I'm almost done with finals!!!! or, "When I Leave this Old Red Couch"

So, this is the last essay I wrote for my wilderness writing class........here we go! (It's not really an essay, more of a reflection. but that's alright, because I really like the title.)

Jessie Riddle
Professor John Bennion
Wilderness Writing

When I Leave this Old Red Couch

My mother always told me that, “you never find yourself when you’re looking.” I guess I have been looking for me, trapped inside my head. I am sitting on an old red couch in a messy dorm room kitchen, reaching the end of my written odyssey and surrounded by half eaten food and half formed ideas. I examine what I have written. My college professors taught me never to use cliché’s in an essay. Or metaphors. But in four months of class discussions, solitary analysis and written self exploration, I have learned that literary rules are made to be not merely broken but danced with in the light of extended reflection. So in the pursuit of unique and profound writing I have explored the power of language to shape thought. I have wondered about what the impact of a decreasing vocabulary has on emotional depth, and I have considered the value of shocking an audience into attention, and I have contemplated the power of an essay to repulse and then inspire me within the space of a paragraph.
In my writing, I have discovered that I can build an essay. I had previously thought that a personal narrative was something I had to pull, mostly formed and in all its purity from inside my soul. When I was forced to keep pulling out essays, I realized that I couldn’t just let them come to me – I would have to create my essays, piece by piece. In the process of construction, I have watched and learned from numberless techniques of other writers, but I feel like I am finally beginning to find my voice as a writer. I have discovered that my voice needs a lot of revision, and also to embrace it.
Long after I have forgotten most of the scribbles in my well-loved black writing journal, I will remember what I thought about every Tuesday and Thursday for four months – that the form of an essay mirrors its content. Realizing this has allowed me to see my own writing and others’ more clearly, and thus become a better editor. Realizing that the theme of my essay will lend its strengths and weaknesses to the sentence structure lets me guess at flaws in my writing that are in my blind spots.
Looking for things to write about me, I got lost, way up in the Uintah mountains. I didn’t know where I was on a map geographically, and I couldn’t find myself on a page emotionally. At first I looked only for a small emotional shelter that I could hide behind; I found silence. I am not normally a quiet person, but in this unfamiliar situation with unfamiliar people I thought I could learn with less risk by just watching. This worked to an extent – when I said nothing, I started to realize things about myself that my chatter had disguised, and I could better appreciate the aching beauty of white peaks piercing a cold and bright blue sky. But by the time we got back to the vans and were leaving the mountains, I realized that I can’t remain silent. I need to learn how to engage other people in conversation with the same level of peace that I listen to them – I needed to learn how to talk without feeling the need to compensate for my exposed vulnerabilities.
In the middle of a Saturday spent typing away at my deeply rooted emotional issues, I walked to Rock Canyon park and had a testimony meeting with my student ward. The sun had just gone down, and the grass was cold, and in the darkness houses on the hills rose up to either side of us. Their bright windows of light looked like stars close to the earth. I stood at the foot of the grassy hill, looking up at the people, sitting in darkness, that I had only begun to know, and waited a while for words to come. I thought about the open space for thought I had found in places with only snow and ice, and about my nights on the porch of a yurt, freezing in a sleeping bag and watching the stars move across the sky. I thought about how insecure I had felt this semester because I was young and inexperienced and immature and from Utah, and about how I’d written countless times and in countless ways that I had forgotten how to like myself. I looked back up at the dark sillouhettes in front of me.
“I am grateful, because I have learned that all things testify of God. And I think, now, at the end of my freshman year, I am finally beginning to see that God wants us to trust him, but that he also wants us to trust ourselves.”
Now, back in my messy kitchen and still on the red couch, I can feel the wind on my face as I stood on the hill and declared trust in myself. A semester of writing has helped me to better know this girl sitting on the couch – both her strengths and weaknesses. My father told me, though, that honesty is part of trust, and so I will continue to recognize my mistakes without forsaking my trust. I’m not sure what will happen now, when I save this document and get off the couch, but I am excited to find out.