To me, this semester has been an exercise in open-mindedness. Many of the convictions I’ve held for years have been completely dissolved by my English class in only two quarters. Initially, I struggled with it; I had a hard time giving up all the beliefs and habits I had held unto for years in which made it difficult for me to hear new ones. However, over the course of the semester I’ve developed a lot as a student and figured out how to absorb and accept a lot more ideas than I could before.
At the beginning of the year I was convinced that I already knew how to read and write. I had been doing it for some years already and felt like I pretty much knew the most important things any English student needed to know; all I was lacking was more experience. I walked into English on the first day of class expecting to read and write and gain this experience, but couldn’t see myself learning anything groundbreaking. My prior English classes had all been pretty similar: a lot of writing and reading and practice but not a lot of change. Books were interesting but similar, and teachers expected the same sort of writing. Imagine my surprise when the first book of the year was Orlando.
Orlando was unlike any book I had ever read in an English class. It stood out in subject, style, as well as level of difficulty. Orlando was abstract; its ideas weren’t all laid out on the counter for me, in fact they weren’t anywhere near the counter. These ideas were hidden behind the cupboards and doors and under the sinks. Nothing was straightforward about Orlando’s story; not his time period, not his views, and certainly not his gender. As a reader I had never encountered ideas or writing this ambiguous before, and at first I rejected it.
Things got even tougher for me when we had our first writing assignment about Orlando. I decided to write an essay about how ambiguity was used in the story to help myself gain a better understanding of it; and it didn’t go smoothly at first. My thesis became something along the lines of “By creating a sense of ambiguity in her novel, Orlando, Virginia Woolfe adds depth to the story”, and to be honest I didn’t totally buy into this idea myself yet. I wasn’t prepared to accept that something that made writing harder for me to understand was making the writing better.
However, at some point writing the essay, I started to gain an understanding of the story and saw how initially not understanding because of the ambiguity really had allowed me to grasp deeper ideas; I just had to work for it a little. The ideas and depth I managed to find in a book I had initially rejected set the stage for the rest of the semester; I needed to keep an open mind or English class this year was going to be a struggle.
I’ve seen a visible change in myself and the way I think this semester. In our most recent project where we were asked to write poems, we learned how important it is to let go of your initial ideas in order to move forward in your writing and find more depth. When crafting my poem, I found myself believing wholeheartedly in this idea, and I began to let go of writing and ideas in my own work that not so long ago I would have been kicking and screaming about losing. It surprised me that I was able to do this.
I’ve learned how to let go of old ideas in exchange for new ones much more easily than before, and so far I haven’t been disappointed with the results. I genuinely think I have developed my way of thinking this semester much more than any semester before it, and I’m excited to see what comes next. Something I need to work on though is not just accepting new ideas but learning how to develop them into my work. I see the value of conciseness but I definitely have a ways to go as far as writing more concisely. I see the need to let go of early stages of writing to move forward, but it’s still not always easy. I can see myself gaining a lot as I learn to fully embrace these ideas and any more new ones that come my way.
