I have changed a great amount my first year at the University of Oklahoma. I believe my experiences these two semesters have shaped me into what I am now. This is not an easily definable change, but I believe it is a positive one. After this semester, I not only understand more about composition, but I understand things about life and my person that I never before imagined existed.

Augusto Boal, the creator of the Theatre of the Oppressed, said, “No-one can see me twice as I am, in each fleeting instant of my life, as all instants are fleeting… as is life. I will never be the same, each second that steals away from me. And similarly, those who see me now will never be the same as themselves in any two successive seconds of the trajectory of their paths through life.”

I never before understood life in this way. Every single experience, whether or not it stand out to us, we remember it, or it is a minute instance, shapes our person. This is an amazing idea, one that I will consider from this moment on. I am a different student than at the beginning of the semester. I have learned so much about writing in this short time. This is a result of my experiences in composition I and II. Thinking about my assignments, the planning I did, actually creating my work, listening to my instructor pass his wisdom onto me, and receiving feedback are among the things that made me who I am now as a writer. Without the exact way these experiences went, I would not be the exact writer that I am. I am truly thankful to understand this concept.

To miscroscope one way that I have changed because of my experiences, I will focus on my works of composition. At the beginning of my first semester, I was all about planning my work out to the smallest of detail. I had such a systematic approach to composition and English as a whole. Although this is not a bad appropoach to take on the subject, I learned that when I approach my work that way, I do not thrive. I may have felt good about my final grade, but I didn’t always get my whole point across. This is important to me because I view writing as an art. After all, it takes your whole self and all of your history and knowledge to create a paper just as it does to create another work of art. When I planned things out to a tee, I would fail to put my emotions into my work. I now understand that to create a paper (or even a blog) that I feel good about, it needs to have me in it. I still plan out my work, but in a different, not easily definable, way. This new way of doing things and this new view on life came as a result of my experiences in composition I and II.