Yesterday in our DigCit class, we started brainstorming ideas for our passion projects through a process called Heartbreak Mapping. The idea belongs to Angela Maiers, who believes in order to find your passion, you must surrender to heartbreak. We began creating our heartbreak maps by drawing a heart and putting the things we love inside of that heart. We then drew another heart around the first and listed the things we hate/what breaks our heart about the things we love. Around that heart, we put possible solutions to the things we hate. To do this, we used a list of questions provided by Maiers on her website. These questions include: what makes us happy, what things do we love to do, what is our favorite memory, and what things in our heart make us sad. Her approach to finding your true passion is different than most people's, and in my opinion, it's also more effective. By listing the things we love AND the things we would change about those things, we really get to visualize what makes us "tick". You get both the good and the bad. On my heartbreak map, I listed that I love wildlife (nature), people, and my family. The conservation of our ecosystems is something I feel very strongly about and I see a lot of problems with how we, as a society, treat the environment around us, so listing what I hate was very easy. However, I had a hard time coming up with a solution to "money ruling everything" or, "money over morals" because you can't make someone change what they believe. You can only hope that you can provide a good enough argument to persuade them to think another way. Another thing I feel very strongly about is people. Generally, I believe the majority of our society is exposed to constant stress and/or criticism. I find it almost shocking that people are surprised by the amount of people that live with mental illnesses like anxiety and depression. I believe that the best solution to this problem is to educate kids, and people of all ages, on what mental illness is and to encourage them to be nice, compassionate people. By starting this at an early age, the chance of them carrying it with them through their teenage years and to adulthood is much higher.
Taylor,
ReplyDeleteCongrats on your first blog post. In reference to mental illness, I read this incredible statistic last week: According to the Mental Health Foundation, about 25% of people worldwide will suffer from some form of mental health issue during the course of a year.
This data makes mental illness so relevant in our daily lives.
Mr. Smith
Mr. Smith,
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Thank you so much for taking the time to read my post. If I decide to choose the issue of mental illness as my passion project, I'll definitely have to include that statistic.
Nice post! If you wanted to collaborate with someone for your Genius Project and are interested in doing something related to the environment, you could talk to Nathan (http://seniorseyesdigcit.blogspot.com/?_sm_au_=iHVqrvJqZ7kJrMq5). I am sure you two would come up with something pretty cool.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting, Taylor! I know you are going to enjoy this class and perhaps teach me a thing or two! Looking forward to following your blog!
ReplyDeleteTaylor, stay compassionate about the ecosystems and your concern with those in our society dealing with mental illnesses. You are correct in that we need to continue to educate others on these illnesses in order that they can help those who are dealing with it on an everyday basis.
ReplyDeleteMrs. Padgett,
DeleteThank you so much for taking the time to comment on my post. I agree that education plays a big part in the solution to both problems.