I am really excited for this project. I thought I wanted to pursue oral history/memoir re: my parents, but then I saw the actual prompts and couldn’t make it fit. I do still want to do that project, but this isn’t the space. I toyed with a more typical memoir, tied to literary research around memoirs for a YA audience, because I used to say that my journals read like a YA novel, and I stand by that as far as some of my teenage years. Or I guess mental-illness memoirs could be another area, or the construction of mental illness and its categories/symptoms and treatment over time. I used to think about constructing a history of the hospital I went to, when I was there. I feel like I’m at the bottom of the fig tree. What I came to, though, from the final prompt of “historical representation fieldwork,” is monuments. I think they’re very fertile territory for creative, critical & research projects. Also they provide a way to expand/extend my final paper into an ILC/study abroad in France. Or a longer term project of researching, photographing, interviewing, traveling. I still want to incorporate an oral/communal history element. Interviews will be hard, even harder en Français, mais je pense qu’ils sont importants et necessaire…

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I feel like I’ve gotten sort of sucked onto this path of examining history-making through a creative/critical lens. I would say serendipity, but I’m not sure I’m happy about it. Am I latching onto the monuments idea because it “makes sense” after last quarter and into next quarter, rather than because I want to? When I finally have the opportunity to work on a memoir, a project I’ve always talked about, in a structured environment, which is the only way I ever get anything done? Is this the wrong thing? What am I supposed to do? What about France? Do I really want this? What do I want? It’s my education, my work. Make the work you’re engaged with, right? Fig tree.

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I’ve been thinking more about my monuments idea and realized there’s a big problem: to fully realize it/realize it in its ideal form, I’d have to interview strangers, and that runs so counter to my personality & anxiety. I don’t know if this is the context in which I’d call my anxiety disorder a disability; I think a lot of people would feel unable to take on that task. I don’t know. Maybe if I try really hard to channel my friend Ellen [who is a reporter for her college TV station and interviews people on the street all the time], I could do it.

But maybe it’s better to work on the memoir, which I think I really want. What if I still want to go to France? I don’t know.

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I want to do the memoir. The idea of engaging with something for basically nine more weeks looks pale and sad when it’s monuments. That idea did flow really well from the work I did last quarter, but so what? When else am I going to start a project I’ve been talking about forever? Now the question is what I want my research component to be. I mentioned young adult literature and mental illness memoirs, but both of those are pretty big categories. If I go down the YA lit path, it would be interesting to consider how reading so many of those novels affected how I thought about and recorded (in my journals and in my memory) the events of my life at that time (ages 13-17 basically, but a few specific moments primarily). Rather than working with or against patterns of literature in my own memoir, exactly, the critical component would be more metacognitive analysis of my memory and how it’s constructed around this scaffold of the literary forms I was so engaged with at the time. If I go down the mental-illness-memoir path, I’m not sure what exactly I’d want to do. Maybe trying to set my work up against patterns I see? Or I could do historical tracking of how my illness & its treatments came to be, epistemologically. Like, the antecedents to my experience, or how a person with my symptoms/qualities would have been characterized in different time periods. I’m not sure how exactly that would work with the memoir, but I know it would color the telling of the tale, and could possibly be integrated with it, rather than producing two separate but complementary pieces of writing. I’m also considering the sub-subgenre of “YA mental illness memoir” but I don’t really know what I would do there. Also, my illness/recovery time frame begins in the YA age range, but climaxes and ends well out of it, so I don’t know how relevant it would be to combine those paths. I’ve climbed out onto a branch but I’m still in the fig tree. I have a little time to figure it out, though.