September 29, 2019
One moment that really got my attention was when Beck quoted Jonathan Adler. Adler said, “sometimes in cases of extreme autism, people don’t construct a narrative structure for their lives”. First, I’m wondering how they figured this out and second, why is it like this? Another thought I had about this is “is this how my neighbor is”? One of the boys that lives down my street, well one of the boys I grew up with, has autism and it’s very noticeable that he thinks differently than the rest of us but, does he not think of his life as a story, like the rest of us do?
Another piece of text that I really liked was “older adults had more thematic coherence… young adults tended to tell more stories about change”. This makes so much sense! If you think about how much goes on just between when you’re fifteen and when you’re eighteen (which is only three years), it’s so much! When I was fifteen, I could never imagine what college would be like, or that I would move away from the friends I had. At eighteen, all I can talk about is how much has changed from high school to college, even though it’s only been a few months since I graduated high school. I can really relate to this on a very personal level because one, I am a young adult and two, my life is constantly changing. Throughout college your friends and interests and even major will change and that’s just how it is.
A final thing that I didn’t exactly jump out of my seat for but really appreciated was “you rewrite the history”. This sentence makes me feel at peace because knowing that I can change my past history by telling stories in a different way. Or that I can change the future history by changing my life now. I can start to edit the story before it’s finished.
I love how you made a connection to the article. Definitely add that connection in a paper we write.
I really enjoyed the point you made that you can “edit the story before it’s finished”. It supported how you are in charge of your own life story. I also loved how you supported one of the quotes in Beck’s essay with your own personal experiences. It puts more clarity into Beck’s words because the reader is able to see how they apply with their own lives.
When reading the ideas that stuck out to you the most I was surprised to see many of the same things written down that had also caught my attention when reading. The observations made were also very detailed, thinking in depth and connecting to some events in your actual life. The real life events you referred to made the piece more real and probably helped you connect and understand even better.