#presentation essay

 The Measure of Change

  Sometimes I will be going about my day to day life and I will slip into a weird phase of thinking. I will begin to think about how much my life has changed over the past year, how I have changed since middle school, even childhood. It should be scary how much I have been molded by my life but it comforts me, how I can so easily be changed by one event. How have I been changed based on the events of my life? Should I always be expecting change? If I expect it is it an different than when I am not? What I wonder is if there is a definitive way to gage change? How can I truly know how I have changed or am I overthinking things? What if I think it is to easy? I am choosing to focus on the idea that we will never fully understand ourselves and that to truly understand ourselves we must accept that we never will. Understanding ourselves takes time, patience and risk.  Paul Heilker states that “It would mean acknowledging that there are parts of us that might be buried – and if we acknowledge that anything is buried we face the possibility of hordes of things being buried. It would mean facing the possibility that we have lost ourselves over the years”(99). Change doesn’t happen over night so neither does understanding it. I find a comfort in knowing that I am not who I was ten, five, or even one year ago. I cannot gage change until I remember what I was like in the past because If how focused I am on the present.  

Our own writing can be a way to re-visit our past selves. In Sullivan’s essay he describes this in relation to writers logs, he says that “logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony --- the reader will know the ending before the writer did” (132). This speaks so much to the current day and age because of social media. I can physically be reminded of my past self via Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. These are basically logs that record my life in pictures and text. Sullivan writes:  “A diary is almost a private matter. Its raw honesty, its dedication to marking life as it happens and remembering life as it was’ (132). Sullivan speaks to the era of social media where bits and pieces of ourselves are marked permanently online. Social media can be seen as a personal history book.  In this case I am the reader who knows the ending to the story. This allows me to re live my life up until today. In doing so I re-live my mistakes and learn from them even to this day. Having an audience there to experience it with me and to share their mistakes helps me understand that there will always be imperfect people. When we see reminders of our past self I think we often cringe. Remembering our past is like reading a history book, to understand ourselves now we need to understand our past selves.I see this in Nancy Sommers writing where she explains using ourselves as a primary source. “If I could teach my students one lesson about writing it would be to see themselves as sources, as places form which ideas originate, to see themselves as Emersons transparent eyeball, all that they have read and experienced – the dictionaries of their lives—circulating through them” (127). Seeing ourselves as primary sources helps us to understand how we are not solely defined by one thing in our lives but the little experiences that cumulate into who we are today. Understanding myself as a primary source helps reflect on my past and not be burdened by my mistakes because I know that I can still change in the future. This has helped me because I used to be embarrassed by who I used to be until I realized I wouldn’t be who I am today without being that person. Remembering my past self reminds me that I will never truly understand myself because I will be different tomorrow.  

When I look through my own social media I can physically see how I have changed. Even through pictures I can see how I have become more confident in how I present myself. Maybe it was because I was an angsty teen but right now I would be annoyed with my past self, I wish I could go back and tell myself everything I have learned but at the same time I know its for the best.

 When Heilker describes being in a discourse community I relate it to the different stages of my life. Right now I am entering a new discourse of my life as a college student. College pushes me to learn how to live independently and interact with new people on a daily basis. At this current moment its feel right but I know that I wasn’t ready last year and I will certainly be different this time next year. Moving away from home and starting to live on my own was a huge learning experience for me. I knew that I was responsible for so much more than I was when I lived with my parents and that forced me to grow into a person who can navigate a new city by herself. The first week of living at western I wasn’t able to go to sleep because I knew that this was permanent. This wasn’t like summer camp where I would go home In a week ( even though it felt like it). I think part of growing up is learning how to adapt to change, both the changes around me and within me. I have learned how to live independently by my self and away from my support system back home. Experiences like these both scare and excite me the most because I know that they will make me stronger. Heilker describes something like this as “the experience of having a discourse pull us up an out of our mundane ways of being in the world and invite us, and challenge us, and compel us to rise toward the realm of the gods, to become something new, something more”(94).  Entering a new discourse of life can teach us things about ourselves in the present and the past. We compare how different we are to our past self’s and we learn through new changes we experience. I believe that having our normal lives disrupted can be extremely beneficial to our growth as human beings. 

Sullivan describes his entrance into a new discourse community in a similar way, the way of embracing change and mistakes, he says “blogging requires an embrace of such hazards, a willingness to fall off the trapeze rather than fail to make the leap. (133) This can apply to all points of my life. In my life I know I need to be ready to fail because it will help me learn. When I started applying to colleges I knew I wouldn’t get in everywhere and that I would need practice to succeed. Making mistakes early on helped me greatly in writing applications that I was proud of. If I thought I was going to be doing everything perfectly it would be harder or me to accept my mistakes. Heilker says that “We must be willing to make and record and share with an audience off all out “mistakes”, all of our wrong turns, and dead ends and mis-steps” (100). Sharing and conversing about our flaws can have a great impact on community because we learn that we are not all perfect beings. Being a part of a close knit group of friends has allowed me to open up about mistakes I have made or parts of my life I am ashamed of. I can specifically remember staying up until 3 am with a small group of friends. It was a night in the middle of summer before we were all leaving for college. In our minds college was the next big adventure so naturally the conversation had drifted towards are fears and anxieties. All of our pent up stress was suddenly flowing freely between us as we shared similar stories of fear for the future. So often I think everyone has it better than me even though I know that we are all imperfect. There is a comfort in knowing that we all share mistakes, knowing how to celebrate and accept those things about ourselves ultimately helps us grow as people. Having grace with ourselves suddenly gets rid of all the anxieties that are attached to mistakes and we learn by accepting those mistakes.

            For most of my high school life I had been crushed by the weight of living with anxiety and experiencing panic attacks each day.  This was only heightened by the fact that it affected my schoolwork to the point where I would stay home because of how sick I felt. My mistake was not trusting myself. I believed that there was nothing I could do to help myself, even though I could see my grades getting worse and I knew how to fix them I still stood by and watched as if it wasn’t my own life. Another problem was that I literally didn’t trust any of my family or friends to help me, this ultimately hurt both my school life and my relationships. This was a point in my life where it was hard to accept the mistakes I was making because I didn’t feel like I could fix them and I thought people would judge me or think I was letting them down. I think the worst part about our mistakes is that it seems like the end of the world until each day we grow a little more and soon enough it is only a memory. Over all I think our mistakes define us because they are what make us stronger. We don’t always remember the days we felt normal but we remember the days we felt pain and that is what causes us to reflect.  My mistakes still follow me today and sometimes I can feel my self slipping into that genre of being even though I know it is toxic for me.