Before entering this class I have to admit that I thought of the “essay” as a well thought out, planned and well researched piece of work. I thought that before I wrote any essay I had to know what I wanted to say and I had to gather sources to “prove” the point that I was trying to convey. Now I realize that what I was thinking of as an essay was actually a research paper and that an essay can take on a number of forms and can and should be personal. I remember when I read the fist read that “the primary significance of an essay [resides] primary in the its display of engaging minds”; I was struck by the idea of the essay as a means od engaging one in a thought process ( Klaus xxiii).  I liked the idea of not having the pressure to come with an answer to a particular problem, all that I had to do in my essays was to make people, as well as myself, think.

At the beginning of the semester I knew that I wanted to not only pick a topic that meant something to me, but one that I still did not have the answers to. That is why I decided to tackle my recovery from my eating disorder in my first essay. I know that I recovered, but why was this time different than all of the previous times? Why was I one of the people who got to recover? These were all question that I was struggling with when I wrote my first textual essay. I will be honest I still don’t have the answers to them, but that was not really the goal. The goal for my first essay was to get myself thinking about my recovery in a way that I had not before.

After writing this essay I realized that I struggled to let my thoughts flow and to let my essay go where my thoughts wanted to take me. Looking back, my first essay is way more straight forward than if I had written it today. I can see now that I knew what I wanted to say at the end of the essay and that is what drove the decisions that I made not the other way around. Therefore, in my audio essay I wanted to not know what I was going to say. That is why I chose to interview my mother about my recovery. I had no idea what she was going to say so there was no way that I could know what I wanted to say before I even had the essay written.

For my audio essay I asked my mother a number of questions about my recover. Did she regret any of the decisions that she made? Would she do it again? I tried to let these answers guide what I talked about later on in the essay. However, I now see that I let too much of my mother’s voice dominate the essay and not enough of my own. I admit though that I am not good at working with technology and that was the first time that I had ever used any type of recording software, so I was presently surprised with how the my audio essay came out technologically speaking.

I will admit that I was nervous to put my essay in to audio format, but the thought of having to use both audio and video terrified me. I had not idea how I was going to capture of find video clips, how I was going to make what I wanted to say line up with what I wanted to show visually and how I going to make my essay more abstract. For my video essay I actually had an entire essay written and filmed that I decided not to use. My group members informed me that it sounded too much like I was ranting. Not knowing how I was going to make my essay sound less like a rant, I decided to scrap my essay and start fresh.

My goal for this essay was to talk about some of the behaviors that I engaged in when I was sick and possible reasons behind these behaviors. I say possible because I really don’t know what caused me to partake in certain behaviors. Through this essay I was able to move away from talking about my eating disorder and to anchor my description in specific moments during my eating disorder.  I chose to break my essay in to sections to sections because though they were all parts of my illness I do see them as highly distinct moments. What I ended up struggling with in this essay was finding images that were not exactly what I was trying to say. I tried to think abstractly but I still struggled.

For my radical revision I knew that I wanted to take a completely different approach and to move away from my eating disorder. Erin suggested that I put one of the family discussions that I had from my first draft of my video essay in context with one of the talks that I had with my professor, this got me thinking what do these to things have in common? After thinking about it the answer came to me at about midnight while I was trying to fall asleep. Both of these conversations required me to keep something secret. So then I got to thinking. What are other times in my life when I was forced to keep secrets? Why did I choose to keep these secrets? What role did they play in my life? I tried to let these questions guide me through the process of writing this essay. I want to mention that I did not have the answers to these questions when I set out to write this essay. I am still not sure that I have fully answered them. But, what I have learned through this class is that I don’t always have to have an answer. Sometimes thinking about something in a different way than I had ever before is enough.