Katharine Anderson and Dr. John Bennion

Main Text

When I set out several months ago to write an honors thesis, I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do. I was going to craft a progression of essays examining myself, beginning with the most basic personal information, and slowly progressing, layer by layer, to the topics and issues which I hold deepest and closest to whatever may be considered my core. I was going to tell stories, express opinions, and in other diverse ways utilize the genre of personal essay as a means of self discovery. I hoped that the final product would in some way function almost as a written road map of my identity, guiding both me and my readers to a greater understanding of who I am.

I like to think that I succeeded in terms of function. Though the pathway meanders rather alarmingly at times and there are certainly many unexplored territories where dragons no doubt lurk, I did my best to reveal my most honest self through these writings. It has long been a cherished belief of mine that the glory of personal writing is that it is the closest thing to unfiltered brain access that you can achieve. You can write so many things that you can’t say. Honest, sincere writing cuts through all the distractions of physical appearance and mannerisms and, ideally, allows for pure communion between the hearts and minds of the reader and writer. I did my utmost to be as honest and straight forward as possible in my writing. In many cases this has resulted in exposing my most vulnerable parts—the topics and ideas which I typically hide away in journals or even hesitate to write anywhere at all are in this work laid bare.

The form of my final product is not what I was planning on or expecting, and that by turns worries and delights me. I set out to write a collection of essays, but I must admit, that is not what I actually produced. I must concede that there are some essays in the final product—some pieces, slightly longer than the others, written in a perhaps higher, and certainly more self-conscious register, which have undergone various revisions and multiple drafts. Typically these were written earlier, either earlier in this thesis-writing process or earlier in life. These were included because I felt they had a place, as illustrative of my experiences and character as well as my sometime ability to conform to what I see as the academic standard for personal essays. However, these pieces are by far the exception, rather than the rule.

The majority of the work took a much more spontaneous form. I came to find, as I wrote and wrote over the past several months, that the traditional personal essay is not a form that comes naturally to me. Of course, acquiring and perfecting the ability to write in essay form is one of the assumed tasks that I set myself when beginning this project. However, as I continued to write, I began to question the real value of that task. As I see it, the perceived value of traditional essays comes from the intricate crafting, the working and reworking, the revising and editing and rewriting that transforms the initial blather into a comprehensible, definable, and more refined shape. As my writing experience progressed, I realized that my perception of value was shifting, imperceptibly at first, but finally building to a feverish pitch. I have come to value the raw and the wild, the blather, more than the polished and perfected. Perhaps with more revision and more effort to fit my thoughts to the frame of an essay I would be able to express myself with greater concision and would reach and please a wider audience. But lately I find that the interest I have in hearing what my brain has to say, just as it says it first, is equal, if not greater than, the interest I have in seeing what those words can be made into through artifice. Therefore, I chose not to expend unnecessary energies in rewriting every word of what was naturally produced, and instead in many cases preserved those words in just the form they came in. I’m not sure what term to apply to these non-essays. I tend to call them “blurbs”; my mentor thought of them as blog posts. For the longest time I tried to rebel against this natural form—I struggled in vain to work my writing into a paradigm that would be more recognizable and perceived as valid by an academic review. In the end I was forced to choose, for the sake of my soul and sanity, whether to continue the fight for the essay, or to surrender to my impulse to blurb. With trepidation, I have chosen to follow my instinctive voice, come what may.

At this juncture, I find myself feeling an unexpected and somewhat perverse kinship to Michel de Montaigne, the purported father of the essay. I am moved to echo the introduction to his own work: “Had my intention been to seek the world’s favor, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties: I desire therein to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple and ordinary manner, without study and artifice: for it is myself I paint.” The Myself that I have painted is not refined or carefully arrayed. It is often inane, frequently self pitying, and sometimes openly belligerent. It is full of doubt, fear, and an almost adolescent angst. I hope that it is also contemplative, authentic, tender, and fun. I hope that the uncharted places in this map of myself are few. I hope that in the careful cartography of my wildernesses and wastelands I have not neglected to portray my quiet fields or ocean shores. I hope that somehow this thesis can mean something to someone other than myself. I hope it wasn’t entirely an exercise in solipsism. I hope that it is just as it should be.

References

• Montaigne, Michel de. “To the reader.” Trans. Charles Cotton. 1580. Quotidiana. Ed. Patrick Madden. 26 Dec 2006. Web. 14 Jan 2010. <http://essays.quotidiana.org/montaigne/to_the_reader/>