Mellix

Mellix explains how her roots and culture gave this standard for language and writing. As she experiences life and education, she is given so many opportunities, confidence, and finds her passion and love. Starting out as a letter writer for a health insurance company, she is overcome by an urge for more, something bigger and better. Enrolling herself in a college writing course, she states how she feels self-conscious because of her “status as a black”. Which is very understandable. Like we talked about in the class on Tuesday; when one grows up experiencing/ being taught a certain language (in Mellix’s case), it is very difficult to just let that part of you drift away. Mellix says “I was unaware that I was transforming into my best classroom language My concern was to use appropriate language, to sound as if I belonged in a college classroom. But I felt separate from the language - as if I did not and could not belong to me.” However, as she sees what she is capable of and her self-satisfaction with her writing, it became a part of her. She says she began to think and feel in the language that she used, and realized that “how one speaks influences how one means”. Discovering her true self, new oppurtunities, challenges, possibilities, and power through writing. “I write and I continually give birth to myself.” As for Gale, she grew up in a China under a democracy. Coming to America, she was scared, confused, ashamed of herself and lack of American culture, and felt like a total outcast. The power of language and writing allowed her get past those feeling and accept American culture; through her teaching, students, teachers ect. Helping her adjust from the only life she knew in China to an American life. She states how we learn about our ‘selves’ in the process of writing it is a process of learning and living that has no closure: we write our "selves"in the process of living; we learn about our "selves"in the process of writing-we are lucky that we can write. They both use writing to learn and adjust to a lifestyle/language they were not used to.