Week 4: Heavy Mental Lifting

This week’s assignment towards our creative essays was the annotated bibliography. I remember skipping this assignment in my first quarter (last Fall) because I still hadn’t picked a topic yet. LOL. This time I actually turned in the assignment. I finished it Tuesday night at like 10PM and felt good about it. I thought I picked pretty good sources and was able to synthesize the ideas and relate them to my paper. I just hadn’t completely read them all word for word so maybe I’m better at skimming than I thought.

Anyways, my essay has taken an extra layer than the last time I wrote about it. I’m still sticking with my connection topic and the words that come up with it for me were: self-awareness, counseling, centered self, emotional, honest and trusting. Then I will go and write about the disconnection (and longing, I suppose) where specifically I will write about my ethnicity and that will break off into two sections. One, with my family dynamic, our relationship to each other and our cultural connection. Two, as identifying as a Pilipina, incorporating representations, stereotypes and other thing. My sources have been about mental health, immigrant parent and US-born children connections and female representations in media. One thing was for sure: Pilipinx Americans (is that even an accurate label? I know that lately using the term “American” has come under criticism because when we use that word we’re commonly talking about the United States and not South and Central America… and Canada. So like IDK) are a vastly underrepresented group in psychological literature. I’m just glad I found something specifically about us, even if the number of articles were sparse.

I’ve found that when people ask me what my topic is, I can’t just give a one word answer. Other people have easier ways to answer this question without explanation of their topics. This probably is just me, I always feel the need to explain myself. I can’t say my topic is connection or feeling connected. I got to go into the whole story, talk about all the things I wrote about in this blog lol. I could just say ready my blog hahaha but then again I don’t often get asked this question. The topic has become pretty entwined with the other parts of my paper that it wouldn’t do it justice if I just said an easy answer

“Heavy Mental Lifting” is something a previous History instructor would say. They would be like “it’s time to do some heavy mental lifting” trying to engage our brains into thinking deeply about the topic. And I’ve taken that and related it to writing in my journal and also writing papers. Writing is my thing to do, I have a journal that I do my best to write in regularly. Writing papers has always been a struggle, it takes me a long time to get my thoughts down on paper (something I also wrote about a bit on here) and this draft will take a lot out of me. So we’re just going to see where it goes, I hope that I don’t end up crying too much.