Photo Reflection of the Day #124: The 4 F's of My Life

The 4 F's of My Life - 20150601_161003

What Is It

A writing challenge in class today to display significant moments of my past and how it shapes who I am today.

Why It's Today's Pick

Today was the first day of my doctoral program.  It went well overall (for more details, you'll have to ask--too much to do to write it all--hahaha).  As part of our getting to know one another, our instructor asked us to draw significant moments that contributed to who we are today.  I didn't intend to but I came up with the four F's of my life.  Failing, Framing, Finding, Fixing.  I came to this thinking about how much my adolescent years and the sense of feeling insufficient--particularly physically--left me feeling like a failure; one that was captured every time I looked in the mirror.  However, this gave way to framing--that is seeing things differently and so much of this happened during my college years as I learned how to learn and see things differently, including myself (it's also not wonder that given such a powerful transition that I have continued to be involved and invested in higher education over the last two decades).  And through framing this gave me to find other ways of existing or internalizing ideas which allowed me to fix those things I initially saw wrong or perceived as failures.  I'm not sure I set out to make this so succinct, but as I got the opportunity to discuss it, I realized how much this has been a reiterative process within my life and continues to shape how I tackle things in my life.  I'm better at it today--I move quickly from perceiving it as a failure to framing and finding other ways of sense-making.  But I also realized how much I find failure important in my life in big and small ways along with the origins of how I can so much better cope with it today.  

This submission is part of the 365 Challenge.  For 2015's submissions, check out this link to all the posts.  For access to all photos, which open for reuse under a Creative Commons License, check out the full album on Flickr.

Creative Commons License
By Any Other Nerd Blog by Lance Eaton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Comments