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The march of time can be methodical-first this, then this, then this. We instinctively turn to chronology as a way to recreate the past, putting our lives into a neat moment-by-moment order. Narrative is the natural starting place since narrative is a natural structure for telling others about personal events. Nevertheless, recognizing a few basic underlying structures may help an essay writer invent a more personal, more unique form. They refuse to limit themselves to generic forms, which, like mannequins, can be tricked out in personal clothing. The remarkable thing about personal essays, which openly mimic this exploratory process, is that they can be so quirky in their “shape.” No diagram matches the exact form that evolves, and that is because the best essayists resist predictable approaches. You begin to delineate the organic form that will match your content. By trying a different angle or creating a composite of past approaches, you get closer and closer to what you intend. Nothing is wasted though, said the design professor, because every bend in the process is helping you to arrive at your necessary structure. Sometimes I even seem to go backward, losing all direction. Although I may start an essay with a notion of where I am headed, inevitably I veer away as I get new ideas or encounter dead ends.
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“This is what it looks like”:Īha, I thought, as we discussed parallels in the writing process. Gay ends the article by stating that privilege is contextual and, after writing that nearly everyone in the United States has some kinds of it, she invites the reader to accept his or her own too.Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual GuideĪ design professor from Denmark once drew for me a picture of the creative process, which had been the subject of his doctoral dissertation. This leads the author to her conclusion, in which she stresses the need for society to get to a point where privilege can be discussed as a fact rather than as a fault, and consequently where everyone’s truths can be accepted as personal and not absolute. This problem is especially relevant in online discussions, where way too often rather privileged parties who talked about their personal experienced are attacked and accused of ignoring the role their advantages have had in such instances. Roxane Gay tackles the problems with these kinds of discussions on privilege by underlining how way too often they result in a “Game of Privilege” in which the different parties uselessly ponder about what factors make an individual less or more privileged than another. The next step is for them to realize how different statuses can cause people to live the same experiences in opposite ways, and maybe even use their privilege to bring up issues that would go unheard if mentioned by someone who doesn’t have it. This dichotomy, according to the author, often makes attributions of privilege synonyms with accusations of “having it easy”, although their only purpose should be of pointing out such privilege to someone who has it to allow them to accept it. Gay declares that one of the hardest things to do is to accept your own privilege and, after listing some of her “peculiar benefits”, she discusses how some other aspects that represent a disadvantage for her (such as race and gender) have affected her. To start her discussion on the matter, she introduces what she considers to be a problem related to this issue: the fact that it is so frequently talked about that it has become “white noise”.
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She then defines privilege and lists different kinds of it. She opens her essay with a description of how the trips to Haiti she used to take as a child introduced her to the existence of opposite life tenors, both in different countries and in the same reality. In her piece “Peculiar Benefits”, Roxane Gay analyzes how privilege has had an effect on her life and the role it has gained in today’s society.