Picture this:

 

Second grade, Mrs. Thomas’ class, Cheyenne Elementary.  It is early October 2002. The leaves outside the classroom window are burnt red and green and various shades of yellow. There is a class full of eight year olds frolicking around the classroom. It’s our daily free time where we get to be big kids and pick whatever we want to do. There is a math center where some kids are playing with colored popsicle sticks, grouping them into tens. There is a reading center, where my fellow classmates are rummaging through a bookshelf full of Charlotte's Web and Junie B. Jones. There is an art center where a group of girls with ribbons in their hair are decorating paper pumpkins with glue and glitter. And there is a writing center. It’s a small desk in the corner of the room with nothing but a stack of loose-leaf paper--wide-ruled--and a box of pictures: old postcards, laminated magazine clippings, and random stock photographs. It was at this desk, inside these pictures, where I found myself.

 

I have always been oddly introspective. I say oddly because I                                                                   am a really outgoing person, an I feel like the stereotype of                                                                     an introspective mind is an introverted personality. But life                                                                   is full of contradiction and unexplainable oxymoron. For                                                                       me, my mind has been a place of escape, a place of                                                                                   imagination, and a delightful feast in the details. It is                                                                            almost like I am going through life taking mental pictures, like Jim and Pam from The Office on their wedding day. My mind is full of these images and I write to make sense of it all.

 

                                                         It all started in second grade; the magazine clippings and

                                                         weathered postcards stirred stories of magical evenings                                                                           in Victorian castles and tales of women superheroes                                                                                      saving the day on flying carpets. My little 8-year-old                                                                                mind couldn’t help but bring an image to life. One of                                                                           my most infamous tales started from a postcard with a

                                                             picture of a family of four on the back. They were posed in a                                                                  perfect square formation; a bright sandy beach, palm trees, and the words “Greetings from Hawaii!” written across the top in large, flashy letters. Their smiles were bright and their skin was sun-kissed. The younger child, a girl, had a lei flower crown on top of her head. Naturally—as any second-grade writing prodigy would—I wrote a lengthy piece on the trials and tribulations of an average family with a hidden secret: their daughter was the ultra-awesome, super cute Queen of Hawaii. Coming from a family of four myself, I guess you could say I wrote what I knew.

 

                                                                       My love for images—not only on paper, but in the world                                                                        around me—continued throughout my life, becoming                                                                               more and more introspective. In high school, I would                                                                              write poetry on what I would see—the morning dew that                                                                        lay on the manicured lawns in my suburban town, the                                                                             loud, high-pitched squeal of the rows of locker doors                                                                              opening and closing in the sleepy silence of the morning                                                                         hours. I would write about the small things, the banal                                                                              details everyone seems to ignore. As time went on and                                                                             life started to get heavy—a normal side effect of                                                                                   getting older—I began to write more and more about how those details were affecting me. How the sleepy silence in the mornings made me feel uneasy, and the morning dew filled me with melancholy. How the stories I wrote in second grade were ambitious and cute, but were they realistic? I began to not just view the images around me, but to question them.

 

Ultimately, the pieces I would write became more about what was going on inside of my head instead of the world around me. My coveted images turned into thoughts I didn’t understand—details I needed to decode.

 

Fast forward.

 

Thirteen years have passed from my stories of queens and flying

carpets and I am now starting my third year at the University of Michigan.

I am given the opportunity in my Minor in Writing gateway class to

re-purpose a piece of writing into something totally new. I decide that in

order to make my work meaningful, I had to be passionate about it. One of

the things I have become extremely passionate about—and you will see

evidence of this throughout my eportfolio—is fighting the stigma

surrounding mental illness. By this time in my life, I have been diagnosed

with a couple mental health disorders and have written some journal-style

pieces with the purpose of trying to figure out what the heck was going on

inside of my head. I have always had a knack for figuring out the meaning behind things, such as pictures or my thoughts. But understanding my mental health disorders was an entirely different story. The only way I knew how to sort through the cluttered mess inside my mind and understand what was truly going on was to write about it. 

 

So with passionate courage I began to write my re-purposing piece for this eportfolio. As you will see, it is a personal narrative about my journey with mental health, ending on an encouraging note to bring hope to those also living with similar challenges. Throughout the process, I decided                                            that I not only wrote in order to understand myself and my mental                                                     health disorders, but I also wrote to share my story. One of the best and                                               most important things a person can do when trying to fight the mental                                               illness stigma, is to write about their personal experience with it. This                                               humanizes the idea of mental health as a real and life-altering disease                                               and gives hope to those who are also suffering.

 

                                           Looking at both my repurposing and remediating projects, I can see how                                          my writing has evolved from not just an analysis of outside images or an                                            analysis of myself even. Instead, my writing has become a portal for                                                   others to gain insight into how I view betterment of the self and understand more about themselves. I have extended this idea into a tumblr page, where other college students can submit their stories and learn more about mental health self-care.

 

The reasons for why I write have evolved throughout the years, but in a way they all are connected and a part of who I am as a writer today. Without the images in second-grade, I would have never picked up a pencil and written my first story. Without my introspective nature, I would have never thought more about the importance of the thoughts inside my head. Without those first few messy journal entries about mental health, I would never have been able to share my personal experience and fight for a cause so dear to my heart.

 

I write because I am curious about the world around me. I write because I want to understand who I am. I write because I want to share my story.

 

I write because sometimes you have to fight for something way bigger than yourself.