The CAS diaries

It was very different from the other two we’ve done – this time it involved no planning. It was devoted entirely to reflection and drawing conclusions from all the experiences I’ve had. 

Most of what I said in this interview is already here on this blog in individual reflection posts or in my big final reflection. CAS was definitely something new for me but I don’t regret trying it (well, it was not entirely voluntary to try but I don’t regret it anyway). There are definitely some downsides to this system, which we talked about during the interview (especially the supervisor system!). However, I think my coordinator was slightly surprised when I said I generally liked doing CAS. And I did – it’s still somewhat surprising for me too.

Anyways, this is the end. Of the blog, at least – it’s not like I’m going to stop doing stuff I would do for CAS just because I’ve finished the IB. I’ve enjoyed putting these posts out, even if there was just one person reading them.

I quickly noticed that doing CAS was not as difficult as I thought it would be. It was actually my first lesson I got out of the whole experience – doing stuff outside just studying is valuable and not a hassle. Writing this, I realize that I did not do all of the things that have appeared in my portfolio because I had to but rather because I wanted to. I wanted to go swimming again. I wanted to write more. I wanted to do something that would make me think that I’m changing the world for the better. However, without CAS, I probably would not have done any of that. I discovered that I tend to undervalue everything that does not directly contribute to my academic achievement and find school-related excuses for not devoting my time to things I actually enjoy. This is a bit of a sad realization, but an important one nonetheless. Now that I have identified this weakness, I will look for methods to improve.

Because of the fact that CAS was mandatory, I made more time for writing and I’m happy I did. I could never imagine myself to be anything other than a writer and I always say that, however because of school and my fear of academic underachievement, I rarely write anything. The writing activities I did for CAS – translating a play, Poetry Writing Month and Writing Summer Camp – were a great opportunity to remind myself why I love it so much and why I should do it more. Constantly thinking about duties, chores and responsibilities is draining, even for someone like me who likes studying. Indirectly, CAS helped me get back to the (serious) hobby I love the most.

Apart from that, CAS has certainly put me ’out there’. Many things I did pushed me out of my comfort zone in different respects. The first experience, translating a play for the local theatre, was a difficult one because I was not sure of my skills and afraid of failing an important task. Instead of withdrawing, I powered through it and did my thing without being a disappointment. Swimming was a challenge I devoted a whole blog post to – it sometimes got too upsetting for me to manage but in the end, I did it. Poetry Writing Month was similar in this respect, as at first, I was terribly afraid of putting bad attempts out there for people to read. In the end, it helped me gain some perspective and see that I do not have to be perfect to enjoy writing. Finally, my CAS project pushed me to work with other people, which was never something I liked to do. I must admit, I still hate it, but working collaboratively on a CAS project helped me see the point of group work and this is very important to me – there is nothing I hate more than doing things I don’t understand the purpose of. This changed and I believe it will continue to change. I’m very much looking forward to it.

I also felt, when doing activities like the Amnesty Letter Writing Marathon, the I Support Women, Not Sweatshops workshop or my CAS project, a strange sensation that I get rarely and I’m thankful when I get it. I felt needed and helpful. I often think about my position in society. As a member of a heavily ostracized and ridiculed minority, I’m not a stranger to systematic discrimination or daily viciousness from other people. At the same time, I have it good in life – I get to live in a country free of war, I get to eat every day, I get to live in a proper house with both of my parents, I get to have a computer to write this document on. I’m privileged in many respects but I also know what it means to not be. This is why I feel activism is important, and CAS has helped me engage in it in different ways. When preparing the ALWM, reading about the people we were writing for made me upset like usual but I was able to channel that energy into doing something more than just feeling helpless. Same with my CAS project – organizing a campaign made me feel that I was no longer unproductive. ISWNS workshop, on the other hand, was a fantastic opportunity to get educated and to feel a part of a community. Even though my letters, t-shirts or posters might not have changed the world, they have certainly changed me, in that I felt that ’helpful’ feeling. I have discovered it and now I will seek it further in similar activities.

I feel like I have developed my creative and social skills infinitely and I certainly did not expect that. I also improved my organizational skills, however not to the maximum – I admit that I could have done a much better job with consistently documenting my activities and this is something I will need to work on.

As for the learning outcomes, I can confidently say that I have attained all seven of them.

From July 6th to July 17th I was in Poronin, a small city in the South-East of Poland. People usually associate this region with sports, activity and sightseeing because it lays in Poland’s famous Tatra mountains. Lucky for me, a person who hates mountain-climbing, the camp I went to is rather stationary and has nothing to do with sightseeing. It was a Creative Writing Camp (or Writing Camp; or Literary Camp – I don’t know the proper name in English). People like me go there for eleven whole days to just get inspired for writing.

That’s it, that’s the whole thing. That’s the fun.

During my time there I wrote ten (!!!) short stories that I’m really proud of. They were all inspired by prompts our instructor gave us. One task, for example, involved choosing a well-known tale and then writing a story that would change the meaning of the original tale. I chose Beauty and the Beast and imagined an alternative version where the relationship between the two main characters is not based on pure love. Another task I really enjoyed was to write a story with a protagonist that the reader would hate after reading the whole text. I wrote a scene from the perspective of a guy who was so bored that he did not stop a kidnapping that took place in front of him. 

You can access the Google Drive with all the texts here.

(They are in Polish, though. I promise I didn’t just write 10+ pages of gibberish to put it on the blog. If you don’t know the language you just have to take my word for it.)

The creativity part of this experience is pretty much self-explanatory – it helped me get inspired and let me gather new, unexpected ideas for directions my future writing could go in. However, this experience also has its service part.

During this camp, the participants have to demonstrate their work for others to see. This year, we decided that we would do an exhibition of the texts we wrote. This sounds like an easy way out but in reality, it’s far from that for a couple of reasons. First of all, we only had one day to organize the whole thing. Second, an exhibition of written text might quickly get boring – prose requires extended attention and detailed reading (poetry too, but it is shorter and more easily digestible).

I was one of the people who organized the entire exhibition from a technical and visual standpoint. We arranged the texts in a way that they were grouped by genre and signalled it with coloured pieces of paper and announced to everyone that they could call the author’s name if they wanted to talk to them about what they wrote. I proposed creating a wall of poetry, which turned out to be a great idea – the poems got their own space which made it easier for people reading them to get through all of them. We also came up with the idea to pair some texts with pictures painted by kids from the art section of the camp, which made the exhibition more appealing to the viewers.

Photos belong to Przystań Wyobraźni on Facebook.

We had lots of work to do with printing the texts, formatting and assembling them for the exhibition but I felt really good doing all of it. I liked the task and the fact that I could contribute something more than just my writing made me proud. People who came to the exhibition were interested in what we wrote and some were even surprised that they did not get bored. 

This CAS experience was a very organic one, however I still consider it to be important – I usually do not engage in group work and tend to focus on one task (in this case, writing). I’m happy that I put myself out there.

I realized the following learning outcomes:

As you may remember, my last swimming update was glowing with optimism. I was genuinely happy to not miss any training day and I felt accomplished. Well, after that post things have taken a slightly less pleasant turn.

In short, I managed to complete most of my training plan, as I did not get to week 15 and 16. My biggest issue was consistency – I missed a lot of training days and this slowed down the completion of the plan. I still enjoyed swimming but sometimes the fear of entering the locker room was too overwhelming for me to go to the pool. 

In the end, I feel like the thoughts I was supposed to beat, beat me instead. I’m still proud of what I did in those first four weeks but I simply did not manage to attain my goal. I still feel largely insecure. My stamina has slightly improved and I felt the physical benefits of swimming but it was not enough to convince my brain that going to the pool is fine. I dropped consistent swimming altogether after 14 weeks of the training plan (approximately 18 real weeks).

The reason I’m posting this update is that I now understand I can. I talked to my CAS coordinator about my failure during an individual consultation (I did not tell her anything before that). I thought that if I admitted to failing something this huge I would fail CAS. We talked about it and, even though it might sound a bit cliché, I understood that failure is not a bad thing here. Challenges we take on are sometimes too ambitious for us and everybody has a different capacity for what they can and cannot do. What we should do is not give up but reflect on what went wrong and try again or attain this goal differently. And, no, I won’t fail CAS simply because I did not finish my training plan. I was relieved.

So, yeah, that’s how it went. I rediscovered how fun it is to be physically active and I will definitely look for ways to implement it in my daily life (spoiler: I will tell you a bit about it in my activity reflection!). Going back to the pool is something I feel like I can do but I have to give myself more freedom to fail, as it is clearly difficult for me.

This experience let me attain the following learning outcomes:

After we came up with the final ideas, I put my somewhat-existent skills to use and designed the posters to be printed. It took me almost five days (again, my skills are only somewhat existent) but I had a lot of fun coming up with different designs. You can see all the designs here.

Here are my two favourite posters I made out of eleven that were included in the campaign:

Translation: #thoughtsandprayers? Do not rely just on hashtags. Choose your representative to make the change on the 13th of October.

Translation: [upper text] that’s the way it goes sometimes. [lower text] Give yourself the right to complain. If you don’t vote, you can’t criticize the choice others have made for you.

In the meantime, my friends found a printing office. It was in a local Work Inclusion Institution, so the price was relatively cheap and we also felt like we did something good choosing this company in particular. My partner took our posters there on Tuesday and they were supposed to be printed by Friday. We also sent the grant application that our Assistant prepared.

On Friday, we claimed the posters from the printing office and hung them up at school. Here is the proof.

And here are the proud creators.

The campaign lasted for a week before the election on Sunday, October the 13th. From our observations, it seemed that people were interested in reading the posters on the first two days. One person commented that the campaign was probably prepared by the government or the city council, which, not gonna lie, was somewhat flattering. However, we did not hear much discussion about the election, at least not above the normal level.

We took the posters down after the election. 

Now for the sad part: we did not get the grant we applied for, as we did not exactly fit the criteria. I think we would have got it if our campaign was planned for a wider audience apart from just the students and teachers at one school. Such a campaign would be good to organize in the future – if we ever do something like this again, it would probably be aimed at more schools.

Another part that did not exactly go as planned was the evaluation. We wanted to conduct another survey that would ask just one question: ‘did you vote in this year’s election?’. We figured that it would be good to wait for a while so that people would not associate the immediate survey with the campaign – we did not want the results to be biased. However, we never got around to doing it in the end.

Evaluation:

Nevertheless, we sat down together after the campaign was finished. We agreed that we were pleased with how the project went. Our preceding survey showed that there was a need for something like this, so we ultimately feel that this was a good direction to go in. From what we observed, people were interested in our campaign, however, we did not see clear engagement. We concluded that next time, that is if we come around to doing this again, we will have to prepare something more than just posters – could be a meeting or a tutorial.

During the evaluation meeting, my partner expressed some concern to me that she felt like the task sharing was not exactly fair. She felt like me doing all the posters was really just me doing everything that was important in the project, whereas she mainly did the research and planning tasks. I said that I did not think so and we talked a bit about it. In the end, I managed to convince her that planning was essential and that tasks were distributed equally in terms of difficulty and responsibility. However, we both agreed that we should probably split responsibilities differently so that we could be engaged in all aspects of the project equally.

We established that we could have done much better with getting the grant and that we missed out on an important opportunity with that. I proposed what I said earlier in the post and my partner agreed – the project should have had a wider audience not only for the purposes of the grant but also to encourage more people and expand our initial goal. 

Our conclusion was that we enjoyed the project overall and it brought a sense of accomplishment to both of us. Even though we have made some mistakes, the first part of the project went smooth and everything was organized well. Although we probably will not be able to do another campaign before the presidential election (May 2020 – a date dangerously near our final exams), we could do it for some other related occasion. We would be happy to expand what we’ve already done and work with more people, as we felt like we did something important.

Final reflection:

I think most of the things we planned panned out just right. I’m happy we had a good plan for the entirety of the project – without it, we probably would have been much more overwhelmed. Overall, I have a feeling that organizational and time management skills were my strongest point in this project. I was also happy to use my creative skills a little bit when designing the posters. It was a new experience and I’m now aware that I have a useful skill. If any opportunities for designing posters come my way, I will be happy to take them in order to improve further.

In terms of my collaborative working skills, I think I have improved slightly. I generally dislike group projects, as I like my plans realized exactly how I envision them to be. However, I know that I would not be able to conduct such a campaign myself. My partner is infinitely better than me when it comes to calling places, asking questions and setting appointments at printing offices, so I was grateful to have her alongside. I still feel like group work is sometimes unnecessary, however, I can now see that it is nice to have a couple of people working on a project where they can fulfil their niche.

This project was an opportunity to realize all seven learning outcomes of CAS! I’m really proud of that fact.

First of all, we’ve got a new member on board. Basia from my class (you might have heard of her before if you know this blog) got very interested in this project when I casually told her about it and so she wanted to help us. She already has her own project going on at school but she wants to take part in our campaign for a CAS experience. Me and my partner talked with her and all three of us decided that Basia will take care of the most technical side of things - finances and printing. The reason for this is that she knows a company that gives out grants to young activists in order to fund their initiatives. She also knows a bunch of good printing offices in her town and can take care of the printing. Needless to say, we’re delighted to have her on the team.

As for me and my partner, we worked hard during these two-ish weeks. First of all, we discussed personal research for the campaign. We wanted to see how the youth at our school (both of legal age and not) approach the topic of the election and politics. We sat down and came up with a ten-question survey that would get us the knowledge we wanted. We then talked to the coordinator (which, by the way, agreed to be our supervisor for the project) and got the survey approved by her. We asked her for help in informing all the teachers about our project, so that they wouldn’t be surprised when we conducted our survey during classes. She also provided us with the information about the number of students in each class, so that we would know how many individual questionnaires we needed.

For the entire week we printed the surveys daily and handed them out to teachers, then collected them. The goal was to conduct the research in all 21 classes from every year - unfortunately, because of some time errors we’ve made, we were able to do it only in 16 of them. Overall, we’ve collected 328 answers.

Here are all of the surveys, stacked.

On Friday, we sat down and counted all the stats. Here are the results and conclusions we’ve drawn from them:

1. Are you 18 y/o?: Only 19,8% said yes. This was expected because only high-school seniors can be 18 (and even then not all of them are at the moment). Earlier when we were coming up with poster ideas, we thought about one directed at the underaged students and what they could do to help the adults in the upcoming election. After seeing the results we decided that we will make two.

2. Are you going to participate in this October’s election? If you’re not 18, would you like to or not?: 44% of the adult students said they weren’t going to participate. 49,7% of underaged students answered that if they were 18, they wouldn’t vote. Our hypothesis was partially confirmed - although the majority is going to (or would) vote, the rate of people not participating is alarming. This strengthened our belief that our project is needed in this community.

3. Are adult members of your family going to participate?: Only 8,3% said no. We concluded that it’s mostly students’ own decision not to participate in the election. They are not influenced by their families in this sense.

4. Regardless of your age, do you have a candidate or a party that you would want to vote for?: 52.2% of people said no. This percentage certainly overlaps with that of people who are not going to vote, however even then there are some people who want to participate in the election and still haven’t made up their minds. We concluded that the reason for some not to vote is that they don’t have a candidate. Taking that into account we re-evaluated our ideas for posters about making an informed decision. We ended up with four of them.

5. On a scale of 1-5, how difficult is it for you to decide on a candidate?: The most common answer was 3 and the least common were 2 and 5. It was expected (we know our statistics from IB math). It became apparent to us that students think it is a relatively easy decision to make (why we think that - I’ll tell you in a second)

6. Do you read agendas and election-plans?: 59.2% said no. This confirmed the need for a poster about it. Luckily, we came up with it earlier.

7. Do you watch debates held on television?: 67.4% said no. We decided to add a little something about debates to one poster.

8. Do you do pre-election quizzes/tests/official political alignment surveys?: 92.1% said no. We were a little surprised by this because we thought this was going to be the most popular way of making election decisions.

9. In general, do you talk about the election with your friends/family?: 74.7% said yes. This is a good sign, we concluded. However, we also thought that majority of these talks (as suggested by the number of people voting) is focused on the negative aspects and frustration or complaining about candidates.

We also asked one open question: Why do you think people decide not to vote? If you’re one of them, tell us why you’re not planning to participate in the election. This was the question we got most valuable answers to. Majority of the answers were focused on how people really wished they could vote but there wasn’t a single candidate/party that would have similar political and social views. This didn't align with what we saw in question 5 - a lot of people said that the decision is not generally that hard to make. However, we agreed with the students. Given the current political situation in Poland, it is difficult to actually choose a good candidate that you’re sure will represent you accordingly. We discussed the issue and though that we would make a poster about the “none of the above” option. In the Polish system that just means you submit an empty voting sheet. Your vote is still counted but it is apparent that there’s no one for you to vote for.

After all of this, we ended up with 15 poster ideas, some unchanged, some refreshed and some brand-new. I immediately started working on the design and so far I’ve made 6.

We also made the next bit of the project plan. The girl that is helping us is referred to as “the assistant”.

Reflection: The task of conducting the survey was overall difficult. It required lots of preparation and work in-between my normal school-related activities both during classes and at home. Despite that, I’m quite pleased with how I did. I feel like I thought of everything - it was my idea to ask for the list of people in each year and to use Google Sheets to compile our statistics. I was also happy about my dedication level because I didn’t leave anything for the last minute this week (regarding this project, at least). I’m proud of the work we’ve done a week ago when we came up with the poster ideas because a lot of them turned out to be accurate. If there are any negative feelings in me right now, it’s slight anxiety about finishing all the posters on time. So far so good but during the school-days I usually have little time to do my homework and studying and now I have to make the posters additionally. But I feel like I will manage.

I turned eighteen in the February of 2019. My first opportunity to vote happened in May during the European Parliament election. I was very excited and I started my preparation a month in advance. I watched the debates held on TV, got to know the candidates from my area, read parties’ agendas, all of that. The choice was not easy but despite that I voted and quietly felt proud of myself for making a ‘mature decision’. 

Not all people my age feel that way about elections, though. When I talk to my friends, they mostly say things like ‘I can’t make up my mind’ or ‘There is nobody to vote for’. When I hear that, my initial reaction is always agreement. The choice is tough and more often than not you have to reach an unsatisfying compromise with yourself in order to make the decision - after all, the only person who perfectly reflects your views is yourself. I know many people aged 18 - 19 who don’t use their right to vote and I want to fix that.

It is not only mine and my friend’s (or girlfriend’s, to be perfectly transparent) experience that confirms the need for something that will mobilize young people to vote in the national election held on October 13th. We researched the matter and it turns out that there is a trend of less than 30% of people voting in the youngest age group (18-29, among the people who haven’t lost their right to vote). This percentage is even lower when it comes to European elections and the last one showed that things didn’t get better this year.

We’re planning to broaden our research and extend it to historical examples but statistics are alarming enough. That’s why we came up with the idea of running a campaign before the election. 

We are going to get to know whether people at our school vote or not and what are their reasons for that. Then, we’re going to gather all collected information - statistical and historical research and results of our investigation - to plan and design campaign posters we will hang around the school with the beginning of October. This will involve employing and developing our skills in social studies, psychology, graphic design, research and management, as we will have to fund the project and make sure somebody will print our posters.

Our CAS project has the following goals:

1. We want to make people at our school more aware of the importance of elections and to make them feel that within that lies an actual tool to change something on a national and global scale

2. We want to show them why voting is important and how it can lead to change

3. We want to educate our peers on how to make a responsible and informed decision when it comes to voting

4. We want to improve our personal skills of time and finance management; also develop those skills in collaborative work (as we’re both people who prefer working independently)

5. We want to make our school a space for discussing important social issues and encourage people to think of them more often.

6. We want to verify our personal views on why people don’t vote (our research may surprise us) and to distance ourselves from our own political views in the process of making a campaign devoted to election as a whole as opposed to advocating for a specific candidate or party.

So far, we’ve met two times. First, we discussed the general idea, goals and method of research (we concluded that a survey would be the best). The second meeting was devoted to further discussion including conclusions from sources we’ve found, setting up a detailed plan and coming up with drafts of our posters (we will adjust them accordingly after we analyze the results from our survey). 

Click here to see the plan for the first four weeks of our project. The later dates of our activities will depend on how successful we will be in finding a printing office and establishing funds, so that part of the plan will be posted later in September.

Reflection: Both meetings we had went fine and we didn’t encounter any problems working together. The biggest obstacle we’ve faced so far was to keep our slogans and posters from being biased towards our own political views - we have to be extra careful to be objective and respectful, as we’re both very strongly opinionated people. I believe we’ve done a good job with that despite the difficulty. As for my personal achievements, when we were making the survey I had to use my knowledge from psychology class to make the questions we will be asking as effective as possible. I was happy to share that knowledge with my partner, as she seemed truly interested in my explanations. As for now, I feel really good about the project - the plan isn’t too overwhelming despite being challenging in terms of time management and personal skills. I think we can do it. For now at least. I still feel very passionate about what we’re about to do.

As I’ve written here before, poetry never was an easy thing for me to write. Each time I wrote a poem in the past, I held myself to a very high standard and was almost never satisfied with how the texts turned out. This month, through the PWM challenge I wanted to achieve the following goals:

1. Improve my ability to write at will and not only when I feel an overwhelming need to do it 2. Improve the quality of my poems 3. Gain a fresh perspective and distance to my own writing, so as not to judge myself so harshly 4. Explore a range of topics I never touched upon in my writing

I have to say that even though I came short of three poems and therefore didn’t finish the challenge, I am proud of myself. I am also genuinely surprised that I achieved almost everything I wanted to when I initially planned the experience.

At first (and this can be seen in my first update) it was very difficult for me to sit down and write. The poems written in the first week all took me a long time to finish. That was mainly because I felt uninspired and like I didn’t have the special factor in me in the moment. I’m glad to say that I’ve seemingly overcome that problem. As I wrote in the fourth update, the last four poems were written at will (that is, I wrote when I had time and the emotional capacity to do something other than just cry and sleep - I told you last week was pretty rough). I also noticed that during this month I experienced much more spontaneous surges of inspiration than I usually do. It seems that forcing myself to write everyday actually had a positive influence on my overall creativity and I didn’t anticipate that.

When it comes to the quality, I have mixed feelings. I wrote my favourite poems from the challenge on August 1st, 5th, 11th, 13th, 17th and 24th, so there’s really no pattern emerging here. Overall, I don’t think there was a massive improvement in the quality. That being said, I feel like this is compensated with the achievement of the third goal. I can freely say that I grew less judgmental towards my poetry over the course of this month. At the beginning I caught myself being hesitant every time I thought of putting what I wrote out to the internet. I feel no such thing now. Believe me when I say I didn’t expect it to happen but I can really say that I’m less perfectionist when it comes to writing now and I think this will eventually help me in getting better.

Because of the fact I had to write every day, I had to come up with different things to write about (duh). I thought I would run out of ideas by the fifth or sixth day but gladly, that didn’t happen. I’m not sure how much I consider the range of my topics to have broaden but I wrote some about some things I’ve never touched upon before. I always struggled to write a poem about anger and yet, I did it in August. I produced eight (!) haikus, a form I was hesitant to try out and I’m happy I did regardless of their quality. I also never write anything that rhymes and in August I did that two times. 

I’m finishing this challenge being more inspired than I was before and with 28 new poems - a number that I’ve never dreamed to produce in such a short timespan. I can say, with confidence, that I will continue writing poetry. Maybe not every day but certainly more often than I did. I know now that I can do it. This challenge has also taught me a little something about time organization - plan your time! There were instances where I sat down to write at 11pm. Regardless, it was fun. And helpful. And inspiring. And now I’m proud.

This was a creativity CAS experience. I spent about 15 hours writing these poems. Here are the learning outcomes of it:

First of all - as you can see, it’s August 31st and there are only four poems here. The reason for this is that this week has been very rough for me (partly because school is about to start and I’m not ready) and I was truly in no condition to write. That being said, I still wrote something. And yeah, I’m proud of it - a month ago I wouldn’t even consider writing in this kind of situation.

Because of my mindset and all the difficult things I’ve been dealing with this week, I had found it difficult to sit down and write. However, these four poems you see here were made kind of organically - I just felt the need to write and so I did. I’ve never experienced this before. It has always been a challenge to somehow confound all the factors that needed to be present for me to write a poem. That being said, I find the quality of the texts below very questionable. I guess I’ll leave it for you to decide.

August 24th - In the sun I like this one the most out of this week’s batch. It’s about a mother who leaves her son in the sun. At the end, the child comes back to her to get revenge for what she’d done. I like to use sun in my poems - for me, it’s a symbol of dangerous enlightenment and knowledge but also of a facade of safety. The mother left her child in the sun because she was oblivious to what would happen if they became aware of everything. I wanted this poem to be about the price of pain and fear we pay for knowledge.

August 26th - The Dust I also like to use dust as a symbol. Dust is everywhere - it’s invisible to the naked eye and we only notice it when big quantities of it accumulate on our shelves or in other areas we would want clean (it can also be seen in the sunlight, and given what I wrote above, I think it all comes together in a good metaphor). Here I used dust as a representation for intrusive thoughts. They are everywhere at all times and no matter how hard you clean your mind, they will always find a way in.

August 27th - The Cycle I played a bit with the concept of the four seasons to show persistence and repetition. This poem is about a person’s anger growing to the point where it becomes destructive to its host and the people around them. The lyrical I here, however, doesn’t stop simply because they could die in the process of bringing destruction to those who harmed them - they don’t care about what happens to them anymore. I used imagery connected with nature to show how primal this instinct is at its core but I simultaneously wanted to show that it is a complex issue.

August 28th - The Triad This one is about a liar who tells stories of good and beauty at the expense of truth. Because what they tell is appealing, nobody criticizes the person for lying. I wrote this poem wanting to show how people can abuse their power (because when people start listening to you, you gain it immediately) and where this can lead them. Ultimately, those who were caused harm will come out at the top. The poem ends with the liar longing to be listened to one last time but no one ever comes to fulfil that wish for them.

I’m back from the trip to Prague. In fact, I’ve been back since Wednesday but this two-day period was very eventful. I have a lot of going on in my life right now and my time is saturated with doctor visits both in my town and in another city. So, yeah, I didn’t have much time to write, nor did I want to. But, regardless of the trip, regardless of the Metallica concert, regardless of all doctors and sudden appointments - the challenge must go on. Therefore, on Saturday I made the decision to experiment. 

Ladies and gentlemen, for the past week I’ve been writing haikus.

I figured this would be a good solution because a) haikus are short and b) at the same time they are challenging to write. It’s not only about the 5-7-5 syllable structure. For a poem to be considered a haiku, it has to be referring to nature, have no rhymes and sound like a coherent sentence while being in the three-line form. I don’t know Japanese so I can’t be sure but I think this specific type of poem sounds and presents itself best in that language. It’s very difficult to write a compelling haiku so I decided not to pressure myself very much. I tried to respect the rules every time (and I hope it shows) but at the same time I am aware that these seven poems aren’t of the best quality. Nevertheless, I enjoyed writing them. It proved to be much more challenging than I thought - I figured that writing three lines a day wouldn’t be hard but it took a lot of effort. 

The goal of this challenge is to write every day and publish what I wrote regardless of whether I think it’s good or not. I have to remind myself of that.

This time I won’t be explaining the idea behind every poem. What I find appealing in haikus I read is their vagueness. For me, there is a story behind every three lines I wrote but I think it’s important that you come up with your own. What I will say, though, is that for the past week I’ve been heavily inspired by an artist going by the name of Lingua Ignota. I’ve been listening to her two albums (Caligula and All ******* Die) non-stop and found her artistry and lyrical ability to be very moving (especially in songs Woe to All and Fragrant is My Many Flowered Crown). The poems are not directly inspired by her but some themes and atmospheric qualities are similar.

Here are all the haikus in one document (because we love digital hygiene):

August 16th - August 22nd - Seven haikus with no names

UPDATE: I’m back from the trip, everything has been fixed. The last two poems were added and links should work for everyone now. You can ignore the first part of this post!

Before we jump into it, I wanted to tell you that I’m stupid. I’m on a trip currently and I purposefully didn’t take my laptop with me, as I figured I could post from the app. It would have been perfectly possible if only I had saved the two last poems (August 14th and 15th) on my google drive. I never do it on the go - i just do my post/text/drive editing in batches. Since I don’t have access to the two last poems, I will edit the post after I come back from Prague to add the two missing pieces. Sorry for that. Also, for the few days I’m away there might be problems with viewing the poems for people who don’t have their gmails in my school’s domain - turns out you can’t change the settings in the Google Drive app. Again, this will be fixed when I’m back.

TL;DR - post will be edited, I promise I wrote the poems. One even is in English so there you go.

As for the progress, I still feel like it’s difficult for me to get motivated to write. However, I do think that I was more easily sitting down every day and writing whatever came to mind. I didn’t notice any quality improvement but I definitely am more comfortable with sharing what I wrote here than I was at the beginning. This means I’m beginning to have some distance and that’s good news.

August 9th - Never Apologize This poem was inspired by An Angel of Great and Terrible Light, a song by UBOA. I relate to her songs on the highest level possible, so I really recommend listening to at least this one track. The concept of my poem is similar to that of the song but more angry than nostalgic or sorrowful.

August 10th - Is Love You This one is about difficulties in love. On one hand, having a person that loves you is a wonderful thing, it can change you and your world for the better. On the other hand, when you allow someone to be so close, you lose a part of your autonomy. I wrote about the gradual irritation that grows within a person in love and the will to experience only the positive things without any responsibility.

August 11th - The Core of the Sun is Ashes The poem was inspired by a play my friends starred in. It’s about difficulties in communicating with other people and about dark issues we only reveal when we create an illusion of safety. It centers around the concept of noon, as the world is the brightest then - this is what makes people think they are safe to share their most unnerving thoughts.

August 12th - Birth It’s a remake of my old poem that I wasn’t proud of (to be honest I’m still not proud of this verision either but yeah). The concept is that even though people around you (here represented by the figure of a mother) take care of you and love you as a child, you still might grow up not being satisfied with life. Making it successful sometimes requires drastic changes. I wanted to make the ending ambiguous - the reader has to interpret the last stanza and decide whether it symbolizes a change or death. Sometimes death is better than life. Sometimes the first birth isn’t the true one.

August 13th - Dreams You may have noticed by now that I write about things that are close to my heart. Sometimes I write about one thing multiple times, as I find writing to be a good way to cope with certain feelings or situations. Severe gender dysphoria is something I struggle with on a daily basis and this poem is exactly about that. I wanted to show here how this kind of feeling slowly but steadily damages your brain and how it’s inescapable. Whatever I do, the thoughts never go away, as if they are purposefully push themselves onto me. The metaphor of dreaming is used here to show that life becomes a nightmare that you can’t wake up from.

August 14th - Writing (haiku) I wanted to try writing a haiku and failed miserably but nevertheless, here you go. It’s about how you as a writer can open yourself to the world and show your bare soul to everyone and yet, there still will be people who won’t appreciate it or regard it as pretentious.

During the second interview me and my CAS coordinator looked at the plan I laid out for myself at the beginning of the school year and reflected a bit on it. There are some things that I’ve added to the plan, some that I’ve dropped completely and some that I’ve already done/am doing now.

The main problem with my CAS work is that I haven’t started my CAS project yet. It is an important component and I do understand that I need it in order for the rest of my work to be valid. The good news is that I reflected on it and thought about my project during the holidays and I’ll have to make some changes to my original idea (lots of changes - post about them coming soon).

Other than that it seems that I’m doing well with my CAS. I may not have sticked to the original plan very strictly but during the school year I managed to take up various CAS activities and I documented them regularly. I worked on all three CAS components and my coordinator said that I balanced them well (although I could do slightly more in terms of Activity).

We also talked about my CAS-plans for holidays. I asked my coordinator whether including going to a summer camp as a CAS experience would be valid and after I explained every detail she said yes (post about that coming very soon!). Apart from that I told her about my plans to do Poetry Writing Month in August. She told me that this was a good idea and supported my decision to do it during the holidays.

______________________________________

This is where the part about the interview ends. 

As I said before, I thought about my plan and decided to make some changes.

Here is a shorter, updated version of it:

DONE: Swimming, Translating a play, T-shirt making workshop*, Amnesty International Letter Writing Marathon*, Creative Writing Summer Camp** IN PROGRESS: Poetry Writing Month TO BE DONE: Social campaign, creativity-activity blog with music reviews DROPPED: Creative writing workshop, teaching my parents English

*not originally included in the plan *post coming soon!

The reason I dropped teaching English from my plan is that my parents simply do not want to be taught by me. When I talked to them about it at the beginning of the school year they were down to having lessons but later they decided that if they ever want to learn English, they will hire a professional to teach them. I tried talking to them and persuading them but they simply don’t agree to doing that. 

As for the creative writing workshop, it was supposed to be my CAS project. I decided to change that because as of late, I’ve had a shift of priorities in my life (not to sound overdramatic but that’s true). I decided that doing a workshop would not be as fulfilling as I initially thought and that I need to do something beyond my comfort zone (something that is not writing). Long story short, I have a different idea for my CAS project now and I already have a partner to do it. There will be a post about it soon up on the blog.

I am now eight days into PWM and to be honest, writing daily hasn’t been easy. There were maybe two or three days when I genuinely wanted to write and had a clear idea for a poem but for most of the time I was just forcing myself to write something. So far I haven’t noticed any improvements in my writing or in my ability to ‘get in the right mood’. However, I’m not giving up. Regardless of their quality, I’m happy that I wrote so many poems in such a short timespan.

Here are all the poems so far:

August 1st - Stop crying This one was inspired by a song named Los Cebula i Krokodyle Łzy by a Polish band Coma. I don’t like this band at all but I find this one track very haunting and beautiful. The poem (as well as the song) is about insensitivity to somebody else’s emotions and their crying.

August 2nd - Home This poem is based on a concept that your body is your home.

August 3rd - Suitcase The concept of the suitcase was borrowed from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 

August 4th - The Bird Awakens This poem is structured like a dialogue. It’s about dual nature of writing – it’s a beautiful thing (like an enchanted bird) but it can also be damaging to the writer and people around them.

August 5th - My Everything My Everything serves here as an affectionate euphemism for gender dysphoria.

August 6th - Dogs Playing Poker I took inspiration from Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s painting with the same title. The poem is based on five-card poker hands, ranging from the lowest to highest in the relation to what is happening in the stanzas. The lyrical I is a dog (duh).

August 7th - The Audience This poem is about the relationship between a writer and their audience. August 8th - Pisces As the title suggests, this one is inspired by the star sign of pisces – my zodiac sign. The poem is about the nature of pisces and how being one affects me.

As I mentioned in the post about my CAS project, I love writing. It’s something that I would love to make my future about. The form I’ve always felt confident in were short stories, however poetry still remains special to me. I really admire the way poets and lyricists convey their deepest thoughts in a form that is so concise. One of my favourite things we do at school (and what I also sometimes do at home on my own) is poem analysis. Noticing all the details and connecting them together into multiple interpretations gives me a feeling of something truly scientific (and as a Myers-Briggs’ INTP type I much appreciate it).

I’ve always wanted to write poetry. Good poetry. However, I worry that my poems are not the best ones out there. Writing something mediocre or pretentious isn’t hard – writing beautifully is. This feeling keeps holding me back.

I want to overcome it. They say that practice makes perfect – during my own Poetry Writing Month I’m going to test that claim. 

The rules are simple: 

The challenge takes place over the month of August

During that time I will write one poem a day

There are no exceptions to rule 2. besides writing more than one poem a day

I will post weekly updates on my CAS blog

That’s it. Those poems don’t have to be complex. They don’t have to be long. They don’t even have to be good.

It’s important to mention that these poems will be written in Polish. My reasoning for it is that I don’t think my knowledge of English is as good as it would be required in order to write good poetry. I’m familiar with Polish, its idioms, linguistic tricks and double-meanings of words and expressions. If I feel like it I might write something simple in English but I want to focus mainly on my mother-tongue in order to practice one thing at a time (writing) instead of two (writing and foreign language).

By doing that I want to see how my ability to get inspiration will improve. I also am curious whether the quality of the texts will improve overtime or not. Either way, I’m sure that there will have to be at least one good poem out of the thirty-one I’m going to produce. I hope that after I do the challenge I will be able to put my writing in a perspective that helps me judge it more objectively and not solely on the basis of my own insecurities. 

The plan of blog updates during the Poetry Writing Month:

August 9th - eight poems*

August 16th - seven poems

August 23rd - seven poems

August 30th - seven poems.

August 31st - two poems

The beginning of September - the final reflection and learning outcomes rundown

So, it begins in two days! We’ll see how it goes.

During this month also anticipate posts about my second CAS interview, an update on CAS project and activity and about a really fun experience I had in July!

I’ve been interested in the topic of responsible consumerism and fighting fast fashion for a while now. In my day-to-day life I try to employ the values of minimalism and low-impact actions so as to not harm the environment and our planet. When I heard about the workshop being organized I immediately wanted to sign up for it.

The I Support Women, Not Sweatshops workshop was a great initiative with a great message. Its idea was inspired by a recent trend that can be noticed in chain fashion stores - t-shirts with feminist slogans. It might seem like a good thing but it’s actually extremely hypocritical. Fast fashion companies mainly employ women from third world countries in their factories. They get paid only the smallest fraction for each t-shirt that is later sold at a much higher price at the store. They also have to work very long hours to make a living, have insanely poor work conditions and are mistreated every day. All of that while sewing the “Future is female”, “Power to the girls”, and “Gender equality” t-shirts.

The workshop was divided into two parts. The first one was a discussion on fast fashion and its ethics as well as its impact on the environment. It was led by Anna Kokocińska from the University of Wrocław. We covered lots of different topics from consumerism and reducing our purchases, all the way to veganism and zero-waste movements. It gave me lots of inspiration to change different aspects of my life and to further research these things. We also got to know some alternatives to buying clothes, such as clothes-swapping, direct second-hand shopping or even renting clothes.

The second part was the fun one. We got to make our own shirts. The hosts advised us to bring our own t-shirts we wanted to redesign and not to buy new ones since it would contradict the idea of the workshop. We were provided with lots of fabric dyes, contour paints, markers, glue and various ornaments to work with. We could make an activist or feminist themed t-shirt or put anything else on it - the point was to just be creative. When we were finished we had to leave our creations in order for them to fry. The hosts are supposed to ship them to us when they wash and iron them so that we can wear them safely later. I ended up creating two t-shirts (both trans-activism themed) which I will show when I get them back.

It was a really inspiring experience. I met lots of interesting and open-minded people (both my age and not) who were curious about the sam things as I am. The discussion was a really insightful one and it gave me lots of ideas on how to improve my lifestyle to be less harmful to the environment and the people that work behind the curtains of the industry. I’m also really proud of my t-shirts - they might not be the most beautiful ones but just knowing that I made them myself and that the message they carry is purely mine is very satisfying and fulfilling. When entering the world of low-impact movements I’ve never really thought about this specific issue of women in factories and the workshop has certainly opened my eyes to that problem. I can confidently say that this experience pushed me to be a better consumer in the future.

Here are the links to the facebook event and the instagram page of the I Support Women, Not Sweatshops workshop. 

This was a service and creativity experience. The learning outcomes are:

I went to the pool for the first time on March 19th. In fact, I wanted to start with the very beginning of the month but every time I was so stressed out that I didn’t manage to actually go there. I don’t really know what forced me to do it on the Tuesday of March 19th. Perhaps I was too frustrated not taking any action. I packed up my swimming bag, took the bus and there I was.

I’ll spare you the details of going to the locker room for the first time in years (not a pleasant experience by any means). My swimsuit looks like armor on me. Normal people wear swimming boxers or bikinis, I wear layers of swimming shirts and swimshorts. The outfit covers me head to toe. I’m sure people who were there had a fun time looking at me.

It’s a weird experience, to submerge in water after such a long time. Not to be dramatic, but I kind of felt euphoric. It was as If I finally managed to fight back all my hesitancy. 

March 19th (as well as March 21st, my second attempt) wasn’t successful in terms of realizing the training plan. I was too anxious to go to the sport part of the pool and start exercising properly. For the first two times I just fooled around or straight up sat in water for almost 40 minutes and then left. I guess I needed some time to get used to going there and being around people in this particular situation. 

You could say I failed those two attempts but apparently they were necessary. From the day of March 26th to April 18th I DIDN’T MISS ANY TRAINING DAY. I’m genuinely and weirdly surprised that I managed to be so consistent - usually I’m not. I went to the pool every Tuesday and Thursday for four consecutive weeks and I must tell you this feels good. And gives me hope for the future (again, very dramatic).

In terms of training I’m also doing fairly well. It turns out that I put together a very realistic plan for myself because apart from the 50-minute days (I sometimes have to extend this time by a couple of minutes) I manage to do everything I planned and don’t feel worn out or painful. Of course, training is very tiring but it is this good kind of being tired that I feel. Surprisingly enough, my muscles don’t hurt as much as I thought they would. And it’s worth noting that I haven’t yet measured the time it takes me to swim 25 and 50 meters - I’ll do it when I manage to convince someone to go with me.

As for the noticeable effects of swimming, there aren’t any. I definitely sleep better the nights after training but that’s it. I’m not surprised and not disappointed - as I said in previous posts, for now I train only to get back in shape and improve my overall wellbeing. 

I don’t know if I’ll be able to go swimming next Tuesday (April 23rd) because I’m currently at my grandma’s for Easter. I’m going back on that Tuesday and I don’t know if I won’t be too tired to go. Maybe I’ll try to reschedule the training day and go on Thursday and Saturday - we’ll see.