Final Reflective Letter | keeratkwriting

What You All Have Been Waiting For...

ZI FINALE...

Digitalized :O

When I was little, I always dreamed of becoming a writer. I loved writing about anything and everything and my number one supporter was my grandmother, Biji. She would encourage me to write a story everyday and then read it to her. It meant the world to me. After a few months of living with my family, she passed away. I sat for hours staring at a sheet of paper and felt empty. Who would read my stories? My parents never had the time of day because they were always working. I felt as though my writing no longer had a purpose and my mind was completely blank. I tried writing and figured it was writer’s block but every time I picked up a pencil or pen, the emptiness would come back. I was in the third grade and didn’t really understand my feelings well enough to move past the loss of my grandmother. In fourth grade, my teacher had told me that I was an “inefficient” writer. I felt like the one thing that gave me happiness in my life was taken away from me. I disliked writing or the idea of coming up with stories. Instead, I started to read books because writing was no longer enjoyable. I stopped writing for a long period of time, almost five years.

Rabia K. was one of the most influential people in my life and contributed to me restarting the writing process. I met Rabia in the seventh grade. Her poetry was based of real life experiences that she had gone through- molestation, physical abuse, self-inflicted pain, sorrow, life, and love. She wrote for herself and about pain. At the time, I was going through a cycle of symptoms of depression and at one of the lowest points in my life. She told me that writing could be a therapeutic escape. However, when I did start writing, I became invested in it. It was as though the only way I could cope with the problems and issues in my life were through writing. After eighth grade, I quit writing again because I felt too dependent on it, a dependency that was unhealthy. I felt like the writing was actually fueling my depression because those thoughts were put on constant repeat in my mind and on paper. Writing had become a single-story that meant sadness, and I hated it.

In my senior year of high school, I decided to take a creative writing class. Now how does a person who hates writing go about to take a creative writing class? To get over the hate of writing, of course! Throughout high school, I felt that I had grown a lot as an individual, but I realized that I needed to get over this mentality of a single-story that writing associates with sadness. So, I took the class and it turned out to be one of my favorite classes in high school. I wrote about different parts of my life, poetry, and empowering religious pieces. I challenged myself as a writer and wrote many emotional pieces and I realized that my writing was evolving from weakness to empowerment. I soon discovered in creative writing that my style of writing tended to be on the emotional side and focused a lot on injustice, minority groups, and oppression of some sort. So, in most of my projects senior year, I would try to incorporate some sort of writing about Sikhism or injustice in different parts of the world. To further challenge myself at writing, I took an AP English class and surprisingly, I earned a good grade. Even though I did not like writing in a standard five-paragraph style essay, the fear of writing and being an “inefficient” writer had suddenly disappeared.

Coming into the English 1103 class, I was a bit nervous. I was nervous because it was a higher level of English and I had only recently discovered my writing style. I do not know about all of the other students but in my opinion, the semester flew by very fast and all I can say is, I ACTUALLY enjoyed English class and writing. We didn’t write in the standard five-paragraph style and we were actually given the choice to pick what we wanted to write about under a given assignment. For once, we had some freedom in what we wanted to write about, the style, the topic, and it felt liberating. . All throughout high school, it seemed almost like taboo to write in first person and in multiple paragraphs. It was as if everything we had learned and all the rules for writing had gone down the drain. We were given so much freedom as to what to write about and we were allowed to establish and explore our own unique styles of writing and I absolutely loved it. I loved being able to choose our own topic, our own style, and combining personal experiences and interests with writing.

I grew a lot as a writer in this class because we discussed so many topics from the meaning of literacy, to rhetorical devices in advertising commercials, and the feeling of writing felt very diverse because of the wide-range of topics. I felt that I discovered myself as a person a bit more in this class because I wrote about personal experiences along with the effects of writing in the outside world. Writing was not as difficult as I thought it would be for once and I believe that outlining essays beforehand had a lot to do with that. Making an outline helped me a lot because it was a way that I could organize all my ideas and put it on paper as a guide to writing my essay. Also, peer revising made it much easier to produce a final, revised edition of our essays. Usually, peer revising, or editing as we called it in high school, included a red pen through every line looking for grammatical errors, unclear suggestions, and negative comments all over. Peer revising really helped me as a writer because not only was I given positive feedback, but feedback that was actual useful and filled with clarity which helped me with my revisions for the revised draft.

In my opinion, I honestly loved all of our major assignments, which included the literacy narrative, digital essay, and inquiry blogs. I learned about literacy and that there was not just one type of literacy but also multiple types! I conquered my fear of, what use to be, the “terrifying” rhetorical analysis essay and I learned different methods of researching for not just blogs, but other assignments as well! In each assignment, I learned something new that improved and evolved me as a writer. This English class was not the typical English class we had in high school but completely different. We had a say in what we wanted to write about… I actually had a say. I am very proud of the pieces that I wrote in this class. They are probably the best pieces that I have written in my whole writing career (which isn’t very long as you can tell). I can honestly say that I worked my hardest and put a lot of careful thinking into my writing this year than I have done before because I actually cared about the topics I was writing about. I am going away from this class as a better and evolved writer and I hope I will continue to learn more as I progress through my college years. English 1103 will definitely be an unforgettable experience.

RIP Biji...

Everyone has their low points.

Now this was a good movie...

Live-changing experience

Oh high school...

An inspirational book that I love

to read