Diego J. Gonzalez
Martinez
Prof. Cynthia Pittman
English
3103- 134
18 January
2018
Journal
reflection Essay:
In this
essay I will be talking about the journal project and my personal experience
with it during the semester, I would like to start my essay with my initial
thoughts on the project. At first, I thought that it would be a lot of work
because we would have to do it every day, and I was partially right. Writing a
10 minutes journal everyday was very tiring not the journal itself but just the
process of it, because I personally considered that 10 minutes was a lot of
time to write about the first thing that comes to your mind. This was probably
the fact that I disliked the about the journal having to write for so long
without a specific theme that would help me elaborate on my writing, it became
a struggle. But in do time it became a lot easier for me since as I was going
through the college experience at the same and that provided me material o talk
about in my journals and that made the 10 minutes go by a lot quicker and I
worried less about the time struggle until it wasn’t a struggle at all.
With the
passing journals I noticed that there were some recurring themes in them, this
was the product of the time struggle I mentioned at the beginning as well as
the fact that I could not stop writing during this time to at least organize my
thoughts. This rule about not being able to stop writing for the whole ten
minutes was also a challenge for me my hand would get tired and it hurt and
therefore my attention would automatically be driven to that completely
changing my train of thought. The only way that I got more comfortable with
this rule was by getting use to it to the point where I knew I had to write for
ten straight minutes, so I just did and payed no attention to my hand hurting,
in other words I simply decided to ignore it. Another thing that did not play
in my favor for this project was that I sometimes thought about too many things
at the same time and I could not keep up with my writing it wasn’t reflected in
the journals as whoever reads it won’t know how fast I was going or at least
trying to go so this was more of an internal problem that only affected me and
my process of thought. But once I got these struggles all dealt with by time
itself it was very easy for me write and the journals where relaxed and came
out much better.
What
surprised me most about this project was what actually came out in my journals,
I like the fact that I could write about whatever I wanted and, yet I wrote
about things I usually wouldn’t talk about at all. The first journals I wrote
where very messy and did not grasp a solid idea but once I got use to them I
was able to write about a topic for the entirety of the journal, some of these
topics where very personal and would normally never be spoken of. I wrote about
my parents’ marriage and how rough it was for me, this is something that has
impacted my life heavily and so its constantly on my mind and, so it was
somewhat constant in my journals. I talked about my ex-girlfriend and how my
relationship changed me, it heavily influenced my life and had a large impact
in it therefore I thought of it constantly and it made its way into my journals
frequently, not the best thing to talk about, but rules are rules and if that’s
what came to my mind at the time that’s what I had to redact a journal about.
There were times when nothing came to mind and I just had to improvise
something to write, at these times I mostly talked about a particular song on
my head or how my day had been up until that moment since after all nobody was supposed
to read this journal.
At times I
could not write a journal when I suppose to, week days this was mostly do to me
being very lazy that day or that I simply forgot to do them, and this was a
very big setback because I would fall behind in them and be forced even in
weekends. I mostly fell behind on journals on days like thanksgiving and
Christmas where I had family things to attend and was unable to find the time
to write, I also considered that special occasions where not a time to do
college work, so I was unbothered about the situation and just wrote on the
weekends. Writing on a weekend was exactly the same as writing in a weekday
except that I didn’t have to and that’s what truly annoyed me about the entire
situation having to write on my journal free day. Even though this was very
annoying the biggest problem with falling behind on my journals was that if I
didn’t get back on track on time I was not going to have the assigned 40 journals
at the end of the semester and that would mean that I was going to get points
deducted probably and that’s exactly what I was trying to avoid because to me
this journal was easy points so there was no room for mistakes like that.
The journal
helped me in some way or another with my writing because of how long they were
I can say they really loosened up my wrist for future assignments in which I
had to write a lot by hand. They helped me relieve my stress when I was going
through a hard time with college or if I just wanted to get something of my
chest or a situation that bothered me. It gave me a sense of time and how much
I can accomplish in a certain amount as well as helping me express the ideas in
my writing more fluidly. I also discovered that there’s a lot of words that I
don’t know how to spell and with this journal I was able to realize which ones
they were and correct them before I used them incorrectly in any other assignment.
Overall I consider the journal to be very helpful for all that I realized
during it and for the things that it taught me and im very happy I was able to
have the experience of writing it.
