Book of Poems and Photos Depicting Struggles of Self-Esteem

After quite a long time deciding what I wanted to further explore in my Personal Project, I decided to choose self-esteem, poems, and photography. My learning goal as a whole is “I will learn about how self- esteem is shaped from childhood to adulthood along with how to grow your own self-esteem and how to properly write & design a book of poems”. My learning goal is divided into 3 parts: writing poems, photography, and learning about self-esteem.

The main reason I chose self-esteem as the topic for my booklet is because of my personal experience. In the past, I was someone who had extremely high self-esteem. To this day, I remember the time when I was able to perform on stage in front of so many people even though I wasn’t part of the list of performers. I was also able to communicate with all kinds of people, even going so far as to asking for food from a stranger. Technically, this was when I was very young and thankfully, my mom arrived before I could consume anything. However, as I gradually grew up, I somewhat developed low self-esteem. I grew more conscious of how I presented myself, and I would doubt so many thing that I claimed I was good at. I thought everyone faced what I did so I left it behind. However, recently, from the frequent talks with my friends and family, I realized that not many people have the tendency to lower their worth when looking at people who they think are above them. This is where my PP stepped in. I wanted a space where I get to lose myself and expose my inner deepest feelings. As a person who is quite outgoing, it may seem like I share a lot of myself with others but in truth, I still have secrets of my own that I’m not confident in sharing directly with them. Hence why, through this booklet, I get to share those secrets in a way that I feel comfortable. I think that the project would be an ‘opening up’ to those around me because I don’t want them to misinterpret the things I do.

Product Goal

Using the different factors I chose as my learning goal, I would create a series of poems with photos portraying the theme of self-esteem. My goal is to be able to create 15 poems with 15 corresponding photos. As for the topic, after panicking and thinking of what I should do for a good month, I remembered something that happened when I was still in 7^th grade. At that time, my mom enrolled me in an editing class so that I could also learn while my sister was preparing for her personal project. We were supposed to choose a topic and at a spur of the moment, I said self-esteem. Turns out it was a topic I could relate to and hence why I decided to choose self-esteem for this year’s personal project. This topic also allows me to express more of my thoughts and emotions that I barely show or express to others. Although I wanted to write a story at first, I thought about it more and chose to do poems because I think I would better enjoy writing poems instead of stories. I also don’t yet have confidence in my story-writing skills, which played a huge role in that decision.

Reflection

As a whole, my personal project centres on me learning more about self-esteem as well as putting this knowledge or experiences into a book of poems and photos. Since the book of poems are centred on my own personal experiences in dealing with self-esteem, it may seem that this project didn’t necessarily create a big impact on me. However, this statement is completely false as I think that I learned the most about myself during these past few months of doing the project.

What I think is the most prominent impact that the learning goal had on me was that I got to explore more of myself through self-esteem. While conducting research and an interview of the topic, I was able to learn more of the importance of self-esteem in an individual. If I may be blunt, I had chosen to ignore my own self-esteem problems in the past 3-4 years, but after learning more on the impacts in adulthood, it made me rethink more on my actions. At that moment on, I knew that I had to fix my own self-esteem before entering the scary stage called adulthood. It truly gave me a bit of confidence in reaching out to other people, albeit considering it as an abstract idea that should happen in... a few more months or years. However, I truly feel that this is a new development in my whole 15 years of living because I had always been too scared to burden other people with my own thoughts or feelings.

To be quite honest, most of the impact that I feel was from when I started working on the product rather than from the learning goal. There were a lot of times where I felt like I was lagging behind because of the mere exhaustion of the months of summatives and formatives that appeared when I actually had to work on my personal project. This caused me to write the poems a bit later than I expected and I was honestly really disappointed at myself. However, those weeks weren’t exactly wasted as there was this understanding within myself that I couldn’t write good poems if it doesn’t come to me or I haven’t gotten the ‘spark’. With this, my project truly taught me to be more patient with myself and that no matter how good the planning was, writing a poem is truly an art that is done best when you let go, and let your emotions drive you forward. I found this to be extremely true because the day after I finished all poems, I was in a state of confusion because I didn’t recall writing the poems nor what I wrote inside them.

Another reason why I created this project for myself is opening the gates to the being known as “Anya”. I mentioned this quite a lot already, but I’m really reserved when it comes to my emotions. I admit that many people have seen me cry, but they had never seen me truly vulnerable. While writing the poems, I had to channel all those feelings inside me and I just felt a weight had lifted from my own chest. I cried, a lot, At the beginning, I regretted doing this because I thought I still wasn’t ready. I had always been waiting for a sign, and I thought it was this personal project, but I constantly doubted this idea. However, it was too late and I couldn’t really change my project so I had to deal with it. At the end, I couldn’t be more grateful for this project for all that it has done to me. It feels as though I’m floating right now because I felt scared on how people would react to my hidden feelings, but I learned to let go.

The last impact that will conclude this section is more on my realizations, specifically on which field I would take on University. As mentioned before, I quite regret choosing poems at the start because of the demands given by the personal project made me lose interest in poem-writing. Nevertheless, as I was writing the poems, a certain amount of joy flooded my heart and that’s when I knew that I truly enjoy poem writing. Although most of the poems don’t follow normal poem conventions, I was still quite happy with the results and I truly don’t regret choosing poem-writing as part of my final product. This helped me reached an epiphany – a pretty late one at that – because I realized that from a different perspective, the personal project is like the EE or Extended Essay given at DP. It’s somewhat a project which will help you know if you truly have interest in a certain subject or topic. Although I know that I won’t take Literature as a major for my University, I came to a certain understanding that I do love poem writing and it could serve as either extra income for my in University or something that could help me relieve stress in the future.

Product Evaluation

I think that overall, this project was a success because most of the success criteria were met. However, this wasn’t to the highest standard possible because of how much the photos were lacking compared to the poems. I felt that my success criteria were moderately balanced between easy and difficult. This is because it’s difficult in itself for a reader to understand the meaning while digesting the poem. I felt that most of the project was in my control except for the time where I had to write poems. This is mostly because I wanted it to feel more unfiltered and personal to myself. Looking away from all these facts, I think that I did the best I could in my own standards. Writing 15 poems in a month made me quite proud of what I had accomplished. Other than that, this book is mines. It’s personal to me so I don’t really care what others think – practicing self-love! In my eyes, I did pretty well for a person who struggled for weeks in writing the poems. Going back, I think that I could’ve done better in managing my time between doing both poems and photos because I felt that I took more time in the poems which led me to having only a few days to work on all the photos. If I were able to go back in time, I’ll probably force myself to set a tighter schedule so that I could divide the time between poem making and taking photos evenly. At the end of the day, I wouldn’t really change a thing because I was able to meet my goal and I am happy at how my product turned out. I forgot to mention this but for the survey, I didn’t really give any teacher the survey because I didn’t quite had the confidence to do so before it was too late. I think that this fact could greatly affect the answers to the survey so I had to add in a bit of my personal views – laced with my somewhat low self-esteem – as well.