Reflection on Blogging

The first half of senior year has been quite a whirlwind tour. New teachers, new classes, new assignments, new whatever, it all seems so bizarre to me now. In the big scheme of things, 6 months is only a sliver. Yet, now that I'm processing everything, I cannot believe how much I've learned within this tiny fraction of time. Thinking, writing, deleting, and rewriting, I spent an unbelievable amount of time over the semester writing my blog posts. Whether I was developing a specific theme in my blog post to hold onto a moment with rich language, or I was searching for relative articles, videos and other forms of media, I learned a lot about myself, my writing, and even my learning during the blogging process. Surely, I didn't accomplish this process overnight, but I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to embark on such a journey with my writing. 

Blogging and I have a quite complicated relationship. Some days, I rush home to write a blog post. Filled with insightful thoughts, I can't wait to log on and write a post. Other days, I dread the idea of finding a topic to blog about. As I reflect on my blog writing process, I realize that my beginning thoughts as a blogger were ineffective to the writing process because I tried to write in a formal, typical "English class" way. However, I later realized that blogs are different in the sense that they must connect to a variety of forms of media, and incorporate more of my own personal thoughts. Over the course of the semester, however, I believe that my writing improved significantly in terms of blogging. Through blogging, I have learned to connect ideas from English class to outside sources and issues, as well as developed my own personal identity as a blogger my incorporating my own beliefs and thoughts into the posts. 

One example of connecting ideas from English class to outside sources and issues is from my blog post, "Beautiful Doesn't Mean Perfect." In the post, I connected empathy to the perception of beauty in society. According to my blog post, "As we discussed in my English class, empathy is important to learn for developing relationships in a multitude of situations. Promoting the acceptance of people with special needs and combating the idea of perfection increases empathy by provoking reflection, as the video above illustrates by showing a wide range of reactions from people as they walk by the store front." 

Another example of my improved writing through blogging and developing my own personal identity as a blogger is from my blog post, "More Than Meets the Eye." In this post, I talked about my personal experience on a retreat I attended, called Kairos. By discussing my personal experiences and relating them to important ideas like aesthetics and appearance, I improved my blog post writing. According to my blog post, "As I write this post today, I find it interesting to notice how big of a role appearance plays in our lives and what I can do to change this so that emotional health and forming relationships with others outweighs aesthetics and appearance." This illustrates my improvement as a writer and development of my own identity. I believe it is important to develop an identity as a blogger in order to connect with your readers at a more personal level. 

Ultimately, I believe that blogging has been a great learning opportunity for myself as a writer. While the beginning of my thinking during the blogging was very ineffective, ultimately I realized that I couldn't think like how I usually do when I write. I've grown accustom to writing things such as research papers and essays, but I needed to learn more about how to blog. When I finally realized that I was going to need to go about my writing process differently as a blogger, everything shifted and fell into place. In the next semester, I hope to continue to improve my blogs and further my learning as a writer by more deeply analyzing both other cultures, texts, various media forms and myself in order to develop my understanding of aesthetics and appearance. 

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Beautiful Doesn't Mean Perfect

Scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed the other day, I came across a post from a friend titled, "Because Who Is Perfect?" Intrigued, I decided to examine this further. The video below comes from Pro Infirmis, an organization for the disabled. The group created a series of mannequins based on real people with physical disabilities in attempt to raise awareness for people with special needs.  

As a fashion lover, I immediately related to the impact of the industry on aesthetics and appearance. With smooth, plastic bodies lining the windows in nearly every retail store, our perception of beauty is incredibly skewed. I'm sure that many of my readers can relate to the internal and external pressures we face to look "perfect," whatever that even means. I found that this project is important to recognize because of its efforts to include body diversity, thus abandoning the "cookie cutter" mentality of beauty in terms of weight, height, body type and age. 

As an English student, I saw the relationship between this video and some of the essential questions we are discussing in class. Specifically, I related it to the question, "how do we understand others' experiences?" Using the idea of empathy, this project from Pro Infirmis allowed me to notice and value the struggles individuals with disabilities face, as well as the pressure that the media places on people to be perfect. As we discussed in my English class, empathy is important to learn for developing relationships in a multitude of situations. Promoting the acceptance of people with special needs and combating the idea of perfection increases empathy by provoking reflection, as the video above illustrates by showing a wide range of reactions from people as they walk by the store front. 

As readers, I hope that you found this video interesting and take some time to reflect on the power of empathy. Typically, those who are able to feel empathy towards others have more successful and caring relationships where communication about emotions is prevalent. I know that empathy has many pros and cons, which is why I would love to hear your thoughts on a few of the questions that were raised for me when discussing empathy in class and delving further into it with this blog post. 

• What does empathy do to us? What does empathy do for us?
• How does empathy impact our identity?
• Is it possible to be too empathetic?
• How does appearance shape our identity?
• What does perfection mean to you?