I feel like a total unc saying this, but wow, time flies by SO fast and even faster every year. Feels like our first lecture was a month ago, but I can’t believe the semester is already ending. Honestly, at first it felt lowkey overwhelming, and I was worried that I had a bunch of novels to read within 4 months (especially because I am not a regular reader). However, it turned out to be less stressful than I had anticipated, and the selection of books in this course was very entertaining. The reflection posts were also stress-free as I simply had to write down my personal impressions of the novels, and there were no right or wrong answers to them.<\/p>\n
At first, the weekly discussions made me anxious, as I am very much introverted and don’t enjoy expressing my personal thoughts\/feelings that are not fact-based (more used to discussions that involve research findings that backup my argument). This anxiety also quickly dissolved once I got used to the environment and started to realize that I may not be the only one getting confused while reading some of the novels. For instance, I remember going to the discussion for “The Trenchcoat” by Manea, and everyone in my table started off with the comment that they were so lost and confused about this novel. I was totally on the same page, and it felt kind of relieving to know that sometimes the confusion is an intentional part of the story.<\/p>\n
My favourite novels throughout this course were “The Shrouded Woman” by Bombal and “The Time of the Doves” by Rodoreda. These two pieces were the easiest to read and understand, while they both also evoked a lot of emotions and thoughts for me. Especially for “The Shrouded Woman”, the perspective that the story was told in was so unique, and it really made me think about my death, being an interesting experience for me (I’m not religious and had never really thought deeply about how my death would be…). Overall, while reading the assigned novels throughout the semester, it felt like a chance for me to face various emotions and thoughts that I may have been distancing or avoiding myself from, due to natural life circumstances (workload, stress, busy, etc.). Therefore, taking this course was a very valuable experience that I got to have in my last semester at UBC.<\/p>\n
Overall, I really think this course was anxiety-free, even more as the course continued. I acknowledge that this was one of the goals of the teaching team (I was touched by this week’s post, where Prof Jon mentioned that life is too short for anxiety ????), and I am so glad that I got to take a course like this before graduating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I feel like a total unc saying this, but wow, time flies by SO fast and even faster every year. Feels like our first lecture was a month ago, but I can’t believe the semester is already ending. Honestly, at first it felt lowkey overwhelming, and I was worried that I had a bunch of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107675,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,12],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anxiety-free","tag-conclusion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstyl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstyl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstyl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstyl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107675"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstyl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstyl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstyl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions\/29"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstyl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstyl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstyl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}