Reflection

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All right, let’s jump back in time a bit. It was the beginning of my junior year at the University of Michigan. I had gotten into the Minor in Writing that previous semester and I was enrolled in the TuTh 1-2:30 section of Writing 220. The first few classes were pretty straightforward: do the readings, write a response, and boom you’re golden. But then, I had to pick a piece of writing that I would work with for the rest of the semester. There were a few papers that caught my attention: a visual analysis, a case study of gender representation in media, and an analysis of Pakistan’s relationship with foreign aid. After much deliberation, and me wondering how in the hell I would be able to transform these pieces, I chose the visual analysis. At its most basic level, the visual analysis discussed the various photographic elements of Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s Threshold, while also advancing an argument about what it all meant. What was the argument, you ask? Surprise, surprise: it was to educate people about the mental health crisis.

 

Here’s one thing you should know about me: I’ve written a lot of pieces about mental health. I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder in 7th grade, which manifested in many different ways. First it was academic, then it became a social anxiety, then it became an all-around nuisance. Since it popped up pretty much all the time in my life, I found myself discussing it every time I had to talk about a weakness of mine- in research papers, in my college essay, in several college papers when I didn’t know what else to write. The problem was that I always approached it with the “This used to be a problem for me but I did this thing and I overcame it!” narrative. I never overcame it at all; it still impacts me to this day. Maybe when I picked that visual analysis as my origin piece, I wanted to do something different. Who knows.

 

Throughout the semester, we performed different experiments on our origin pieces, transforming it into something brand new. I won’t talk about my first experiment at length, since it didn’t have a profound impact on the final product, but here’s what you need to know: it was underdeveloped, lacked creativity, and it never stood out as being final-project worthy.

 

For my next experiment, I decided to do an open letter, an idea I stole from an essay I wrote back in English 125. If you plagiarize your past self, does that make it new? Who cares, I did it anyway. At first, I wasn’t too excited about it. As time went on, though, I warmed up to the idea. Finally, after discussing it with my peers in workshop, I was sold. It seemed like the perfect way to discuss the mental health climate around campus, while also encouraging the University to handle the mental health problem in a better way. At this point, I was certain that it would be my final project. But I still had one more experiment to go.

 

This is pointless, I thought to myself. I have this genius plan in front of me, and I already know everything else will pale in comparison. Eventually, I gave up and asked my instructor for help. She suggested using my third experiment as research for my open letter and compiling that research in the form of a Michigan Daily article. I’ve never worked for the Daily, so I browsed the Internet in search of example articles off which to base my work. PLOT TWIST! The open letter to CAPS had been done before, and it had been done a lot. I was forced to recognize that the Daily article was my best bet for a project. I decided to focus my work on Wolverine Support Network, a mental health organization on campus.

 

I have been involved in WSN since freshman year, so naturally I felt really excited about the topic. Even though I did not end up doing the open letter for my final project, the conventions of the open letter really worked well with the conventions of the Daily article. I was able to highlight Wolverine Support Network as a prime example of students mobilizing to address the lack of adequate mental health resources on campus. For the first time, I was writing a piece about mental health that I thought actually mattered. Not only did I get to highlight an organization that has been so great to me in terms of creating community, but I also got to speak candidly about how the university can improve mental health resources for everyone. Overall, this was an extremely fun project and I’m glad I was able to partake in it.