of my college writing has been focused on a historical event, a policy, or an objective fact.
The most challenging part about writing for me has been sitting with that uncomfortable feeling, learning as I write, trying to discover something about myself. During my initial writing projects, I was hoping that I would walk away with some profound discovery about myself. When I finished writing, I was annoyed when there was not a revelation to be had. What made writing about myself and my experiences a challenge was being vulnerable. I had to find my voice outside of a monotone academic one. I had to learn to incorporate my own emotions, feelings, and understandings of my own experiences.
The battle of writing about myself was not against my inability to do so; it was the fear I associated with it. My own feelings of self-consciousness and doubt suppressed my writings, pushing me to want to make it as impersonal as possible. I feared publishing work about my own experiences would pale in comparison to other people. I was sure I did not have something I was as passionate about or a story to tell that was nearly as interesting. Therefore, I picked a topic that I thought I could hide from. That topic was food. It was simple, anyone could relate to it, and I did not have to dive into my own experiences as much as another topic.
When I finished the first writing project, I breathed a sigh of relief. I talked about my experiences of where I lived and how I wanted to explore what a meal meant to me. I was able to write about myself and my experiences in a candid way that I felt was honest. However, I wrote more as a narration that was separated from any sort of purpose. I did not have to do much thinking beyond what I already knew. Revising this project allowed me to revisit my initial writings and try to contextualize them with the other projects finished. I was able to explain more in the first project the bigger idea I wanted to convey and add the purpose that I left out. Doing this made my project more robust and challenged me to actually think about my intentions throughout this class and the topic I chose.
I looked towards my idolization of Anthony Bourdain as a way of inspiring myself to do the second project of actually experiencing each meal. I have an obsession with his book and TV series. There was something magical about his way of storytelling, not only the extraordinary trips, but the way he was able to describe mundane jobs in a restaurant kitchen. He made the job of being a line cook in a busy kitchen seem like a work of art. His ability to take the ignored or misconceived and humanize them was something I admired. In the back of my head I reminded myself that this project was about MY experiences, not anyone else’s. I didn’t have to prove a point to anyone or make an argument. After all, my purpose was to discover how being conscious of food and meals could reveal their emotional significance and the human connections they foster.
In cooking two meals and experiencing a third one at a restaurant, I felt confident in my ability to write about myself. There was a release of pressure knowing I did not have to search for something that was not there or make my relationship with food and meals valid through outside confirmation. This allowed me to do this project with ease as everything I wrote was true; it was what I did, after all. For the first time, I felt confident in my ability to self-reflect. I lost that self doubt that clouded my ability to reach for a purpose.
In writing the third project, I felt confident that I could take what I learned in the first and second projects and relate them to a bigger idea. It almost felt weird to write an academic essay after going through the process of writing about myself. I enjoyed returning to what felt familiar and also felt comfortable including my own voice in it. As the class comes to an end, I am glad to discover the intertwinement of food’s impact on my own life and its all-encompassing ability to transcend societal boundaries. Food and meals were the perfect what and the means of which I relate to a meal was a perfect how. When I took a step back and looked at its greater significance in the third writing project, I felt like everything made sense. Food had a purpose in bringing people together, causing conflict, and was a form of identity and pride. I could see my own life come into play, understanding this paralleled how a shared meal is sacred to me. Letting go of searching for a profound revelation was a way of discovering something entirely different. I am fortunate that this class and professor were able to push me out of my comfort zone and allow me to feel confident in myself as a writer.
