Work in Progress

It's been a while since I posted on this website due to what seems to be five billion reasons. The need for perfection is the largest, and it lead to several unfinished drafts of journals and an SDA that I despised, and thus was too ashamed to post. Everything seemed wrong. I read the "Tell Me How It Ends: Essay in Forty Questions" by Valeria Luiselli, and I loved it. It was incredibly well-written, poignant, and said exactly what needed to be said; her experience was exactly what I hoped at the beginning of the year that I could have. She told the stories of children who didn't have voices, and she told of ways she took action, ways her students took action and made a difference and a true change.

But when it came time for me to write about the book and do my SDA, I felt that no matter what I did, it seemed like I wasn't doing her work justice. Like my assignment made a mockery of her book and her point and any journal I wrote felt incomplete and "hollow", if that's the best way to describe it. So I would try again and again with different ideas, and every. one. of. them. would. fail. In Boy Scouts, everyone has to undergo a teamwork course, and in that course, the guide says that every team goes through four steps: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing. You can forwards and backwards along this, but you will always be at one of the steps. Now, as everyone who is reading this is probably aware, I am not a "team", but I believe that these steps can be applied to any project. You have the beginning of the project where you have all of these fresh ideas, and everything just flows. You feel ridiculously productive because you want to say so much, learn so much. Then you face difficulties when you discover that your ideas don't work, that you idealized a situation, or that you were on the wrong track; you become disheartened and deeply entrenched in the Storm. The only way out of this is to pull yourself up and tell yourself what you do have and form a plan. If that plan fails, you get yanked back into the Storm, but if it succeeds, then you finally Perform.

This is a class. And as my beloved adviser told me, they aren't looking for perfection. They are looking for progress. So, accompanying this journal will be a slew of journals that I started writing months ago. They will lack a certain amount of flow that was present in my earlier journals, but it'll be okay. Cause this is a work in progress

Questions:

What will be my plan for the future?

Is it still possible to volunteer, now that sports are over?

How can I learn to post something that I find incomplete/lacking?