Two words: Course Registration. Is it just me, or is there so much drama around that entire process? Gen Ed requirements, prerequisites, major core classes, and not to mention the anxiety of waiting for your registration window to open so that you can *hopefully* get into all of the classes you need to graduate. This past semester I was finishing up my gen eds, and I had left one category for last- human performance. Somehow, the stars aligned and I found out that there was one creative writing course that could fill the requirement, and also get me out of a gym class (I’m getting flashbacks from running the mile in high school as I type this). Creative writing ended up being without a doubt the best class I have taken in my academic career thus far, and a good portion of that comes back to our journaling assignment for the semester.
The assignment was simple: one semester, and an entire composition notebook to fill front to back. Let me start off by saying the assignment came easier to some students than others, and I was on the latter half of that at the beginning of the semester. The weeks came and went, and that composition notebook sat in my backpack, relatively untouched. I made every excuse I could to avoid taking the time to just sit down and write. I had nothing to write about, other assignments to do, hours spent at work- the list goes on and on. As the halfway point of the semester drew near, I realized that if I was going to be able to complete the assignment, I needed to seriously buckle down.
Once I began to take the assignment seriously, the pages literally began to fly by. I made a point to get to campus a little bit earlier every day or stay a while after my classes got done, just to write. I started by writing about my day, my friends, my roommates, what I had for lunch, and then ended up moving into deeper topics involving family, myself, and my future. Journaling became a very therapeutic process for me, and I started bringing the notebook everywhere. The assignment began to not feel so much like homework, and more like a lifestyle choice that I began making for myself.
What started as an in-class assignment turned into what has become a big part of my daily routine. It is incredible what you can open your eyes to about yourself and the world around you if you simply take the time to sit down, and take it all in.