In the creation of this final project, it might be useful to look at the trials that led to the creation of this site. The original piece – the catalyst of it all – was a very terrible poem I write my senior year of high school. It was an awful attempt at nostalgia and expressing emotion growth, but it certainly reminded me of the intense emotional sensitivity of my childhood years. As a kid, I wore my heart on my sleeve as if I did not know anywhere else I could put it. As time wore on, of course I learned how to conceal the waterworks and reel in the public displays of emotion. This process led me to have a unique outlook on emotion, especially public displays of emotion. I chose to write about this piece for two main reasons, the first being that I wanted to have more honest conversations about emotions with my friends and figured that a class assignment was the perfect way to open that gate, and the second being my knowledge that the more you talk about something that is (technically/kind of) taboo, the more you open it up to mutual understanding and honesty.

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My first experiment was an analytical research paper on socially acceptable emotions in public spaces. It was interesting, set in a familiar format, and allowed me to see the nature of the research already conducted on this topic. This experiment also allowed me to look into a wide array of fields and how those fields viewed and defined “emotions.” This opened up a new idea: emotions vary – both in how they manifest and how they are perceived – across cultures.

In that experiment, I was very focused on the research and the creation of content, less so on the form of the essay. However, I found what aspect of this research that I was really interested in: how societal and cultural acceptance of certain emotions in public spheres has changed throughout history. To find this information, I used library resources to find academic journals about certain keywords. For example, to find examples of anger in ancient Egypt, I used the words “red” and “divine” because the two go hand-in-hand to represent divine wrath.

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In my second experiment, I outlined a personal narrative. Initially, I did not want to go down this avenue at all with my topic, because it seemed too obvious and overdone. Pushing forward, I decided to do it because I figured that I needed to establish or baseline my own thoughts and feelings on the topic in order to orient how I wanted to write about it, holistically. Reflecting back on it now, I am glad that I took the time to consider where my own feelings on the topic came from, and that trickled down into my thoughts in “The Conscience” piece in my final project. Ultimately, I realized that I would not want to pursue this experiment to completion because my own thoughts were not the focus of what I was trying to push on the readers; it was only a piece in the puzzle. If readers could see that a littler personal reflection was relatively painless and led to small realizations that they could notice in the future, that portion would have accomplished its job. As I mentioned, the point of the entire project is give readers a model for their own reflection on emotional expression and they ways in which it occurs. This section was necessary for me as a writer in the scope of this project because it helped me hone in on my own reasoning for my argument.

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Finally, my third experiment was a blog. The reason for creating a blog centers around the answers that came from the second experiment: discussing emotions means looking at stories of emotional expression. The plan was to curate short, personal narratives submitted to the blog and point out to general readers the certain themes that all of the stories follow. In my head, those themes would be hesitation to share negative emotions and feelings of being overwhelmed with emotions. I tried to bring this element into the final project with both the interviews and the examples of the histories and timelines, which I think tied in nicely with the theme.

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I decided to take a bit of a different take on experiment three and expand the idea of personal narratives. The main goal of the project, I had come to realize through the experiments, was creating a model for readers to have to carry their own conversations about emotional expression in their lives and with the people who they are comfortable (and maybe not-so-comfortable) discussing it with. Overall, I think the project turned out fairly well in an informal sense: it is conversational and I tried to make it as welcoming a space I could. I did have issues tying the design of the site in with the material, as I am clueless when it comes to colors schemes, design, and anything that is aesthetically pleasing. Though this the creation of mine I am proudest of, I can accurately call this project a learning experience and just that – an experiment.

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Now that this project is coming to an end, I can finally stop thinking so critically about my own reactions to everything. And, yes, that sounds bad, and yes, people need to be aware of the space they take up and how their words and actions impact their surroundings, but writing and researching so extensively about emotions was a bit draining. There were certainly fun and interesting points, though. Reading accounts of a female poet from hundreds of years ago and being able to nod along in agreement about the anger she felt towards patriarchal systems of oppression is amazing. Writing about four emotions that are so acutely felt and real in modern time was eye-opening in a way I did not originally suspect it would be. We have a tendency to see the past in this removed world that bears little resemblance to the one we inhabit today, but that is truly not the case. It was humanizing and humbling to look through history, even in such a brief way, to see how the most core parts of people have shaped the world we live in today. That all being said, emotions are intuitive, and I would argue that we are not used to thinking about them in such a critical way as this project required. I am happy with the answers and thoughts that this project has produced, and I am also ready to walk out into the great, wide world and try to work toward the idyllic society this project hopes for in my own small ways, as I hope its readers will do, as well.

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And now, for the big shebang: my writing. As I wrote my experiments, my thoughts mostly revolved around the style of my writing, the vocabulary, and other relatively topical (though important) elements. The further I got into my final project, though, the more I became focused on the way that I presented the content, and whether the way I wrote would be appealing and convincing to my readers. Also, because my writing in this project came from research, I had to be aware of presenting that information in an unbiased and forthright manner. Although I had experience with this in the past, as a college student who does historical research, writing specifically about emotions in such a clinical manner was a proved less of a challenging task than I had originally thought.

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Perhaps that is because, whenever I had written about emotions in the past, it had always been very personal, like in a journal. However, when you are writing for publication, your perspective shifts and what you write is unconsciously censored. I tried to avoid this in the personal writing I did (“The Conscience”), but I still had that nervous worry about how readers would see my work in the back of my head constantly. This is a fairly universal experience for writers who write with the intention of publication, I am sure, but it was the first time I had experienced it. All other formal work I have done was meant for a teacher or professor to read, or at worst, a workshop of two of my peers. The thought that someone might Google my name and this could pop up was usually a thought (read: fear) that crossed my mind throughout the site’s creation.

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As for my future writing, the creation of a website and the exploration of how to create those sites have led to me to begin the construction of a personal portfolio. Towards the end of this project, when I was working on the finishing touches, I reserved my name as a domain in WordPress and have slowly started applying little tricks I learned in the creation of this Wix site. I had been planning on doing that for a little less than a year, so I certainly now feel equipped to actually begin developing that personal portfolio because of my experience in website-creation and after learning about the importance of having that information and those samples available to employers.