This is the last one!!! Thank god, I am dying from these writing assignments!
Audience: Social media doesn't make me feel insecure. Julia: Well, I am happy to hear that. Do you struggle with depression or self-image problems? Audience: No, not really. Julia: That might help you feel like social media isn't a burden on your mental health. Just put yourself in someone else's shoes for a second. Imagine being a young teenage girl/boy who has body image issues or feels lonely. Audience: Okay, I can try that. Julia: Now, imagine you have a lot going on in your life. You're either graduating high school and going into college, or you're in college or working and you have this pressure on you. You need to get good grades or you need to work in order to pay bills or whatever. You're not eating right, you're up late, you're working hard for hours on end. You feel like you have no control over anything. And then you log onto social media. You see someone else your age, whether they're a celebrity or someone you know from school. And they seem to be living their best life. They're out for the weekend on a boat in the Florida Keys because they can afford it or they don't have to work. They're out having fun with friends or being in great shape because it's easy for them. You feel like you're not living the way you should because on every source of media, all you see are people living the exact opposite of you.
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This is the last installment of our writing session, and in this one, we're writing a sympathy letter. I'm going to write to young adults just like me.
Dear young adults, I don't know you and you don't know me, but that's okay. We might come from different areas of the world and different backgrounds, but we have something in common. Pressure. The pressure is real. The pressure to get a degree. The pressure to get a job. The pressure to start a family. The pressure to make a good impression. The pressure to live. In a way, I'm sort of jealous we weren't young adults 30 or 40 years ago. I feel like the pressure was less. I may be wrong but they didn't have the pressures of the media telling us what we should be doing right now. Or comparing ourselves to the multimillionaire celebrities our age on Instagram and Twitter. There wasn't always something negative circling the internet or pointless celeb drama we live by. I feel like we swear by everything we see online. We're always constantly talking to each other through Snapchat, and you feel like a loser if you aren't messaging someone back every two minutes. We have it hard in a weird way, it's not like we are being sent off to war because we got picked from the draft, but we're being sent off to war with ourselves. Hello, I am back. So we're doing another writing session. We're asking ourselves "what if?" about something important in our memoir.
I wonder what would've happened if I never got addicted when I was seventeen. Junior year is an important year in high school, that's when you take the SATs and start applying to colleges. You have prom and people start driving. You start forming into the friend groups that you'll rent a house for senior week with. All of those memories or opportunities were stripped away from me. Or at least that's what it feels like. What if I never got high? Like at all. I've always wondered what it would be like to be that person who was always sober. The person the other kids thought was weird because she doesn't like to drink or smoke. You know who I'm talking about because for some reason at that age being sober was a crime. What if I just focused on classes and worried about colleges? What if I tried out for a sports team or applied for a club just to have it on my transcript so I could show schools I wasn't lazy? What if I did things a normal high schooler was suppose to do? All these what if's have me fucked up. Sometimes it's better to not think "what if?" and just move on. I didn't have anything bad happen to me, I did it all on my own. I like to keep that experience in my mind and remind myself to not go down that same path but I'm done thinking "what if?", I need to think "what now?" In class, we had a ten minute writing session. In this assignment, we had to write an empathy letter to someone in our memoir, so I decided to write to my old self.
Dear 17 year old Julia, You're an idiot, but it's okay. You were young and insecure. I'm a little upset with you because I don't think you realized the road you went down and how it still bothers you to this day. You sort of slashed open a wound that sometimes doesn't want to stay healed, and it gave me troubles for years. You had a lot of ups and downs, but thankfully, we're on a road to recovery. I'm not gonna hold this against you, but it has been hard to move on. I sometimes feel as if I missed out on a good time in high school or going away for college. Having good, clean, innocent fun like you're suppose at that age. You didn't really think twice about your future, but that's okay. As I'm looking back now, I understand what you were going through, and it makes sense. The things you did were bad, but they made you feel alive. And when you're in a mindset of isolation, doing things that make you feel better is understandable. Everyone has been there before, whether it's binge eating junk food or going on a shopping spree, you just chose a different vice. I just wish you loved yourself like you should've, or maybe had someone who watched out for you, because face it, you were alone. You've made me become more open and understanding of people's secrets, because everyone has them. And since you put me through it at such a young age, I'll have this experience with me to standby my whole life and reflect on. Thanks again for some crazy memories. - 21 year old Julia Well I handed in my draft this past week! I really need to work on it because I totally rushed it. I was honestly scared to type it just because I can't stand research projects! I'm just happy we can submit multiple drafts so I can keep improving it.
So today in class, we talked about reflection and Aristotle's Rhetorical Triangle. We did an activity on the board where we pieced together the rhetorical triangle and received an extension deadline on our research project.
That right there was describing, not reflecting. And I feel like when I'm suppose to reflect, I end up just describing and I need to stop that. On another note, I've decided for my research project to talk about social media hiatuses. I sort of set myself up for this without realizing it. Months ago, before this class started, I got rid of my social media. I hoped that it would help me clear my head and get out of the funk I was in. And looking back now, it did. I'm not glued to my phone and mindlessly scrolling when I have nothing to do. So I guess the question for my research paper would be, how has my social media break helped me overall? So, we've started the research project. And, honestly, I'm nervous. Something about research projects freak me out. Thankfully, our professor is really cool.
I think what I'm going to be looking into is social media's effect on youth depression and suicide rates. I don't know if I'm going to compare it to previous generations or not. And I also have no idea if I want to do a documentary or not. I was thinking it would be interesting to do that but I'm short on time. Sabatino was so right, you think doing a video would be cool but then you realize how much time you actually have and you're like "nah, nevermind." |
Julia PeabodyThis is my zone Archives
April 2019
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