The Author's Note

Dear Reader,

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Thank you so much for taking the time to read my piece. My Writing 420 Capstone Project is a long-form braided essay of thoughts, feelings, and personal developments, encapsulating my life for the first three months without my father. I would have never imagined my senior year Writing Minor Capstone Project being about this topic, and deciding to pursue my vision was difficult. Nonetheless, I am overwhelmingly proud to have a collection of my raw emotions as I navigate my grieving process. I am so grateful to have my Writing Capstone Project to reflect on for the rest of my life.

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The writing process was constantly changing, and my levels of comfortability varied greatly from beginning to end. At first, I wanted my project to be a research-heavy piece focused on educating the reader about the complexities of grief. As time went on and I started reading more books, articles, and frameworks, I found it very difficult to disconnect myself from the research behind grief and my personal processes of grief. I was hit in the face with the fact that I was living through my grieving process. I was actively living through the Dual Process Model of Grief, actively asking myself, 'Why am I crying so much?' and actively feeling a sense of dread as I found my new normal. I knew I wanted to use this space to reflect on my very fresh wounds, and over time, I found solitude in adding more and more personal anecdotes to my essays.

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As my grieving process was in hyperfocus while writing, I was continuously going through a wide array of emotions, moments of grief, and flashing memories of my father. Sometimes I would internalize them; in other instances, I would find the courage to write in my journal. Looking back, I believe journaling was one of my most powerful strategies for externalizing my grief while processing my own emotions; however, journaling and writing this piece was one of the most challenging actions because it forced me to sit in my sadness. Whether sitting at home in my room, in the basement of the Ross School of Business, or on the second floor of the Undergraduate Library, I would always cry when I was writing in my journal or drafting my project.

 

I strived to journal every day for the first three months of my grieving process. I debated how I wanted to incorporate my journal into the project, but I settled on using writing in a non-conventional way by making visual art. The writing in my journal is very personal to me and bears some of my most heart-wrenching feelings. My thoughts were a mess, my tears strained various pages, and my scribbles etched out portions too difficult for me to read. I wanted to use my website to display the disordered chaos beheld within my journals while retaining a sense of privacy as I sort through the clutter, which came to fruition in the form of a collage. The different collages provide a distorted reality of my journalling process and figuratively represent my scrambled brain and thinking process as I learn to navigate life without my father. You can see the different arrangements of my clutter gracing assorted pages throughout the website.

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Thank you again for visiting my website and viewing my piece. I am so appreciative to have the platform to document my visceral responses three months into my grieving process. 

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