A Work in Progress

"The only journey is the one within"-Rainer Maria Rilke

In the past, when someone said to me the word “Journey”, quite frankly, I thought that it was the band. I mean, who wouldn’t, right? That band is amazing. But that isn’t the case since it has a lot of deeper meanings. In this class, “Journey” was the principle theme since it relates to everything that’s happening around. The first assignment that I had, was to write an essay about the definitions of journey and I wrote two. The first one, I basically wrote “a journey is when you travel from one place to another”. For example, Kiara is going to a journey in Spain. Quite like that. The second definition, to me, is the one where “you find yourself’. This one is my favorite. We see it all the time, where you basically swim to unknown to know a little bit about yourself. The reason why this is my favorite is because I did this for this class. I was so afraid to take English literature seeing that I don’t dominate the language very good. Well, I am good is just that I get so nervous talking in public that I sound like Sofia Vergara (no offense to her, of course). This exact thing is what I said to my friends when I was talking about my collage the journal project: “When I’m alone, I talk like Morgan Freeman; when I’m with other people, I talk like Sofia Vergara”. It is so weird how we can dominate a language so good but since is not our first, when we’re in front of others, we mixed our two languages (in my case, Spanish and English) and just speak gibberish. Or maybe that’s just me.

Quite literally, I went through an internal journey in this class. I was always so afraid to take an English class in the university so I always took the classes where “Spanish” was the first language. But I knew that it was important for my knowledge to take this class. Plus, I wanted to prove to myself that no matter the fear that you have of something, you can always overcome it. I learned so many things about myself that I didn’t knew before. Like how I can just feel so much better when I’m writing all of my worries in a journal or how my mood has improved because of that. Not just that. But in this internal journal that I experience, I discovered that when you’re a tourist, you tend to ignore all the problems that are happening in the place that you’re visiting. How “home” is different to everyone depending on their life experience. It can be a place, a person, thing or even a smell. How amazing is that? That our ideas, thoughts, our tastes in music, films, clothes shaped the identity represent us. I loved hearing all of the essays of the students in this class about how many of them traveled all over but they they still considered themselves puertorrican. The ones that will always be in my mind are from Angela and Isabel. I was so touched by the vulnerability in them and I hope to one-day write as good as them. The friends that I gained from this class are so amazing that I hope to keep in touch with them forever. In conclusion, this class has helped me so much in gaining some of the confidence that I thought that it was lost forever and becoming a better version of myself. But as I always say, I’m still a work in progress and I know that this wont be the only internal journey that I will experience seeing as life consists of just that.