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As I wade through the world of corporate and take a step back from purely academic prose, the distinction between writing for an undergraduate class and writing for personal pleasure has taken on an entirely new meaning. 

Academic writing is simple – you have a clear topic or some kind of guideline. You have a plethora of prior knowledge waiting to be accessed and utilized, and an opinion that is inspired and constricted by the work you choose to internalize. To a certain extent, the constraints allow you to think of topics you would not normally have considered. But at the same time, constraints require you to function in a pre-existing framework, a framework that has remained stagnant for hundreds of years. And as such, you get trapped in an infinite cycle of regurgitating the same blind interpretations till extinction. 

Personal writing, however, is a genre of its own. Now here you are, required to sculpt your own thoughts and conclusions based on the visualizations and experiences of your day to day. Be it professional life, human interactions, nature, whatever you will. This brings freedom – the freedom to write from personal will and thought rather than from the perspective of a white man living in Italy in the 1200s. But it also brings complications – complications that stem from writing something from within yourself. Something emotional and empathetic to make the world a little less callous. To write personal is to reflect and criticize everything stable, to tear apart the foundations of relationships and see if the base remains unchanged. Not a task for the unaware, the uncritical, and the ill-informed. 

Within my own personal writing, there are certain topics that I have historically tended to gravitate towards. Mostly I like to describe images – images that work to express a small facet of the lives directly concurrent to mine. Close enough to view and draw flawed conclusions from, but far enough to never entirely comprehend. The interpretative framework here is none other than my own, and I try not to assume a false sense of understanding to that which I am an observer of. 

I always think of these global images as visual art in a museum – their value lying in the intent of their creation but also in the interpretation of the viewer. While stagnant in one space, they are contextually malleable and as such, draw two contrasting parties together in a moment of unison and appreciation. To appreciate both a global image and art is to accept that both are being interpreted through a very specific and very personal framework. But access to this interpretation would not exist if it weren’t for the images that elicit this branch of thought. And because of this, personal writing is academic in nature. What distinguishes it is an emotional element that makes it all the more relatable, and all the more binding. 

In this blog, I plan to dive into the images that help me define and redefine what I know. I hope to make the world more relatable, to introduce an almost artistic representation of the lives I’ve had the privilege to see over the years. And through this, I want to continue to bind people closer together in the commonality of human imagery.