senior year honors research project
The initial goal with my year-long honors project was to read a selection of novels and research that accurately depicted mental health. I wanted to look at the depictions in these works and see the ways they were implemented in the classroom—specifically, how people could use literature to connect to someone living with mental health or to connect with themselves. In doing this, my end goal was to create a piece of fiction accurately portraying a character with depression and/or anxiety that could reach these audiences—idealistically bridging the gap between one’s understanding of sympathy vs. empathy. This project was much more difficult than originally speculated but turned out better than I’d originally imagined.
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At the start of this project I chose to read three distinct works: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, The Hours by Michael Cunningham, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Steven Chbosky. From Plath, I wanted to take and mold the metaphor of “the bell jar” serving as depression and find a similar metaphor readers could relate to. From the latter two works, I wanted to gain a better sense of understanding true mental illness. Another one of my goals for this project was to find a place of empathy within myself, because even though I do not live with mental illness, I have close friends and family who do. This project was a project for me as much as it was for others.
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After reading the novels and making those distinctions for my later work, I researched how they are used to help people better understand the complexities of anxiety and depression. In my research, I looked at the ways in which therapists, teachers, and loved ones used literature to learn and understand the perspective of suffering. The final bit of research I did, and probably the most interesting, looked at how people currently living with mental illness viewed these works as a beacon of hope. They saw characters like themselves and knew they were not isolated in their suffering. In the entirety of my research I was able to find unique voices that encouraged the use of literature as a bridge for understanding.
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From this research, I wanted to create my own narrative that not necessarily mimicked, but was influenced by the works and scholars I read. Initially, my goal was to create a main character whose best friend suffered from mental illness. I wanted to take that main character from a place of sympathy to an understanding of empathy in her relationship with her friend. In the first draft I wrote, I believed I could demonstrate this transition—while taking what I learned—over the course of one scene. Thankful for the project advisors working with me on this project, I realized that this was near impossible. My character lacked dimension. She needed to come from a place of pure rage and disappointment in order to make the complete 180D turn toward empathy and patience. To demonstrate this transition and at the suggestion of my project advisors, I wrote a series of episodes that detailed the initial conflict and the following conflict that would later become resolution. From this episodic story, I feel as though I was able to complete my starting goal for the project, while also completely reshaping my initial draft into something that would better demonstrate that goal.
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While the project is finished for the purposes of this final honors course, I don’t think it is complete. Writing is not a linear thing and it certainly isn’t a scheduled thing. I have plans to revise and then re-polish this piece to be more rounded in content. I am happy with what I have and am excited to tell people about my final project, but I am also excited to see where else this piece could go. Over the summer, I have plans to not only add certain details to the piece, but to include the final draft in a self-published zine. Because I was not able to present this project for my friends and family in a formal setting, I will do it the only other way I know how.
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Below, you will find my semester-long research paper and the final draft of my short story titled "All We Have."