Erik TP11

As I start every session with Hyejin, I asked how her week had gone. She smiled, saying she was crazy, and that she “needed to pull herself together”—an expression I had explained to her a couple weeks before. She explained to me how she had been set up on a traditional Korean, blind date, and really liked the boy, but now has conflicting feelings. We spent the first part of our session chatting about this, which I enjoyed. When we first met, she had always been friendly, but very conservative about conversation topics. Today, however, she was speaking quite frankly and matter-of-factly. I assume this is from our talks. Last week she read a fairly personal essay I had written, and my point was that these little idiosyncrasies of our life make for good writing material, and also help us process the events in our head as well.

She confided that I was her American friend, so she could speak this way. Her Korean friends may judge her, she said. I felt honored that she shared her dating life with me, and her personal rant helped lead into my very point. I went on to explain that the heart of the personal essay is intimacy—to set up a relationship with the reader through the power of your voice.

This intimacy requires a conversational tone. The writer opens up a dialogue with a reader because they are already having dialogues and disputes with themselves because they acknowledge multiplicity of selves. This brings in honesty and often confessions to the reader. The writer must acknowledge the limits and borders within his own humanity, then point them out, which requires a sense of partial overcoming through detachment. These were some of the points we covered.

We then searched through some of the topics she had selected for her essay. She seemed mainly interested in writing about prostitution or addiction, since she is working towards her PhD in social work. We ended the session by brainstorming some formats she could utilize for her papers, and how she could combine narratives as well as body paragraphs into one paper. Once again, she thanked me whole-heartedly for a fun session, and she gave me some oranges for the road!