I feel that writing a personal narrative is a foreign feeling to many older students, especially when it focuses on personality and emotions from an experience rather than just the experience itself, and not for the sake of looking good in front of other people like scholarship and college application essays. Writing purely about how I felt was not something I did willingly outside of assignments (in my mind, it’s a lot to unpack so I’d rather throw away the whole box) and even then I tend to write about my opinions in a bit impersonal manner because it feels like facts speak louder and truer than emotions. I say older students, because I feel that younger kids tend to be more open about how they feel or at least creatively express it more often, or at least this was true for me I think.

Writing the personal narrative allowed me to take a step back and think about myself for once, and I decided to focus on something positive, some good memories, to fondly write about. There are so many words I have not spoken, even more words I have not written, that I’m not sure I ever intend to say, but writing opened up a new conversation about me with myself in my own mind. Just as negative emotions need to be sorted through, positive emotions should be brought up and thought about as well because this is how a balance of the emotional self and identity is achieved. I spent far too much time dwelling on the negatives in the past years, so I wrote about the positives between them that I have nearly forgotten in recall memory but not in spirit. It made me happy to share them, however insignificant.

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