Personal Narrative: Disappearing Pink Walls

When doing my collage I decide that just having my thought bubble reflection would not be enough. I wanted to give a better representation of just how much I learned in Critical Perspective Learning and Teaching and make my collage more personal. What I came up with was going through my social justice textbooks and picking out quotes that left an impression on me or would be useful to remember for when I officially become a teacher. The quotes I choose mainly centered on validating experience of minorities and about how easy it can be to invade the spaces of those who are marginalized. After picking my quotes I wanted figure out how I could make up for my missing face. I knew the purpose of making the faces, to show what people see about me on the surface versus what I’m like deep down, so I wrote down everything I put on my face on a brown piece of paper. Then in the center of my collage I wrote the goal I have as a teacher to incorporate social justice in my classroom.

As I am riding in my husbands 2008 chevy cobalt I realize, this is exactly how I envisioned the perfect day. A soft gentle breeze wafting the sweet scent of jasmine over me, the sun radiating against my skin. The sky is clear as cleaned crystal and bubblegum blue. I settle back on the warm leather seat of the car and embrace the feeling. I am totally immersed.

When I think about my red house, a free and easy feeling rushes over. Worries consisted of macaroni being too hot, swinging too high, and Dora, my first dog, pooping in my room. With bookshelves filled with stuffed animals and countless Pooh Bear toys, I was always content. The playground in my backyard provided days of fun, and nights in my mom and dad’s bed gave me peaceful and comforting sleep, preparing me for the next day of work. The kitchen was where I liked to claim I “worked”. Although I didn’t do a lot of the actual cooking, I liked to be there while my mom was. A love for cooking and baking developed at a young age, around the same time I realized I wanted to be just like my mom. The song “Best Day” by Taylor Swift perfectly describes

Many years ago, in a distant kingdom, I lived with my seven siblings. We all had nicknames which represented our personalities. There was Doc, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful, Dopey, me (Jolly), and Smiley. Smiley was the youngest and the only girl. We lived in a castle, working for an evil Queen. We obeyed every order and followed any command, fore if we did not, there would be severe consequences. Every single day at the crack of dawn, we would wake up, get five minutes to freshen up, ten minutes to eat a small breakfast, and go our separate ways to fulfill our duties. Doc, Sneezy, and Dopey would prepare all the meals for the whole kingdom, and Smiley was the queen’s personal assistant and pet. Mine and Dopey’s job was a little more complicated.

According to Bree Brake, “Many of us in life have made mistakes, big or small. We all don’t know everything that we should know, and most certainly we are always trying to get better at something that we do.” The time when he made a mistake at work and how did he handle them. My dad replied, “I made a lot of mistakes. One time me and my co-worker were installing ovens at Red Lobster, we turn them on to let them heat and they started smoking very badly. We had to call a fire department to put out the fire in the ovens. All because we forgot to take out the cardboard packing material from the oven.” (Gignac) After, this situation he learned that he will always check inside the oven before turning them on. This job can be dangerous and you have

I was a girl who was born into this weird society, not knowing it was at the time. I knew I was different from everyone else but never knew why. As a kid, I was always the quiet one in the back of the room and differently not a fan of the parlor walls. My family loved it, they always talk to them like if they were their real family. I never like them, I thought it was really weird taking two huge screens on the walls in front of everyone. But what I did love to do was sitting and reading the scripts alone, not to the screen, not to anyone. I always wish that there was something more in this world then parlor walls.

I walked into the plain, white room, and although I was with six other people I had never felt more alone than at that moment. I didn’t belong in a place like that, and I felt how out of place I was. There were two colored benches, against two of the walls in the room. The man whom had led us into the treacherous place demanded that we sat and waited for further instructions. On the bench, to the left, all seven of us had taken a seat and, without speaking a word to one another, we waited. I remember thinking to myself, “I’m not like these people, I’m 19 years old. What in the hell am I doing in this godforsaken hellhole?”

The day was August 1st, 2013. Summer was coming to an end and fall was close at hand. However, on this particular day, I paid no mind to the changing season. Hundreds of people strolled the hospital hallway, their voices echoing the long pale corridors like distant hums. Despite the outside chatter, my room encompassed a certain stillness. I had always associated stillness with serenity, but this stillness was made up of apprehension, hopefulness, and most notably, fear. As I sat on a bed meant for sick patients, I looked around the small confines of the white room to my family. Within each of them I saw panic; I saw the fear of losing me. After what seemed like a lifetime suspended within a cruel dream, the doctor finally entered the room.

Multicolored lights lazily fly by, tails of neon blue, purple, orange, and red trailing behind them. They drift past the window that I stare out of, almost seeming to wave at me as they float on through an eternal dream. I sit in a small travel pod, soft violet hues spilling out over the cushions, walls, and floor. I'm not sure where I am headed, but it's certain that it's far from my old life of struggling and pain. All I can see as I gaze out my single window, is space, an infinite inky canvas. Colors dotting and splashing its serene fabric and edges. The scene is one of tranquility and peace, letting myself become one with the soothing atmosphere of calm. I'm now far away from the hardships that haunted me, as I travel to a new destination

Blue used to be my dog. It was incredible. We played, I taught him, and we had the best three years of my life. But when I had a cat, that was a whole different story. He didn’t play with me as much as Blue, we didn’t take walks, but all he would do is sleep half the day, and hide. He didn’t play as often but it did play. Dogs and cats are both very different animals. I would rather have a pet that would play with me, be able to show itself to me and those are dogs.

An unsharpened pencil dreams about being a razor sharp writing instrument, to have a point in life, writing all the deep internal thoughts we have. An unsharpened pencil thinks about being gripped by someone who wants to show their emotions, someone who cares enough to sharpen me to give me a point. An unsharpened pencil remembers when that one kid snapped me on his head, splinters of my furnished cedar wood on the ground. when I was packed in the brown cardboard box and shipped. An unsharpened pencil forgets the moment when I was in the forest a short cedar tree,

I, Brianna Rose Kooshian, am technically a failure, but I’m going to share the story of why that’s not always a bad thing.

I’ll admit that every ounce of my mental and physical strength that I have accumulated over my 17 years of existence has been reduced to a test of strength against the unquenchably rebellious walls of my painfully crimson red apartment. These defectively cracked and stained walls serve as a constant reminder of what my existence is truly encompassed by: neglect.

I woke up around 7 am to go to school with the soft yelling voice of my mother. I had my classes and then it was time for lunch. Me and my friends were talking and then the topic “ The Window “ came up. The window is bad news and is very mysterious. My group of friends dared and without any thinking I a greed, for I don’t fear many things. I went to the window at night. It was cold, dark, and the moon was watching me. When I got in it it all seemed normal. I found a knife, put it in my bag then continued searching. The old man that lived there broke the silence, and then as fast as I could I ran back home. At home I found out that I was in such a hurry that I left my bag in the apartment.

The kitchen was the heart of the house. The cabinets were painted bright green and the walls were linen white. When me and my sister were little my mother let us decorate the walls any way we wanted with a maccaroni yellow paint. She kept it up even when we were older, vowing to never paint over it, saying, “It’s nice to remember when you were young and cute.” That is how I knew something was changing. I came home from school one day and the walls were covered with a fresh, shiny coat of brown paint, the toxic fumes still floating in the air. Speechless, I sat down at the large kitchen table with a box of goldfish and waited. An hour later my sister arrived home and stopped dead in her tracks, “What the hell happened in here” she