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All good journeys must come to an end at some point. Once
the fear of venturing out alone subsides, everything is great and you forget
that you were ever nervous to begin with; but then there comes a point when you
realize that you must go home. You don’t want the vacation to end, but after
coming to the realization that it must, all you can think about is home.
Has your experience of the freedoms of the open road spoiled
home for you? The first day back is always a drag...
Still though, it’s nice to return to normalcy. To your
routine. To comfort. To your own bed. Home will always be there for you,
waiting faithfully for your return.
As you climb your way back up the mountain to reclaim your
throne, you begin to feel anxious. Given all you’ve experienced, it’s hard to
believe you were ever homesick; yet, when looking up at your home as you
approach it, it’s hard to believe that you ever wanted to leave. But that
experience will always stay with you. Eventually, experiences turn to memories,
and memories breed longing. Longing for the open road and a sense of adventure.
You’ll meet the road again one day, but until then, it’s great to be home.
When this semester began, I was a little nervous about these blog assignments because I don’t consider creative writing to be a strength of mine. It was a bit of a struggle to create my first post, but I ended up being pretty satisfied with how it turned out. The rest of them came surprisingly easy. I worried about having to incorporate someone else’s theme into my writing, but the themes that I was able to take from each of my four partners really sparked some ideas for me, and it really shaped an ongoing narrative that I wasn’t expecting.
ReplyDeleteMy first post set up the original setting, or the “home.” For the second post, I was partnered with a blog that discussed the idea of travel, so I took that theme and used traveling away from home as a metaphor for throwing caution to the wind and trying a new experience. I left it vague so that the new experience could be whatever the reader decides they want it to be—a new relationship, a big move to another city, a new job, etc. My third post utilized the imagery of a scorching hot climate taken from that week’s partner blog by creating a “lost in the desert” scene. This was a metaphor for the struggles one might encounter as they venture out on their new experience, and how one can persevere through it. The next partner blog talked about how he or she hates the beach, and doesn’t understand why people seem to enjoy it so much (a sentiment I can definitely relate to), so I took that theme and used it to explain that there’s beauty in everything if you look hard enough. Finally, I was lucky enough that the last blog partner wrote about being homesick, which was a perfect way to end my narrative and bring the story back “home.”
Like I said, when we first started this project I was nervous, but the way things shaped up was really great. The interactions with the other blogs and the way we used them to shape our own posts was really unique, and the fact that, for the most part, the authors all remained anonymous throughout the process really added a new element to the project. I know that personally I felt more freedom to express myself because of this. Most texts take some sort of influence from somewhere else whether the audience or the author realizes it or not, but to be forced to directly take influence from someone else that you know nothing about was really cool, and I’m proud of what was accomplished. The entire project was one big intertextual web of collaboration between strangers. I didn’t set out to have an ongoing narrative throughout this semester, but that’s the direction these assignments took my writing, and it was a great learning experience, and I can definitely say that I enjoyed it.