Journal Reflection

For the class we made a journal based on the first thoughts activity in which we had to make five entries a week for eight weeks, following some anti-rules. I made 40 entries and ten life compasses, which is another activity that makes you identify how and why you are feeling some way. Throughout the time of the activity I noticed that my style and vocabulary maintained constant, but my creativity was developed in a good way. I noticed this in the way I expressed my thoughts and feelings. The anti-rules I mentioned earlier are: Don’t cross out, don’t worry about spelling, punctuation or grammar, don’t think, don’t get logical, go for the jugular, and keep your hand moving. The rules that I consider were the most difficult were the don’t cross out and forget about grammar because I automatically wanted to cross out something that I knew I wrote incorrectly and many times, some more and some less, stopped to think how to write a word mainly because I thought the word in Spanish and wanted to find the correct translation to English. At first the one about going for the jugular was difficult, because I wanted to have more of a formal entry so I wanted my thought to be fluent, but the mind is not that way. You think about so many things at one time and because of this I started to follow the rule in a natural way. There was one particular entry that I made on a Sunday before a very complicated week in terms of school work that I felt I followed all rules to perfection because of all of the stress I was feeling. In this entry I started writing and listing all the works and tests I had in that week, then I started to divide my time so I could get organized, and at the end I wrote that I needed to lower my level of stress, because I knew I could make it. This part I think happened because I was able to liberate a little of that stress. This was my longest entry because I didn’t stop to think, I went for the jugular, I didn’t worry about grammar, and I didn’t cross out. All I wanted to do was take all that stress out of my system. With this entry, this journal, and the life compasses I understood this activity was very influenced with your mood and with your internal journey. With this journal I learned that I have a style of writing, made me understood why I was feeling a certain way, and made me get out some feelings. Getting out my feelings was new for me, because I usually don’t tell people what I’m feeling and this made me understand better my internal journey.