Reflection
I started this semester knowing that I had a story that needed to be shared, and I didn't quite know how - or if - I could ever tell it the way that I imagined. My brief academic career has been shaped by over a handful of traumatic and unsettling experiences that have marred this space that I've almost always felt solace in. These fragments have followed me from universities to cities to states and back home sweeping up the world around me the way a middle-of-the-night rain drowns your patio garden.
I could tell my story to others in the quiet moments between midnight and morning, but aside from those hours, I didn't know what other spaces I could let those narratives take hold. The stories were - are - mine, after all. I could easily distract myself from them through course work and work work, but the stories would still come to me when the sky was a certain color pink and the moon was still in boldface font. I never found myself trying to tell my stories as anything more than an unloading process until I found myself in a space where I had to relearn their value.
Moving from Ohio to Michigan was not a trek across the country. The seasons act the same and the air still smells like home. But that doesn't mean that the ways that I experienced myself and my learning were left stagnant. Entering this program and building relationships with the people doing work here has taught me that my stories have value in the very same academic spaces where my trauma took root. I can use these spaces to not only build community through my stories, but I could spend my academic career making sense of experiences for others in my field.
As I work on my projects for my portfolio, I am constantly reminded of the ways that my stories deserve to be included in these academic spaces. I am still trying to learn that I deserve to be in these spaces, but the belief in my stories is half of the battle. As I move in these spaces and do the research associated with online communities, mental illness(es), digital literatures, pedagogies, and poetry, I see the ways that I fit in these spaces as an internet user, bipolar person, digital reader and writing, teacher, and poet. And just as each one of these identities can't be neatly boxed off when they describe me, I can't neatly separate the ways that my research intersects. I want to see the ways that online communities affect users with mental illness(es), how digital literature can provide alternative methods of storytelling for the classroom, how communities can engage with poetry and art, and how the process of storying mental illness(es) is complicated through the acting of telling and sharing the narratives attached to it. And these are only the beginning of my research's intersections.
As I continue studying in Michigan, I want to open doors and build connections with the people around me. I hope to continue delving into these areas of research to discover how I can engage with them as a member, as a scholar, and as a storyteller.
I could tell my story to others in the quiet moments between midnight and morning, but aside from those hours, I didn't know what other spaces I could let those narratives take hold. The stories were - are - mine, after all. I could easily distract myself from them through course work and work work, but the stories would still come to me when the sky was a certain color pink and the moon was still in boldface font. I never found myself trying to tell my stories as anything more than an unloading process until I found myself in a space where I had to relearn their value.
Moving from Ohio to Michigan was not a trek across the country. The seasons act the same and the air still smells like home. But that doesn't mean that the ways that I experienced myself and my learning were left stagnant. Entering this program and building relationships with the people doing work here has taught me that my stories have value in the very same academic spaces where my trauma took root. I can use these spaces to not only build community through my stories, but I could spend my academic career making sense of experiences for others in my field.
As I work on my projects for my portfolio, I am constantly reminded of the ways that my stories deserve to be included in these academic spaces. I am still trying to learn that I deserve to be in these spaces, but the belief in my stories is half of the battle. As I move in these spaces and do the research associated with online communities, mental illness(es), digital literatures, pedagogies, and poetry, I see the ways that I fit in these spaces as an internet user, bipolar person, digital reader and writing, teacher, and poet. And just as each one of these identities can't be neatly boxed off when they describe me, I can't neatly separate the ways that my research intersects. I want to see the ways that online communities affect users with mental illness(es), how digital literature can provide alternative methods of storytelling for the classroom, how communities can engage with poetry and art, and how the process of storying mental illness(es) is complicated through the acting of telling and sharing the narratives attached to it. And these are only the beginning of my research's intersections.
As I continue studying in Michigan, I want to open doors and build connections with the people around me. I hope to continue delving into these areas of research to discover how I can engage with them as a member, as a scholar, and as a storyteller.