This class was one of personal discoveries and setbacks. Through this class, I learned that staying motivated is hard and talking to people is scary. Being self-directed isn’t necessarily my strong suit, so now I have something to work on. I think that the biggest thing I learned from this class is the importance of having a plan. My typical strategy of winging it and hoping for the best turned out to be unhelpful in this class. I think that were I to do this class again, I would want to have a more clear plan from the beginning. I would want to have more structure on the day to day because it turns out, I work a lot better with structure, either self-imposed or not. At the end of the year, I realized the importance of planning, which is the main reason why I got my project done. Having a plan kept my motivation up and helped with my time management skills. It turns out I need plans.
For me, the hardest part of the project was staying motivated for a whole year with limited guidance. At first, it was easy because I was working on a topic that I was passionate about, but once we reached the part of the year where we started transitioning from loose research to thinking about final projects and general directions to go, I lost all motivation. At that point in the year, I didn’t know what I was doing and it was really hard for me to do any work in class. Because I wasn’t doing any work in class, I felt like I wasn’t accomplishing enough and it created a cycle of unproductivity. This was the hardest point in the year: the part where I was directionlessly drifting. However, by talking to my classmates and teacher mentor, I gained more purpose and direction. This helped me to move forward and create a final project I am proud of. This was one of the biggest ways that I challenged myself in this class. Reaching out felt really hard at that point and I am really proud of myself for doing it. Another major challenge for me was reaching out to people in the community. It’s not easy to reach out to people you have no information about beyond the fact that they have tattoos. That was really scary. And in the end, I don’t think I really overcame that fear. Initially, reaching out to people was exciting and eye opening, but as the year progressed and the people I was reaching out to became further removed from my own circle of contacts, it felt nearly impossible to reach out. In the future, I would like to be braver on this front and just suck it up and reach out. I guess I know that for next time.
My process for this project was far from linear. My initial idea had been very broad: a research project on all aspects of tattoos culminating in my getting a tattoo. It was meant to serve as my personal research before getting something permanently inked on my body. But it was too broad. So I shifted: tattoos and Judaism. But there’s not a lot of wiggle room there. And so I shifted again: tattoos and women. And that’s where I stayed for most of the year. There were twists and turns along the way, but tattoos and women remained fairly constant. My final project also went through several iterations before I settled on a creative work, which felt the most authentic to me. However, the creative work did erase some of the work I had done before. It was hard to directly incorporate all of my interviews into my project, but I think that they provided valuable background for my approach to the writing, even if they don’t explicitly appear. I think on a core level, the openness of my interviewees influenced my writing and pushed me to be as open as possible about my own experiences.