Author: Joshua Mora

This is just a short story about a boy who failed to believe.

Throughout the semester I have failed as a writer; not in the words I wrote but in the words I failed to write, and in the work I have failed to criticize effectively. Writing as a practice is tricky, especially when criticized. But in order to improve in the discipline, or any discipline for the matter, criticism is necessary whether it be for yourself or others. However, criticism is merely criticism at best if one does not take it in effectively and practice that itself. With that I propose the thought that criticism as a practice is the most important discipline of all, especially when it involves criticizing oneself.

In several aspects of the course, I failed to pull through as a writer. I failed to manage my time and pace my blog posts. I failed to work on my writing and editing of my paper in a constructive manner. I failed to meet deadlines or complete assignments that I should have been able to. Most of all, I failed in the practice of taking criticism positively, while even failing to give criticism to others as well as I could have. After experiencing all this, it brought up the question we all ask ourselves at some point, “Why am I doing this?”.  It not only affected me in a way where I had to ask myself how to do better, but what is essential to truly improving and reaching success. What am I doing wrong? How could I do better? How could I use criticism I have received to get me to move forward? These are the questions that took me a whole lot longer than it should have to answer, all due to the way I ultimately criticized myself after each failure.

    Criticism comes to everyone in many way, and through different facets. We could be  criticized by our peers, our professors, or ourselves. But none of it really matters if we do not use what was said in the right way. During the semester, there have been several cases of constructive criticism being given. Regarding blog posts, I received feedback from Professor McCoy about how I could improve my posts. Both in terms of writing, and connecting it to another work that I may have drawn ideas from, I had more to work with so that I may take steps to create better blog posts. On top of this, peers have given me so much inspiration and help when we have talked and shared ideas in class. But despite these cases that could and should have helped me to further improve my work, I still managed to fail in such practices. I asked myself why, what was I missing? I figured it out, my mindset.

Having the right mindset is key to mastering any practice, especially regarding self criticism. My mindset has always been fixed, something I have addressed and talked about in a previous blog post. A fixed mindset that simply does not take failure as a something to learn from. A growth mindset, however, is something to strive for. But when it comes to mindset, it’s less important to think about how to get there, it’s the ability to believe that it will happen. With that belief, will come the will to take action and move forward to actually practice and improve on the discipline. If you don’t believe you can improve, then you will hinder yourself from doing so. You will stop, and shut down, all due to believing that you can’t improve after failure. You will do just as I did. Failing, and then not take a single step to get better.

So if there is anything I want anyone to take away from this last, incomplete work of mine it is this: believe in yourself more. Believe in your ability to improve, and the rest will fall into place. If one has that solid foundation, that core belief, then the concrete steps you can and will take to improving a practice or discipline will come naturally. The ability to take criticism in and actually apply it will slowly become easier. It is easier to say than do, but it starts with oneself.  I failed to believe in myself after each failure, and it only made it worse. That’s why I will start to by ending this semester’s writing with this sentence. I will improve and do better next time.

 

Over break, as I’ve reunited with lots of old friends and familiar faces, there’s been a trend as far as how we all see thanksgiving break. It’s not a break, it’s five days to try and catch up with everything back in college in terms of work. That’s exactly what’s happened since I’ve been back home. But even in doing work, it feels costive, constipated. It’s making time here at home feel slow moving, but then it will be over before I know, and the progress I’ve made in the work I have to get done may be costive as well.

    Now when people think of constipated, they probably think of how hard it is to go number two in the bathroom. But what I think of now is the word “costive”, and how Everett has used it in both Frenzy and his poem Zulus. In Frenzy, Dionysus uses the word to describe his father, while in Zulus it is used to describe the evolution. “C is for costive, because that is what evolution is”, which in my eyes is true in every sense. Whether it is scientific or in regards to humanity itself, evolution or real change does not happen over night. It is slow, constipated. It is costive.

    Ever since the beginning of the semester, I’ve felt this word has applied to my work. Everything I’ve tried to do has felt costive, and a lot of that simply has to do with how I have managed my time. But perhaps ever so often, everyone experiences this. Maybe it is true in saying that evolution, that growth, is costive. Things move slow, and life feels costive, which is okay so long as you learn from it. Learn to make everything stop being so costive, and just start doing, just as I have been trying to learn.

Logic must be, even if it is not there.

Ironically, my class after English 203 is always my logic class, so the discussions that followed from Percival Everett’s Logic made me think of how I’ve learned to think of certain things due to the class. For example, a basic syllogism would be “Some dogs have tails, all dogs are mammals, therefore some mammals have tails.” I have always thought of logic as a basis of thought, that was not always applicable to everything in this world. “Constituent parts compose this reality-molecules, atoms, simple X”. I have always believed that the world we know, as well as what we do not know that simply exists, builds our reality. But it is what we do not know, and may never know, that interests me.

The letter “X”. From math to logic, it is one of the most popular letter for an undefined variable, an unknown. This particular part of the poem made me think of the fact that some things that exists, are not applicable to logic or vice versa. There is the X, that exists in everything and anything logic tries to prove or disprove. When one really thinks about it, logic is illogical. It leaves us with more and more questions, continuously delving into an “X” that leads to more unknowns and at some point, there is nothing left we can logically do. There is just “X”.

Some may find this endless cycle of logic to be interesting, but it came up in conversation in our group that Everett might actually mocking the continuous need to apply logic to everything. “Does my memory of you consists in parts? Simple component parts?”. Reading this, questioning it myself, I wonder if we should apply the thought of logic to human beings. We are complex, consisting of parts perhaps we ourselves can never fully know or understand. And do we really need to? Must we be able to break a person’s individual complexity down to an array of simple parts, or can we not not accept them. Is there a reason to logically delve into a person so deeply, and if so, will we not just arrive at “X”? The emotions about us we cannot explain, such as happiness or pain. The things about us that simply are.

Therefore, I end with this thought on logic as a whole. We learn how to logically assess certain aspects of what exists in this world, meaning logic is and always will be, even if it is not necessary or applicable to everything. Even if it will only lead to “X”, and that is okay. Because it is these variables, these unknowns, these endless string of questions with new ideas and “X’s” that arise that drive us forward to learn.

 

    We all have expectations, but perhaps the most important ones are what we expect from ourselves. In one of our classes, the idea of expectations was brought up. In my group, we not only talked about our previous expectations on a film we had watched, but new expectations as we began reading Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier. It occurred to me we all had expectations, even if they were different, were there nonetheless. Although I did have an idea of what I might expect from the text, what I had not expected is what actually ended up that actually allowed me to enjoy reading it more.

    When I started to read, I expected it to start a certain way, to go a certain direction, and to tell more as to why this man has such a comical name. All my expectations failed to be met as the text was nothing like I imagined it would read. It has been quite a long time since I last read for a class, and actually laughed to myself out loud as I read the text. It lacked the serious tone I was expecting at some point, even when talking about serious events that happened like the death of Not Sidney’s mother. Everything either felt comical or natural, and even if it did not meet my original expectations for the story, I certainly was not disappointed. However, failing to meet certain expectations does not always go so well.  

    As I thought more about the idea of expectations, and how we all have it, I started to think about my expectations for myself rather than the ones I had for the outside world. How time has flown, being already halfway through the semester as a college freshman, and I wondered if I had met my expectations for myself when I first came here. Just like with reading about Not Sidney, my expectations were not met. Time and time again, I have expected myself to do something instead of actually doing it. When expectations, especially of themselves are not met, people tend to beat themselves up over it. I know I’m guilty of doing that just about every time. But at the same time, it’s important to think about the expectations you did meet. Even if none of them were met, that also just means there is something to improve and that’s only natural. Contemplating further, I realized the same concept applies to when I fail to meet my expectations of myself in class, whether it is with papers or studying for tests. We’re all human, and it’s okay to mess up so long as you learn something from it. We all have expectations of our own writing, but the only way to make sure it gets better to meet your expectations, is by writing again even when you fail to meet an expectation.