Today’s youth are quite familiar with the struggles of reaching to satisfy high expectations and dealing with the immense consequences of stress. The main strength behind this collection and one of the reasons that it is effective is because there is a creative connection made to these well-known topics throughout the collection, highlighted uniquely during each piece. By creating new and various connections to a subject so common to the average young person, there will become new conversations created throughout the youth demographic with the hope that these conversations will become more widely accepted in the years to come. This project included many forms of writing and representation that I personally had never tried before. By challenging myself to create pieces using these less common styles, I gained a large amount of knowledge in areas I was not familiar with, and I enjoyed the process much more than I think I would have if I had continued to write pieces in the same formats. Due to the fact that this collection was created with fresh new ideas and methods to present these ideas this project was successfully executed.
If given extra time to work on this exam, I believe that I would have spent more time reading over various pieces to assure that all of the information that I included was beneficial to the overall writing, and spent more time explaining some areas of information which were only briefly brought up. One example of this would be located in my informational research piece, where the symptoms of anxiety and coping methods were discussed, but how family members can aid those affected and how people develop anxiety were nowhere mentioned or explained. Something that should be mentioned is that I am extremely passionate about my topic because I have struggled with these factors for several years now. With this in mind, I tried my utmost hardest to keep my emotions to myself, but exaggeration of some aspects and a small amount of bias may be found in this collection without my knowledge.
In my opinion, I believe that my non-fiction piece titled “One of the Lowest Points of My Life” was the best contribution to this collection because I spent the most amount of time on it, ensuring that everything was worded how I wanted, while still being explained efficiently. I am most appreciative of this piece and I have an especially strong connection to this piece over all of the others because I started writing this composition on my worst day of the year. Although I did not exactly realize this at the time, I started this piece on the same day that I suffered the worst effects I had ever experienced due to my worrying; I hit my breaking point. Due to this experience, I feel that this piece has an outstandingly unique perspective and input to my overall situation of managing pressures of high expectations and stress.