I would describe my body of work this semester as a challenge I needed. Whether, it was a success or a failure, it was something I know I will grow from. What stands out to me is my actual interest in these stories. I found myself able to relate to a few characters and authors we read about. The characters and I do not have the exact same lives or upbringings, but there were some events that happened in their lives that reminded me I experienced something similar. The feminist stories where something that naturally stood out to me being that I share a common interest. Though I feel like my writing skills may not have progressed, I have discovered new writing styles that I can use to practice bettering my skills. I realized that I like creative writings like scripts and poems more than formal writing like research essays. My journey over these 15 weeks has been daring and eye-opening.

The erasure poem is the piece I’m most proud of. Its the first time I’ve expressed the personal issues I go through publicly. Although the poem may be hard to understand, I know what it means to me and how good it felt to put those emotions into writing. My experience while crafting the poem was liberating and meaningful. I gathered words that I knew explained my journey best, and the poem developed into something that made it easy for me to share.

This semester I can say I struggle with time management. Between work and school there was a unbalanced distribution of my time. My hardest class was public speaking. The work wasn’t necessarily difficult, but it was the fear of presenting that really affected me. I felt like my anxiety would take over and I couldn’t produce the high quality performance that I would have liked to and know that I was capable of doing.

Overall, this class and this semester was an experience worth having. I interacted with people, which hasn’t happened a lot since covid, and I engaged in my classes to the best of my ability. I will always constantly try to push myself. Life isn’t an easy road but its still a road worth taking.