1 Moving Forward by Stepping Back

In an instant, my identity changed.

I was 23 and thought of myself as a martial artist and a musician. Those roles had been central to everything that I knew and did for many years. Then, I was forced to reexamine my identity. It happened during karate practice. I was sparring with multiple partners when my foot got stuck on a mat and I severely dislocated my knee. Instantly, I knew I may never be able to kick the same way, but I had not yet learned the full extent of my injuries.

The knee injury led to a series of life-threatening blood clots in my lungs, and I was diagnosed with a disorder that made such clots more likely. The treatment for the clotting disorder was blood thinners, which has meant that since my early twenties, I have had to avoid contact sports, including karate. The damage to my knee was serious enough that it prohibited most of the kinds of martial arts that I had practiced up to that point. The recovery for the injury and for the clots involved a lot of sitting.

Prior to my injury, when I had big feelings, I ran. I moved. I hit things (inanimate, appropriate things). Now, suddenly, I had to remain still. I couldn’t resolve my feelings in the same way, so I became depressed, anxious, angry, and frustrated. I knew of no way to let those feelings go without movement.

Thankfully, at that moment my stepmother introduced me to a form of stream of consciousness journaling. I began to wake each day and write in quiet for 15 minutes in a journal. I didn’t worry about what I wrote, or why I was writing. In some cases, I wrote things like “when will these 15 minutes be done?” I also wrote about the feelings I had about losing mobility and independence, as I suddenly had to rely on friends and family to drive me wherever I needed to go. I expressed frustration at how things that used to be easy, like walking, now became slow and labored on crutches. I filled hundreds of pages in handwritten college-ruled notebooks throughout the years following my accident.

Eventually, writing in a journal became what running or exhausting my body had been. Journaling became a way to release the pent-up weight of emotions, and when I placed some of these feelings on a page, it cleared my head, and helped me to find a way forward. I came to realize another part of my identity was that of an artist, a person who has a need to be creative and to create. I had been reading a lot of fiction while recovering, and so I decided to write a novel. In addition to beginning each day with journaling, I would also write the novel for a half hour. In a few months, I had a draft of a truly terrible fantasy novel about a bard who was also a barbarian, a big oaf who could beat you up but who would rather sing you a song.

It may have been a tad autobiographical.

Now, as I look back on my discovery of journaling, I recognize what I was doing was thinking about my thinking. That is, I reflected on how I was thinking about myself, and who I was, and by engaging in reflection I began to understand myself differently. I had reduced my personality down to a series of external activities and when a barrier hampered those activities, I shut down, deflated, knowing that I could never be the person I imagined myself to be. When I allowed myself a chance to step back, think about the activities that gave meaning to my life, accept the place that I found myself, and then do what I could do at that moment, I did something that I value to this day. I wrote a novel.

Metacognition, thinking about thinking, is now understood as a key component of learning. You may have experienced it in your classes, even if you were not aware of it as it happened. Consider two hypothetical students. The teacher tells the students to read chapter three to prepare for a quiz. The first student reads the chapter and does not do well on the quiz. The second student, before reading, wonders: “why am I being asked to read chapter three?” and “how does chapter three relate to the work we’ve done in class?” and perhaps most importantly, “what might the quiz cover from chapter three?” When the second student reads chapter three, they noticed connections between it and the previous chapters. Concepts that had been covered in class correlated with information in the chapter. Observations stuck with the second student as if highlighted in the text, because they had thought about what information was the most important to notice before reading. So, the second student did well on the quiz. Thinking about how, why, and what we learn makes us more likely to learn. There are many evidence-based studies, such as those conducted by Saundra Yancy McGuire, demonstrating the importance of thinking about how one is thinking as a component of learning.

I wish I could say that I gained a habit of reflective journaling after my accident. I wish I was someone who understood from that incident that thinking about how I thought was essential to my being productive and learning new things. Unfortunately, I have had to relearn this lesson many times before it began to stick. I relearned it in romantic relationships when I had to discover how my thinking was affecting my feelings. I discovered it again when I noticed that how I was thinking about writing was keeping me from completing my PhD dissertation. I know now that if I want to do something well, and to experience an activity as fulfilling and easy, I often need to start from a place of reflection. I am most at ease in an activity when I understand how my thoughts shape the feelings I bring to an experience. I accomplish more when I first wonder, “why am I thinking this way?”

Works Cited

McGuire, Saundra Yancy. Teach Yourself How to Learn: Strategies You Can Use to Ace Any Course at Any Level. Stylus Publishing, 2018.

About the author

name: Brian Moon

Brian Moon has taught at UA since 2003. When he isn’t teaching, he is a choral conductor, guitarist, singer, occasional songwriter, and an avid amateur cook who struggles to fit all of these activities into a busy life with his family. One of Brian’s core beliefs is that music is transformational. Add the right music into a person’s life and it will change them. In this manner, music makes the world a better place.