Senior Portfolio: Reflection Essay
By Claire Wrobel
Ever since I first started to love reading, words have had a special power for me. As I matured and grew older, I began to form a small circle of friends who also seemed to have this understanding of words. Very few of these friends were readers or loved literature, but the important point was that they could understand the power that one can yield through words. These people had been harmed and broken by words, and we banded together as a small supergroup of word-appreciators. These people had the strongest empathy and the strongest morality that I had ever seen.
Flash forward to college, and I’ve mostly lost contact with my word-appreciators. For one reason or another, our empathies had found new things to love and new challenges to crack. It was in college that I discovered how people could use words to manipulate me. High school had showed me that words can have a lasting impact, but this new manipulation seemed to come out of the shadows, or like it was in disguise. These people knew how important words were to me, and my love and honor for words was weaponized and turned into my weakness. I would repeat certain words or phrases that were said to me over and over, until I could not even think them without remembering the pain they once caused. It would take me years before I was not angry at these words, even though they were wielded long ago and without a say about how they were used.
This is when I found poetry, or more importantly, when I found the community of poets. I remember in one of my English classes, the professor told us that poets have to be especially careful about the connotations and delicacies of words because they often use so few of them. Poets all knew and respected the power of words, and they used it to make change. They used it to tell their stories, to provide healing, to make a statement, and to reach out to the other broken word-appreciators. They were using words to heal people, and I thought maybe they could begin to heal me.
My sophomore year of college was spent diving into this new world, and becoming a regular swimmer myself. I devoured thousands of poems, and I could never get enough. I began to fear that I would never be able to read all the poetry I ever wanted, because there was just so much to read. With dozens of spectacular examples as my inspiration, I dipped my toes into the different pool of writing poetry. I experimented with different structures and different tones, and paddled through subjects from squirrels to sexual trauma. The entire world seemed to be full of poetry, and as a woman of letters, I felt like it was my duty to unlock and unleash the potential that was sitting there stagnant, growing algae.
My love for words has flourished through different phases, and right now is in the exciting wildfire of encouraging others. As I’ve been working on my honors scholarship project, writing a poetry collection, I’ve been doing many different exercises to try to stretch my creative muscle—and my most recent endeavor came in the form of blackout poetry. For weeks, I carried around an old book I’d gotten for free, which seemed to be just interesting enough and just weird enough to be perfect for blackout poetry. From this exercise I learned that blackout poems can look like many different things: it can be several sentences long, it can be a hodgepodge of randomly selected single letters, or it can be only a few words left white on the page; but, like Gusteau said in Ratatouille, “Anyone can cook!” My experiments with blackout poetry showed me that “Anyone can write poetry!”
Because I was bringing this book around with me everywhere, I began encouraging (okay, pressuring) my friends, and sometimes even nearby strangers, to branch out and try this new form of fun. While many were reluctant, almost everyone I introduced it to ended up writing one to ten blackout poems. It brought me such joy to see my friends discover that they were capable of this strange expression of creativity—almost like I had unknowingly discovered some new aspect of themselves that they had never believed in, or had even ardently denied. Although I started blackout poetry as a temporary exercise during my capstone project, it taught me something very important: your love of words is contagious, and it can be a wondrous, miraculous thing of encouragement.
Being a woman of letters is not a solitary, introverted way of life. I write because I want to connect with others while also expressing myself, and it takes a special kind of courage to do so. You can form a community out of people who are not “of letters,” so long as they realize the power and the possibility that comes from words and their meanings. No matter where I end up, whether it be working as a middle school librarian or teaching abroad, this kind of inspiration and encouragement is essential.
This ideology is fundamental to my definition of my personal mission and vocation. No matter what career you choose, your life calling should always be to find and follow Christ, and to share His love wherever you go. Encouraging people to believe in themselves and to be proud of the way God has gifted them, whether that be through trying blackout poetry for the first time or through meaningful conversations, should be a part of every vocation. I do not believe that your vocation and your life calling are the same thing; as Christians, we are all called to share the Good News, no matter your vocation. The overarching narrative of our lives is the Christian narrative, and every over self-identifier (US citizen, mother, student, etc.) falls underneath that. Some people experience a great deal of stress because they feel that they do not have a clear direction of God’s plan for their lives, but if you are following God’s will and being a passionate ambassador for Christ, you are already doing what God has called you to do.
However, it is not enough simply to keep your eyes focused on your personal path alone. God also calls us to reach across societal boundaries and reconcile with people that have been hurt and harmed, by words and the people that use them. Although it may not seem conventional, a career focused on spreading the love of literature is a great way to pursue this goal. As literature becomes increasingly diverse and begins to represent a wider range of perspectives, readers, and society alike, will come to recognize the value of the “other.” When I read literature that tells a story different from my own, I am expanding my idea of the human condition, which therefore expands my concept of who God is. God loves diversity among His children, and I will continue to encourage and love on literature that perpetuates that realization. This validation is one step closer to a harmonious, rightly-ordered, loving society, and one step closer to the true kingdom of God.
Claire is a senior English and Honors Humanities major from the Chicago suburbs. She primarily writes about social issues, particularly sexual assault and the impact it has on its victims and society. In her “spare time” she likes reading (especially poetry) and watching Disney movies (especially Hercules), and is hoping to publish her own poetry collection this year. Right now her passions include knitting, juice boxes, and planning her upcoming trip to China.