When I first began the genre experiments project, I was filled with a particular type of nervous excitement. The kind of excitement that you feel in your fingertips, my hands itched to grab a pen and begin the creative process. I began the semester eager to see what I would be creating, so imagine my surprise when our first assignment was to choose a form of writing that we had already completed. This is where my nerves entered the picture. While I have been producing articles monthly for a club, Hopelessly Yellow, I have not taken an academic writing course in at least a year. Aside from the articles that were posted online, a majority of my writing was locked away in the notes app on my phone, for no one else’s eyes but my own. 

A goal of mine for this year was to become comfortable being open with people. I have a tendency to keep my feelings in a vault and cater to whatever my friends and family would like. And while that helps to reduce tension and keep the peace within the complex social relationships that I am a part of, it also leads to anxiety and stress. So, for my origin piece, I decided to expose a little of what goes on inside my head. The genre of my original piece is poetry. I have been writing poetry for quite a while now - I started when I was very young, writing poems to stick on the fridge and spending summer nights going to poetry slams with my granny. She is the one who sparked my love of literature and helped me realize the power that words hold. 

Earlier this year, a couple of people in my life ended up being hospitalized due to alcohol use. I had a lot of thoughts about these events, but didn’t know who I wanted to talk to. I decided to write a poem as a form of therapy; I found it quite cathartic to use metaphors and different rhetorical devices to explain my emotions and slow the thoughts racing in my head. I realized that, if I was struggling to understand what they had experienced and gone through, they were definitely struggling too, in a way that I would never understand. The first experiment of my project was turning this poem that I had written into a more complete message on the importance of checking in on the people you care about, the importance of human connection regarding the health of our souls, as well as the importance of recognizing your own emotions. I would flip the script of my poem, which is a bit solemn, into an uplifting, helpful and positive mini podcast episode. I would be the host of this podcast and my target audience would be college students with an interest in mental health or struggling with mental health themselves. Considering the aftermath of Covid-19 and the stigma surrounding mental health issues, it is very important to acknowledge feelings of isolation and remind ourselves of the importance of both offering and asking for help. There was a tangible weight off of my chest after creating this podcast episode. Discussing any topic of my choice, especially one that I am passionate about such as mental health, without any restrictions or limitations truly felt like a form of therapy. I had been hosting the Golden Hour podcast for a club I am a part of, Hopelessly Yellow, for a few months already. So, I knew that I enjoyed the podcasting world - but I had never recorded an episode completely on my own. Usually, I had my friend and co-host Caroline Tully with me, keeping me on track and offering insightful ideas of her own. This mini podcast however, was mine. It is always a beautiful thing to see a project come to fruition, and while this mini episode is only a few minutes- not nearly as long as I would like for a full episode, I am still incredibly proud of the work that I did. Hearing my voice never gets any easier (it’s always unnerving to hear your own voice), but this mini podcast is one that I am proud to listen to and share. 

Diving deeper into the world of podcasts and spending more time cultivating my thoughts on mental health and the impact the drugs and alcohol can have, made me curious about what actually goes on in the brain when we are under the influence. My original poem, that this project is based on, starts off with my description of someone “mumbling about Jesus’’. When I was trying to come up with a new genre to explore for my origin piece, I realized that I wanted to know more about what processes occur in the brain to produce religious hallucinations. For this experiment, I decided to join the genre of Science Articles. Science articles, which I recently discovered are different from Scientific articles, have a wider and more general audience. Scientific articles on the other hand, are written by scientists for scientists; this difference is very noticeable in the manner that these articles are formulated, written, as well as the way that they are structured. I struggled a lot with finding sources for my topic: the neural correlates of drug and alcohol induced mystical experiences. These experiences are rare in nature, and consequently are more difficult to research and study in depth. I was particularly happy with the structure of the Genre Experiment project during this second genre switch. The tricky part about the Gateway Course’s structure is that none of the experiments are fully realized. So, for my podcast episode this meant only recording about 10 minutes of audio. For this second experiment, this meant that I got as far as an outline and some preliminary research. There is not as much to present for this second experiment, however it paved the way for the final experiment and my fully realized project.

As I was conducting research on the neural correlates of drug-induced religious hallucinations, I found a documentary that dove into religious experiences during NDEs. This piqued my interest as I remembered that one of the people I knew who had been hospitalized, ended up in the hospital for multiple days. I have not had a truly in-depth conversation about that night with this person, but I began wondering if what they experienced during their hospital stay included a NDE. This second experiment guided me to the realization that I wanted to enter the conversation discussing mystical experiences (religious hallucinations), and attempt to discover the neural correlates for drug/alcohol induced religious experiences as well as religious experiences induced through Near Death Experiences (NDEs). 

The culmination of research and ideas throughout this semester in the Sweetland Writing Minor, the creation and revision process, the nights in my room spent contemplating the meaning of my existence and the meaning of life at all, allowed me to internalize the importance of leaning on each other when we need to, and also when we don’t need to; telling people how you feel when you have a pot of emotions ready to boil over, and telling people how you feel when you have nothing on your mind but what you want to eat for dinner; asking for a hug when it feels like your legs can’t carry you, and asking for a hug just because sometimes it’s nice to be embraced by those you love most. We shouldn’t be scared to leave pieces of ourselves behind in the people we meet and in the work we do. Don’t make yourself smaller so that other people are more comfortable. Be loud. Be bold. Have outlandish ideas and the motivation to make them real. Be unapologetic and invite people to see the beauty of who you are and who you will become, because as frightening as it may be to open yourself up to people, being alone when you don’t want to be is worse.