Process Diary #1 đ
Six years ago, I sat across from my professor while she read my thesis manuscriptâfive essays, including one journalistic piece, that were all about death. The collection ranged in style from prose poetry to personal essay, but their connecting theme was grief. And not only mine for my mother, but also my motherâs for her mother, and my familyâsâeven grief as a philosophical conceptâwhich ultimately made the project, titled I Love You Stop, feel massive and unfocused. I wrote about death and dying in agriculture; unprocessed generational grief; and grief as a potential world-building emotion. I knew that I covered too many subjects before handing the draft in for edits, and my professor knew I knew it, too.
We sat there for a few minutes before she looked up at me. âDid you cry while writing this?â She flipped through my work, having already meticulously marked it with comments and questions, and then met my gaze again and waited for my answer. No one had ever asked me something like that. It was a question, yes, but even I understood that it was ultimately an assessmentâthat I had turned a personal devastation into a palatable perfection. I had examined my grief as an outsider, and in doing so, I had stripped myself from an experience where âmyselfâ played the titular role. My professor was referring to one paragraph in particular that came towards the end, in which I described a conversation I had had with my mother that was supposed to be the essayâs emotional climax. In this scene, I had just assured her that everything would be alright while tucking her into bed:
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