Reflection

Area 1: Self as a reader

Since reading was brought into my life, I hated it, I never really did it and if I did do it, I never tried my best on it. Why didn’t I like to read? The reason I don’t like to read is that I can hardly read. The words on the page don’t look like it’s in order to me, it looks like a bunch of random letters to me. I believe it sees words as just letters to me because, I love math and I’m good with numbers, so when you see numbers on a page you have to figure out what to do with them, which is what I do with words. Unlike Jhumpa Lahiri from the article My Life’s Sentences, I did not like to underline things that I did not understand but rather underline the things I did understand. Many people like the underline what they don’t understand so they can look it up and get to understand it. But since I’m not too good at reading and hardly ever understand anything I’m reading, I like to underline the things I do understand because since it is clear to me, I can talk about it and know what is going on in those few lines. As the years of me hating reading keeps on growing, I learned that reading is very important in the world. I started to read the work even in school which helped me earn better grades and made me feel better in the classes because I wasn’t confused in the class discussions. Although I still hate reading and would love to not read at all, I know for me to be successful I must put my pride aside and try my best so I can become better. 

 

Area 2: Writing Situations 

“My mind became a jail cell and I was held captive to the trauma. It was almost as if everything good came to an end, and I was stuck staring at the ceiling, slowly falling into this sea of nothingness. I started to become self-conscious and introverted.  My mind quickly repressed it.”

Strength, courage and lively were words that were once used to describe me until two years ago when I found myself becoming a person I didn’t recognize in the reflection of my mirror. These sentences, although not many, tell a story of profound damage. While going through this identity crisis, I became comfortable with stillness and an enemy of change. When anything in my day to day life shifted, I never knew how to react, and in return, I became close-minded and shut off from the rest of the world. Although this motionless mentality is what led me to repress these memories and pretend as though nothing happened to me, writing helped free my mind. As I wrote those sentences, I realized that what truly shapes me is not what happens to me, but where I go from there. How I respond, react, and reflect are what will keep me going forward and get me out of that motionless cycle I was stuck in. These sentences that once told a story of damage and hurt, now tell a story of growth and advantage, because they allowed me to “orient” myself. Not many people can say they have reached this level of knowledge at such a young age and that is what gives me the advantage. When Jhumpa Lahiri writes, “The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail,” she is saying that not only is writing a means of escaping, but it can lead us to the light when all we see is dark. The best sentences do indeed orient us because, without a portal to vent my frustrations, I would’ve been the same lost and close-minded person I was before. Writing, much like stars in the sky, allowed me to shine beyond my mind’s limitations. 

Area 3: Language and Identity 

While growing up in a household that forever was the only things we knew, but then things turned upside down in a manner of days and forever went to never. Although this could have affected me in many ways, such as bringing me closer to people or pushing me away, in fact, this one aspect of my life caused me to push everyone away. This caused me a separation from everyone and everything. The reason this changed my mindset is that I did not trust anyone or anything. This led to me losing friends and many people did not want to know about me and I did not want to know about them. Writing about this known kind of pushed me away from other people too because it made me remember that I can’t trust other people. While writing that paper it had my mind all over the place because it started to see as everyone doing things that were good for them but not good for me. But then I noticed that people are here to see you do better and push you to your limits. For example, my sister always stops me from doing the things and I took that in a bad way but through time, I learned that she just wants me doing nothing but the best for me and the rest of us. Therefore, this one aspect that was a part of my life caused both bad and good but got me closer to people that I was once pushing away; which now they are the greatest people in my life.