Autoethnography

The story I'd like to share is one that's been in the making for me for a number of years; one of the discoveries of my own personal identity, emotional capacity, and exploration of my values and the experiences that have shaped me. I really enjoyed Tessa Muncey's shared experience of doing autoethnography as it clarified the process of doing this for myself.

Growing up as an only child I've always felt somewhat different from the people I've known. When I was young I always wanted siblings but just spent time with friends and definitely grew up feeling like a bit of an outsider. I always made close friends but somehow felt like my emotions and emotional capacity differed from those around me. I felt things very deeply and was interested in the feelings of other people as well. It was often hard for me to become disconnected from my emotions and other's opinions of me but it wasn't something that necessarily governed my life. I could describe this using the metaphor of a sponge; as a sponge soaks up what it's surrounded with, I myself would take on the emotions or occurrences around me and they would stick with me for a while and the same would go for other people and their emotions. I've often felt that I was just overly sensitive and needed to detach from feelings until just recently. In the past couple of years I've learned about the concept of people being empaths or empathetic. An empath is described as someone who is highly aware of the emotions of those around them, to the point of feeling those emotions themselves. I've considered myself a fairly intuitive person and I am very impacted by positive and negative energy whether that be from other people or from within my own psyche. This categorization of the kind of person that I might be really resonated with me and allowed me to feel at home with my emotions. It even helped me to recognize the qualities that made me feel different or othered as strengths rather than weaknesses.

Moving forward in my story during this time of exploration, photography became an outlet for me to capture the emotion in the things that I saw in the world; animate and inanimate. The medium became a way to portray emotions and experience in unique and interpretative ways. Photos acted as tokens from memories or places and were taken usually due to an emotional attachment to the subject at any moment in time however fleeting that moment may have been. They had the quality to transport me back to that exact place in time and the emotions I felt which was a pretty magical point of discovery.

Some artifacts that I can find to fill in the details that I may be missing from my story could be journal entries, the art I made during that time, and also continuing the kind of art that I'm drawn to as my story isn't yet complete. I'd associate my story with the wider scope of society in the sense that our culture really emphasizes staying detached from our emotions to a certain extent. We're expected to be very much independent in our actions and care about ourselves first and foremost but for empaths, this can prove to be a harder task than it sounds. You could also say that I was drawn to the art world because of its embrace of emotion and expression and this allowed me to feel more accepted and like I had found my niche. With that said my story is very much a developing one and I find that I am seeking to get to the root of who I am. With many considerations of other people floating around it can be hard to narrow in on the self and that identity. I'm really grateful for this opportunity to reflect on a story that illustrates a part of who I am and I'm greatly interested in autoethnography which may be something that I explore further in this class and in my own life.