FiNaL

This class has helped me to realize that people are more alike than i thought before. We saw so many different facets of each other's personalities. People are like Day and Night. We see that in ourselves on a regular basis, and we also see that in the people we are closest to, but we hardly ever see that in people we don't know very well. The Fear assignment was my favorite, and that is really what brought out this change in my perspective. I'm very reserved and have trouble trusting people, but that assignment shoved other people's fears right into my face. Everyone else is just as afraid as I am, and they're all just as complex as I am, even though i rarely see that side of them.

We keep our Day side up front, and put that out for the world to see. But our Night side is kept hidden deep inside of us. It's just human nature, to hide our weaknesses. I know that i've been working on fighting my own fears since that assignment. It opened my eyes to the Day and Night inside of me, and showed me that my life has been ruled by my Night and my own insecurities. I'm starting to learn how to fight that. But unlike in a videogame where you aim to destroy your enemies, what I need to do is merge my Day and my Night. Kind of like a yin and yang symbol, they work together and make each other stronger. I need to find that symbiosis.



All of our emotions, and Day and Night, they're all completely natural. I tend to live in the realm of logic, and rarely look at my own emotions. I was always taught that they made me weak. But i'm starting to learn that it's okay to have emotions, even the bad ones like anger or fear, because we're only human. No matter how hard i try to be perfect, or to be "good" it doesn't really matter, because i'm guaranteed to make mistakes. By being such a perfectionist i'm really hurting myself more than helping, because i try to live up to standards that no human is really capable of, and i stress out about the tiniest details, and it just makes my emotional well-being much less secure.

I already know how to think, i've been an expert on that all my life. The lesson i need to learn now is knowing how to feel- and learning how to be okay with that.

So, for this project, I took 100+ photographs over the course of the week, just of things that triggered emotions in me (both good and bad). I later came up with the Day and Night theme, chose the two pictures that i felt were the most beautiful (Day- bright, clear blue sky with tree branches off to the side; and Night- a lamp illuminating part of the lilac bush behind it.) I remembered that fun blending modes trick Beth showed us a while back and played around with those two images. (Click on the photo to be linked to a full-size version).

I also wanted to write for this project. I wanted to write about how i felt, and what i'd learned, and what i'm still learning. So this is also a pretty wordy blog entry. But since i'm all about the words, the photos are kind of a visual representation of how i feel- though i definitely wanted to put the words here too :P

Here is the link to my gallery with some of the photos i took:
http://s22.photobucket.com/albums/b313/PuppyNoelle/HowIFeel