Rough Draft for Project 2

            Writing has impacted my life, first in an indirect manner and then in a very dominating way. Having a mother who graduated from UNC’s Journalism School, the concept of journaling my experiences and using it as a cathartic tool in order to overcome trauma and empower others. However, even with my mother’s background, it was not until I learned of the importance of writing on my own accord that I truly acknowledged its significance. I decided to define writing as simply a string of words that form an idea. The five artifacts I chose the showcase take multiple forms: a blog post, a chapter in a novel, a song, a poem, and a journal entry. This story, and it is a story, follows my experiences as a sibling of someone with cancer. I did not know how to express my feelings of frustration, so I simply did not.

ARTIFACT ONE: blog post from my sister’s treatment

-my sister used to have cancer and a website devoted to how her treatment was going

-how this blog helped to connect a lot of people together

-it was written by my mother in my sister’s perspective

ARTIFACT TWO: chapter from the novel Wonder

-perspective of a girl having her life revolve around her sick brother

-I cried in middle school when I read it for the first time

-words were able to articulate thoughts I had never been able to process myself

ARTIFACT THREE: lyrics to “Waving Through A Window”

-discuss the background of the musical Dear Evan Hansen where this song is from

-talk about how the song discusses Evan’s experiences with anxiety

-how I developed anxiety as a result of the trauma

-the song helped me to fully understand what I was feeling

-how it pushed me to seek treatment

ARTIFACT FOUR: Walt Whitman’s “O Me O Life”

-it was assigned reading my senior year of high school

-this poem resonated with me and I still reread it now in college

-it influenced me to begin writing and viewing it as me “contribute[ing] a verse”

ARTIFACT FIVE: Recent journal entry in my daily journal

-how I recently have begun to take up journaling

-I journal about a page every day

-it helps me to grow as a person because I discover things about myself as I write

-talk about the power words written down hold in comparison to words spoken

-how much more thought it takes to write words down