Mulligan 1 Catherine Mulligan Dr. Lauren Mason ENGL 1101-015 30 September 2013 Reflection In this paper, I tried to tell my story and the lesson I have learned. My purpose was to explain the importance of following your heart on the journey of life. I tried to portray exactly what I was feeling by giving the reader background information and flashing back to my past, two years ago. I tried to create the overall feelings that I felt as this story actually happened. I included my reactions and behaviors from the past so that the reader can witness the change in perspective that I discovered. In this paper, I described a feeling of fear and exposed my own neurosities of defying all expectations. My purpose of this was to show how I overcame those issues and lies and moved forward. As usual, the most difficult task in my writing was slowing down the wheels in my head to a pace that I can write on paper. I struggle as thoughts come and go, I cannot include all of them or even remember all of them. That is one of my biggest obstacles in writing this paper. It takes a long amount of time with pen and paper to record all of the thoughts and ideas that are just right. No matter how much time I put into writing, there is always work to be done. In this piece of writing in particular, I found smoothing the transitions between fall 2011 and fall 2013 to be a challenge. I also struggled with keeping the reader up to date on what was happening in the world around me and also expressing what was going on in my mind. By comparing the rough draft and the final, the reader will notice additional content. This was because my first draft lacked action. It took me a while to find out what the climax of the story would be. While the thoughts and feelings were raw in the first draft, it still lacked excitement. I slept on it, meditated on it, and rolled my forehead on the keyboard. Eventually, the “aha moment� happened. The
Mulligan 2 action was that I decided to change my major to English. I think it is obvious that I had fun experimenting with language in this essay. I intentionally used words that would play into the theme of the “path.� I wanted to use directional language for both scenarios to depict the transition from being lost and confused to letting down my walls and putting one foot in front of the other. I described where I was sitting in the room to show where my heart was. I also used laughing vibrations to cultivate what I was feeling deep in my heart. When someone laughed at me, I felt sad. When I knew where I was meant to be, I filled up with joy and laughed. I love that moment in composition when I realize what I am going to play into. That moment was when I put together the encounters I made on those separate first days of English class. I contemplated the change in my response and dialogue from the random staff member in the hallway to an old friend from dance who happened to be in my class. I tied it all together by sharing a quote from Paulo Coelho that I read and really resonated with deeply. Between the flashbacks and the flashing forward, consistency is one thing that I am worried about in this paper. I wanted to be able to take the reader up and down the path that I have had thus far and give them a glimpse of my thoughts on the future. I would like advice on how to do this smoothly with more sophistication.