Life Cycle of a Butterfly
Caterpillar
A profile is a condensed description of person’s identity. A profile doesn’t just tell you what that person is like or what he or she does on a Sunday morning. Instead, it creates an experience for you to live like an outsider looking into a piece of a person’s life for just a few minutes. For this occasion, that piece of my life is the writer part of me. Writing is something that has been instilled in each of us since we were born. Picking up a pencil and putting it to paper is one of the first actions we do in our childhood. Already, we begin our lives as writers. However, the writer I was then is not the writer I am now and will not be the writer I am in the future. People are constantly changing and experiencing new feelings, new ideas, and new epiphanies that change them from the writer they once were. These new experiences, consequently, change a person’s attitudes, changes the forces that propel their writing, and changes their purpose for writing. There are downfalls and there are times when you feel like giving up, but then there are the times when you want to jump for joy because you received an A on the ten page paper you worked all week on. I definitely know what the downfalls are like and haven’t experienced much of the accomplishments because my journey as a writer is still a work in progress.
At the beginning, as a child I would always keep a diary and would write things that pleased me. Although, I wouldn’t just write about how my day went. I would invent an elaborate story about how my day went extraordinarily well, I had met amazing people, and accomplished unimaginable feats. As a young writer I had a huge imagination and enjoyed writing almost every day of the week. The forces that propelled my writing at a young age was that I was not told what I had to write about, how I had to write it, and what words I was allowed to use. I was in the caterpillar stage, eating the leaves of the trees, and doing as I pleased. I was taking in the world around me, writing my story to be exactly the way I wanted it to be. This narrative, free-style writing was what I was excelling at. It contributed to myself in my days in elementary school feeling like I could write as I pleased and actually enjoy it. I was writing and I had a stake in my writing. My purpose was my own and not the purpose of someone else. My writing was driven entirely by myself actually wanting to narrate, to invent, and to create. It was driven by interest, driven by my own will.
Cocoon
In junior high and high school, most of the work I did was about other people, other places, other things but never about me; it was about the school newspaper, it was about poetic devices, rhetoric used by Robert Frost, about explaining how Jane Eyre comes-of-age, or about the use of symbols in The Bluest Eye. It was never about how Briana Gonzalez has a profile as a writer. So, writing about myself and any type of reflection for myself was mostly absent in these next 6 years. In junior high, I held a position on our school newspaper called the Tiger’s Tale. Nothing very excited was happening on a week-to-week basis at my school. So, many of the stories were dry, boring, and my job was feeling extremely mundane. I remember my first writing assignment in September of 2008 was to write about how the flu season was nearing. I hated this assignment and I was new at journalism so I was not yet familiar with the writing style. I was also taking a Language Arts class that included lots of persuasive and descriptive writing. Journalism requires more of expository writing. Writing in journalism required that you write the most important facts at the beginning. The first time that I turned in the draft for my news article, my journalism teacher told me that I had to include the main idea or most important fact within the first 10 words of the article. This expectation from journalism was so different from the expectations from my Language Arts teacher who would teach us how to add more “fluff” to our introduction and the main idea in the writing was the thesis. No one in their right mind would write their thesis within the first 10 words of the paper. I hated journalism and writing in the context of it was not something that I enjoyed doing. I could do it, of course, since it was just a formula but I wanted something more from the writing. I wanted the feeling and emotions of the writing. However, journalism and news article writing is not meant to provoke feelings, it has a purpose of delivering facts in a specific order. In high school, I did little to no self-reflection. I did more analysis than anything. In AP English my life was rhetoric devices, I memorized over 30 rhetorical devices with elaborate names like synecdoche and asyndeton. AP Language was like my mini book club, symbols were everything. My writing in these classes was also never about myself, I never had a personal stake in the writing. I am not saying that either of the genres of writing above are horrible and should never be done. It did create the basis for my writing in many different contexts. However, what I am doing now in writing about myself is a difficult task because I was so accustomed to writing about other people. This is where I entered the metaphorical cocoon stage in my own life. The writing that I did in my youth had completely subsided. I stopped journaling about myself and my own days. It was something that I never thought about picking up again until my neighbor gave me a going-away gift for college: a journal.
Metamorphosis
I saw that journal as blank slate. Not just literally but figuratively as I was about to begin a whole new chapter in my life and enter the world of college. At this point in my writing career I felt mediocre because my writing was never praised and I hardly received perfect grades on my writing. I always thought other people could express, through words, how I’m feeling better than I could express it myself. Before this point I thought everyone else was exceeding in writing except me. The journal looked at me like I didn’t reach the end and there was something more waiting for me outside of my own personal cocoon. This class was the driving force for that. I had never been asked to write about myself. never been asked to write about how and why I write. So, it opened new doors to my feelings about writing. It isn’t a formula, it can’t be compared to the layers of a cheeseburger with two buns for an introduction and conclusion. Writing is a project, something that you struggle to put together. I want writing to come naturally to me but I know that it never will because of the fact that writing isn’t natural and there is a struggle in the process. A quote by Diaz can portray this nicely as he says, “... a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.” This is true for my own journey. At the start of this Writing Class I journaled about how unconfident I was feeling going into this project because it was all new territory for me. I was so accustomed to strict, one-way-only prompts and I had never been asked to write about myself. I was presented with an open-ended prompt and it was looking to be very difficult for me. Then, after reading McCloud’s article on first-order and second-order thinking I reached an epiphany. My first-order thoughts were generated from my attitudes I had towards writing in elementary school, in junior high, in high school, and in college. I realized that after putting together so much first-order thinking that included lots of brainstorming, ideas, possibilities, I saw that I had gone on a journey that I am still trekking as we speak. A trajectory. I didn’t realize it until I gathered analysis and coding from second-order thinking that I could put this piece together and form a metaphor for my journey to compare myself as a writer. I compare it to the life cycle of a butterfly.