First Year Hon. Mention: Enough: A Journey from Overcoming to Becoming

WRIT 1702, Becoming a Better Writer: Methods and Models. Course Director: Dunja Baus

Abstract

What can one do when one’s own strengths become vulnerabilities? What should one do? Where has that “one”, that self who was so familiar, even gone to? These are some of the questions anyone gripped by chronic physical pain comes to ask themselves. But “Enough: A Journey from Overcoming to Becoming” so capably demonstrates that all it can take is a watershed moment to empower an individual such that burdens become access points for freedom. Framed by her battle with rheumatoid arthritis, the author employs resonant metaphors to show us that under the veil of pain the same things that make up the perceived core of one’s identity can also be like handcuffs. With a keen sense for rhythm and tempo along with deft use of flashbacks that evince character, we feel her nature as a workaholic resistant to failure co-opt that same identity into something more convoluted—until she recognizes that she still has value as a living self, and that this value advocates strength in asking for and receiving help from others. This way, she learns that healing oneself can have repercussions that reach beyond the moment, and even one’s life, both back into the past and forward into the future.