Reflective Essay

Lisa Rotella
Reflection Essay

As I sit, whether here at home, on the train, at my son’s baseball practice with laptop or in class. My reflection will never be the same at any given time. It is so dependent on my subject at hand, my personal involvement with that subject and my own personal space and what I may be feeling at the time. I tend to have an ability to write no matter where I am however, sometimes I am stuck in a position of dead end where I feel I need to step away and come back. This explains why I have so many “versions” of the same piece over and over again. I need to branch all the way out like a large oak tree. I need to put all of my feelings on paper and really tell my story exactly the way it happened. I need to make sure that my feelings are there in my head and then put on paper so I can allow the reader an easy access to what I am feeling. Wait, should I be giving my audience easy access? I then reevaluate the situation and list all of my ideas and thoughts as a list. I take that list and go back to what I originally wrote and make sure that they are all of the things I need to include. The list should match up somewhat with the original writing I created. Printing both documents and looking over both, I try to create a scene for the paragraph in the story I am writing about. My goal now is to be able to tell the story AGAIN without actually telling the story. I want my reader to be able to put the pieces together like a puzzle. Think about which piece goes where and try to match up every angle. I think normally I spend way too much time on pieces, but I could never just write something for face value and not be able to ponder over it for extended periods of time. I would think that I would cheating my reader into giving him or her the value of what I am trying to reveal.
I have chosen to publish my personal essay which talks about my process of leaving my husband and how a close knit family can teach their children lessons and sometimes those lessons are the learning experiences of themselves. I have a close relationship with my feelings regarding this issue as it has taken me years and years before, during and after to learn by the way in which I lived. My concern is that I allow the reader to understand that mistakes are not mistakes if you learn something from them. I do not like to refer to my situation as a single mom a mistake or “life sentence” as my dad sometimes calls it. I like to think of it as a learning experience. I can tie it into what I have learned in this class as well. I believe writing about writing could even give you yet another avenue where you may or may not have gone before. It may give you more opportunities to explore yourself more and more and allow your audience to see much more of you by your expressive ways. I feel this class and my personal essay writing process is one that is hand in hand. I feel this class, my writings and my personal essay all give the feeling of learning experiences and how important it is to make small boo boo’s to improve yourself.