Picture of flyer for The Power Within Reading Series
Junior Year - Nuvia/Hood-Esparza Team
Picture used to describe myself in my Presentation of Learning. "I am adaptable and ready to take on new challenges"
Junior year is the moment in your life where things really start to matter. Colleges will be looking at your grades, what you do with your free time, and how you are involved in your community; Your workload starts getting heavier, you have to take the SAT, and at High Tech we have junior internship; Overall, you are getting to the age where you need to learn about you. Life is no longer dictated by your parents. You will be on your own in a little over a year and you'll need to start figuring out what you want to make of yourself. This year, I hope I will be left feeling confident in my future. I want to develop better study habits and build myself up for college applications, but mostly, in order to be prepared for the life I have ahead of me, I want to know what makes me happy.
So far, my junior year has been marked by stress and vulnerability. In our first official project of the year, The Power Within, we had to write a story about an event in our life that has made us feel powerful. We also had to have a connection between this event, and one of our biological systems that has contributed to this power. I chose to write about my family. Most of these stories were not happy. Like life, they had messy endings and it was hard to decipher who the good guy and bad guy were. I think the power in these stories, often describing events that seemed quite the opposite, came from the liberation of writing them and sharing them aloud. Alcoholism is something that has affected certain members of my family since I was little. It has been difficult to cope with at times, often I get angry and lash out because of this, but writing about it helped me to realize that a lot of the conflicts that I have dealt with are more complicated than our brain lets us see in the heat of the moment. When I stopped, took a breath, and evaluated these complexities, it was easy to see that even though the situation was difficult, it wasn't anyone's fault. Alcoholism is not something that a person can wish away and I know that in the end, I have become a stronger and more understanding person for knowing that.
This semester, learning about emotional honesty and being vulnerable with my audience has shifted my perspective a lot on character development and its relation to the nature of people in general. I have developed a more rational view on conflict and blame because I now am able to see that writing pieces that use the hero, villain stereotype are much more unrealistic than those who do. I have realized that the roots of many of my problems aren’t as deep as I think they are, and that I need to refrain from victimizing myself in order to look for solutions. I have also learned the value of patience and observation as a tool for discovery. I have learned to value the complexity of the world around me and the systems within me through my biology class and exploring my body as a source of power.