Now I See

In the beginning of this course we had to write a short paper on a strong belief that we hold. My strong belief that I wrote about is giving my best effort in everything I do. I always had this belief, but after a life changing event, my belief became stronger. After re-reading my diagnostic essay from the beginning of this semester, I realized that I also have some invisible narratives. Throughout this semester, we learned about the concept of invisible narratives and uncovered a number of different invisible narratives. We mostly looked at invisible narratives in other's writing, but we never explored the invisible narratives in our own writing.

An invisible narrative I found in my writing was that I depended on my father a lot. The man in the family is dominant and my family also believed this. I think this is why we, as a family, were so affected when my father left us. Although I was not especially close to my father and he was usually not there to support me, I found myself really devastated when my father left my family for his new family. When I found out the news, I automatically assumed that I would no longer be happy or have a happy family. The invisible narrative that a happy family should have a father and mother implies to my situation. I think media has shaped my narratives a great amount. I thought that a happy family is a family with both parents because on television when parents get divorced, the family starts to break apart and every family member becomes depressed. According to society, divorce is not a good thing and media emphasizes the effect of a divorce on children.

In the second piece of writing we did this semester, which was an editorial, I realized that I am attracted to free things like Ariely says in his article. For my editorial, I wrote about discounted or free bus fare for San Francisco State University students. Re-reading my editorial, I noticed that I used the word free about ten times throughout the editorial. Ariely writes about the word free and if the word free is involved we would give up what we actually wanted for the thing that is free. If San Francisco State University did decide to provide bus passes, then a certain price would be added to our tuition, but because the bus would seem to be free more people would chose to have bus passes.

After reviewing my past writing, I noticed that I have a lot of invisible narratives, personal and society inflicted narratives. In paper two I explored the invisible narratives in economics and one narrative of economics is that the master and servant relationship is the only way for a firm to be successful and efficient. I believe that there are still a lot of invisible narratives in my writing that I did not discover. I noticed that in class when we have class discussions about a certain narrative, new narratives always seem to make its way into the discussion. Because narratives have already been placed into society for so long, they have become norms and hard to uncover unless they are addressed. When I was still grasping the concept of invisible narratives it was a bit hard for me to understand and see the narratives, and this is the same way I feel about my writing. I have a lot more narratives that I have to uncover in my writing and I believe that over time as I experience more things I will slowly realize my personal narratives. This class also helped me open my eyes to back stories and become more open minded. Therefore, I think the only way to lessen the impact of invisible narratives is by experience and open mindedness.