REMEDIATION
For my remediation I wanted to depict how my love for different activities shifted by showing the loss of the magical feeling I got when doing them. I also wanted to integrate my current passion for drawing into my work. I chose to create a series of illustrations that show how the same activities felt drastically different when the love was gone. I wanted to create three sets of illustrations to juxtapose the feeling of magic and the loss of that feeling for each activity I discussed in my repurposing. With the third activity, drawing, I only know the feeling of magic. For that reason, I decided to make my final drawing a portrait to show that the magic is derived from my own personal love of imagination. I used a cartoon style for the portrait to tie it in with the theme of creativity throughout.
Describe your image.
Describe your image.
Describe your image.
REpurposing
WHERE DOES
fleeting love
go......
Pick something you love to do. Now if it’s the kind of love I’m talking about, you won’t have many options to choose from. It should be something completely consuming, something you’ve put so much of yourself into that you couldn’t possibly abandon it without leaving a piece of you behind. It should be something so integral to your identity that without it, you wouldn’t truly be you. Have you got it? If you don’t that’s okay, keep thinking. It’s probably become such a big part of your life that you don’t even see it as a separate entity anymore. It is a part of you and you are a part of it. For that reason your love can be hard to pick out.
For me, that thing is dance. Dance is where I find that love, where I’m invested in and consumed by every element. Closing my eyes, I can so vividly imagine how it feels. I picture myself lying on the hardwood floor of my studio back at home. I love the floor. The perfect balance of slippery and sticky that allows for effortless turning with no fear of falling.
Although I am aware that this floor has been covered with dirty feet, sweaty bodies, and bloody knees and toes, I feel perfectly content to lie here. With my eyes closed, I feel my body sinking into the floor. All I think about is the music and my breathing. Waking from relaxation, I hear the voice of my teacher directing us to slowly begin moving.
Eyes still sealed shut, I gradually start to reawaken each muscle in my body. My fingertips skim the floor as I arch my back, reaching out my arms like a morning stretch. Standing up, I press my bare feet into the floor. I am grounded, secure. Matching the slow yet intricate rhythms of the music, I move through the room, filling the negative space around me.
There is a sense of freedom in improvisation. The freedom to dance with no one watching and no one judging is a rare yet beautiful gift for a competitive dancer. No choreography, no counts, no tricks; we can be ourselves. We are focused on our individual
movement and expression. With our eyes closed we are vulnerable, but together we are safe and secure.
That’s the feeling I always come back to, the reason I feel so deeply intertwined in dance. It’s a moment I can come back to when I’m feeling lost or disconnected. It’s a feeling that gives me purpose, focus. Now I want you to think about the thing you love, think about how it makes you feel. What is it like? Does it make you feel happy? Challenged? Calm? Excited? Safe? It can be anything, anything that makes you love it. Now what would you do if it went away? Slipped ever so gradually from your reliant grasp that you didn’t even realize it was going till it was too far gone to get back. Maybe this has happened to you, with that thing you love so much, where something changed about that thing. And it changed enough that the love you used to have for it became muddled and lost.
I’ve recognized just recently that over the past two years, unsuspecting thieves have arisen and stolen, bit by bit, my love for dance. Thieves come in many forms; they are settings, experiences, people, and events that take away what you loved before and replace it with something quite wholly unlike its predecessor. A thief, for example, comes in the form of an inept coach, incapable of creating challenges and pushing boundaries. A coach that encourages uniformity and discourages individuality. A thief that steals passion and inserts apathy in its place. A thief comes in the form of a new setting and new values. A setting that emphasizes image and appearance rather than expression and creativity. A thief that replaces thought with superficiality. I found theses thieves creeping into my love of dance at the start of my freshman year of college. Picking away under the concealment of the excitement and glamour that comes with being a celebrated member of the University of Michigan Dance Team, they stole pieces of my love till there wasn’t any left.
“Love is fleeting”: we’ve all heard the saying. But for some reason, I always attributed it to relationships. Assuming “love” denoted a romantic connection, I wrote off the saying as an issue pertaining purely to romance. It made sense, people change, feelings change, so loving another (also changing) person must not be possible forever. Not unless you love them through the changes. Dance, though, dance is concrete. Dance is always going to be there, constant and unchanging. Dance will always be loved, I thought. Wrong.
For my repurposing I chose to rework my Common App essay. For this essay, I described my passion for dance and how deeply invested I was in it. It was the first nonstandard essay I had ever written and I really enjoyed the writing process. When trying to select a piece to repurpose, this essay immediately came to mind as a sample of writing that expressed something I cared deeply about. However, after reading back through the essay, I began to realize that my feelings towards dance were now starkly different than when I wrote my Common App. This realization launched me into my repurposing to discuss how love develops and where it goes. To read my original essay and peruse an earlier draft of my repurposing, just follow the arrow.
Without it, you wouldn't truly be you
Now perhaps that is what makes it so crushing, the realization that something I took for granted is gone. At times, I expect people to disappoint me. I’ve seen friends come and go, I’ve built relationships stronger and watched some wither. It’s natural, it’s expected. As people change, some grow together and others grow apart. Losing my passion for dance couldn’t have been more unexpected.
That’s the thing about it, I still dance. I’m still physically capable, I still have access to facilities. There is nothing standing in my way keeping me from dancing. Yet it’s gone from me. It’s lost, I’m lost. I tried to find it again, to reconnect with myself, with the floor. I went back to the studio looking for that piece of myself I gave so willingly to dance. I played my favorite music, dimmed the lights, and lay on that cool hard wood. I relaxed each muscle from the top of my head to the ends of my toes, allowing myself to sink into the floor. I focused on my breath, on my body. I listened only to the music and the beating of my heart. I started moving. The same way I used to, I ran my fingertips across the floor. I arched, stretched and moved. Something felt off, yet nothing was different. I was back in the same place, the same atmosphere, doing the same thing. Everything I loved was here, in this enclosed studio space.
Why is it that I couldn’t reconnect with myself, with my passions? Have you ever tried to do that? To go back to something you used to love so deeply and try to find those feelings again? I remember feeling this same way when I was a child. I was a couple years past the appropriate “doll playing” age yet found myself reflecting so fondly upon the hours spent in my little sunroom-turned-makebelieve-space inventing countless adventures for my dolls to live out. I’d conjured up personalities, voices and rich histories for each girl. They each had their own individual style and preferences. They lived in a wildly vivid world, and I missed spending my days there with them.
Quietly tiptoeing through my house in fear of being ridiculed for playing with dolls as an twelve-year-old, I snuck back into that little sunroom one afternoon. Everything was as I remembered it. Each doll was dressed as I knew she’d want to be. Kit was still a tomboy, Samantha was a girly-girl, Megan was still a science nerd (apologies for my stereotyping, but I was a middle schooler after all). I set to play. I styled their hair, dressed them up. I had them go to school, gossip about boys, go to ice skating practice. They played with their pets, they performed in pop concerts. I was back in their world but I didn’t feel a part of it anymore. Everything was as I remembered it, yet jumping from being a soccer star to a celebrity model didn’t feel magical anymore. I felt foolish, I didn’t belong. Feeling disenchanted and empty, I put each girl back in her respective bed, shut off the lights and locked the door to the sunroom leaving no trace of playtime behind.
Was it because my cool middle school friends scoffed at the “kids” who still played with dolls? Was it that my little sister had already moved past the doll playing phase? Were they all still there in the back of my mind, judging me to a point where I couldn’t enjoy my make believe world? Or, was it me? Had I just grown up too much? Had I fallen out of love with my imagination? That’s a scary thought: to have forgotten how to love imagining things, creating things.
Had i fallen out of love with my imagination?
In middle school I started dance, and maybe that’s why. Though there’s no way to establish a cause and effect relationship, I feel that in some way one lead to the other. The loss of a creative outlet and the disintegration of my imaginary world led me to seek expression in new forms. Or maybe, dance showed me a new, different way to do what I loved. It showed me a new way to make believe I was someone else, to invent stories and to express myself. Maybe it drew me in so strongly that it pulled me away from my childhood games. That’s the thing no one ever explained about fleeting love; where does it go? Does it just dissolve, disappear? Is love so intangible that, unlike any form of matter or energy in the universe, it can just vanish? Possibly due to several years too many of chemistry classes, I don’t think it can. Energy is conserved. It may seem to disappear but really it just changes form, manifesting itself in a new entity. So is love like that too? Energy that never dies, only transitions from one thing to the next?
As we grow up and change, our love does too. So perhaps love isn’t fleeting at all, just constantly evolving and finding new homes in which to reside. Maybe that’s why I’ve found that, as dance brings me less and less joy, drawing brings me more. These days I get lost in my art. I lose a sense of time and place. I’m consumed in my imagination, my creativity. In fact maybe that’s what I’ve loved all along. I’ve loved to imagine other worlds. I’ve loved creating magic and feeling connected with my own creativity. That love has never gone away, never faltered. It’s only travelled through different outlets of expression. Losing my love for my world of dolls hurt, losing my love of dance hurt exponentially more. Maybe one day I’ll lose my love of art (though I sincerely hope I do not). However I feel that somehow I can trust my love for imagination. I can trust that it will persist, it will follow me forever.
I think that’s how love works: the things we love change, but the things we love about them never leave
that's the thing no one ever explained about fleeting love; where does it go?
us. Think back to the thing you love, the thing you picked in the beginning. Now try to answer the question: why? Why do you love it? If you’d asked me this a couple years ago, when I was still fully infatuated and all consumed with dance, I would’ve had a completely different answer than I do now. It’s fun, it feels good, it’s challenging; these are just some of the superficial benefits I drew from dance. In the moment, I enjoyed these aspects of dance. But, looking back, that is not why I loved it. I loved it because it was a means by which I could express my creativity and live in my imagination. I loved taking on characters and stories, being whoever I wanted to be in whatever world I dreamed up. But why is it that I had to lose that feeling before I could articulate exactly what it was?
Now when I sit down to draw, I can pinpoint several things I love about it. I love the physical motions, the way my hand guides my pen across the page. I love how I can create anything, any shape, line, figure, or world. In a sense, the page is my universe, and I’m free to populate it with whatever I dream up. This is how I feel about drawing now, and perhaps years later I’ll view it differently. However with each lost love, I’ve gained insight. I played with dolls as a child because it was fun, and at the time that’s all there was to it. As I grew older, I stopped playing with dolls and began dancing. Dancing was fun too, but even at the time I recognized there was more to it. I could go to dance after having a bad day at school or fighting with my sister then walk out of the studio afterwards feeling calm and refreshed. It gave me a sense of release. I noted this at the time, but never delved into uncovering what exactly gave me this sensation.
It’s challenging to draw out overarching themes and uncover parallels between just a few things. From a distance, playing with dolls, dancing, and drawing are three wholly different behaviors. However, if you take these three time periods, every day of my life can be described by one. I’ve found that, when one creative outlet is lost to me, I infallibly seek out another. For this reason, it seems to me that love grows not from things, but from overarching desires. In my case, it is a desire for imagination and the drive to create and express my own world. Yours may be different, in fact it quite likely is. However regardless of what these loves are, they share the same constancy. Love cannot be limited to an item, activity, or individual. Love is energetic and, though it can be fleeting, it never flees to nothingness. Instead, love merely travels from one manifestation to the next.
ABOUT ME
Hi, I'm Caroline. A lifelong Disney fanatic and self-proclaimed princess, I love spending my heavily caffeinated days dreaming up new artistic pursuits. Throughout my time at the University of Michigan, I've discovered that my passions lie in drawing, design, and writing (despite my major in Biopsychology, Cognition and Neuroscience). I find that through my art I can express my deeply manifested desire for magic and challenge my ever-developing imagination.
About my work
Perhaps due to my ongoing infatuation with fantasy, I've come to see imagination and creativity as the most valuable intellectual duo. In assembling the pieces of my portfolio, I've found that imagination and creativity are invaluable elements not just in how I think but in how I identify myself. My work delves into the idea of love and how different passions, like imagination and creativity, can persist throughout one's life.
WHY I WRITE
The primary reason I write is to learn. I find that through the process of writing I am able to organize my own thoughts and ideas, as well as outside information, on a more cohesive and complex level that I cannot reach through verbal discussion or internal thought.
Somewhere amidst my writing process I develop a deeper understanding of the issues I’m writing about and, often times, form a broader understanding of underlying connections. Writing is a unique learning tool in that it demands an active participation in the topic at hand. While it’s easy to read or listen passively, writing requires direct involvement. It forces a deeper level of comprehension and broadens the breadth of opportunity in learning and discovery.
In my opinion, the writing process is incredibly vital. I find that somewhere amidst my writing process I develop a deeper level of understanding of the issues I’m writing about and, often times, form a broader understanding of underlying connections. Writing gives me the ability to learn actively, by imposing my own thought on outside ideas. Often times, it is easy to read about other people’s experiences or insights and feel a sense of understanding.
You can read about someone else’s near death experience and picture how they felt or listen to a professor discuss philosophical theories and understand the thought process behind it. However for me, it is not until I write about those takeaways and relate them back to my own experiences that I feel I’ve obtained a truly deep level of understanding.
This is not to say that I feel the need to explicitly incorporate my own experiences into everything I write. Instead I see it more as an implicit thought process, the process that occurs when writing.
During my writing process I break down topics into little fragments, extracting the various essences and themes that form them. I then disperse these fragments, grouping and separating them based on any combination of mood, theme, message, etc. and naturally interspersing my own thoughts and experiences.
Through this process, I pull away the visible and clear message of ideas to uncover the more nuanced issues beneath the surface. I feel that this allows me to learn in a more interactive way that, as a result, provides me with a greater depth of understanding.
This writing process also acts as a fantastic avenue for creative expression. I am a very creativity oriented person and I find that writing is a great outlet for that. While there are a lot of required writing assignments I’ve done that have not satisfied my creative drive, topics or styles I’m interested in definitely satiate my desire for creative expression. Just as I enjoy playing with color, shape, and line in my drawings, I like manipulating tone, word choice, and style in my writing to produce evocative works. I’ve found words to be an extremely powerful tool.
As with art, words can be used for such a wide range of purposes. It can be a form of communication, a tool for understanding, or an outlet for personal expression. It can ignite passion, stir up emotion, or evoke excitement. The opportunities to explore through writing are endless... and I’m always looking to learn more.
I write to learN
The question "Why do you write?" is the type of question I tend to avoid. It's the type of question that addresses so much that it's hard to focus in and decipher the answer. However, I found that through the process of writing this piece I was able to uncover my answer. As I wrote, I realized more clearly what I was gaining from the process and how valuable the writing experience truly is.
