The Last Blog

It's hard to believe that the end of the school year is already here; this post may well be the "last" on this blog about memory. Of course, I wonder if I may continue to write later on if I happen to find blog-worthy topics that might benefit from a "memory" point-of-view analysis. However, for now, I want to look back into the past and see what I have done with this website. 

You may all assume that I chose memory as my lens because I had a particular interest in neuroscience or psychology. However, the complete opposite is true. Before this year, I never believed that I wanted to study a subject related to those two disciplines, so that's why I decided to try out the topic of memory. While I dreaded not being able to find enough substantive topics to blog about throughout the year, I eventually found that a perspective of memory can essentially be superimposed onto any normal-day aspect of my life, such as photographs on Facebook or history-oriented discussions in English. 

In retrospect, I believe that I did a lot of horizontal exploration in my blog rather than vertical. What I mean by that is that I dabbled in a whole bunch of topics, but I never really earned the satisfaction of deeply analyzing the nuances that memory imbues when it's associated with a seemingly unrelated concept. The first couple posts that I wrote had to do with current events, such as the Rabaa al-Adawiya Square massacre in Egypt as well as the tendency for in-court testimonials to alter in truth due to stress and other factors that are often unaccounted for. I even played around with the association between stereotypes and cultural memories. The category that I was frequently marked off on was analysis. I want to make the excuse that I had very little time to analyze the relationship between, let's say, memory and ecocriticism; however, the honest truth is that I never really tried and I regret not having done so. 

But, I don't want to get too sentimental. One important thing that I've learned from blogging this year is the connection between social constructs, such as race and class, and cultural attitudes towards them. In my more recent posts, I researched for more blog ideas on Lens, the New York Times photojournalism blog, and I found many articles on photographs relating to race. For example, I wrote a post on how distorted images of famous African American singers, such as Ella Fitzgerald and Mahalia Jackson, represented that today's generation no longer really remembered them as a mere result of their race and gender. 

Overall, I had a wonderful experience just from frequently contributing to my own blog about memory as a perspective. I learned more about the simple things that are around me and how they can be critically analyzed with simple changes in thought. I want to end this blog by talking about what I stand for. Because I will soon graduate from high school, I am constantly thinking about what kind of legacy I will leave behind. Obviously, I hope that the life I've led at school can be a paradigm; however, that's very unlikely. But one of the ways that I want to say my good-byes is to really state who I am. I never had any strong beliefs in high school, and that's why not many people associated me with certain buzzwords. My inspiration for this comes from an activity that we've recently been doing in Stand for Peace, a student organization at my high school that tries to raise awareness about human rights violations that are taking place around the world, such as sex trafficking in Southeast Asia. This activity is the Power of One, in which we write on a white board what we stand for and hope to accomplish personally. So, I'll end this by saying that I want to become a person of conviction. I want the people around me to identify me as a person who's willing to listen to other perspectives. I stand for the people who are rarely given the chance to express their voices. 

#PowerOfOne