Letting Your Guard Down and Letting Yourself Out
The Ethnographic I by Carolyn Ellis is an amazing source to compare my own autoethnographic work to. After reading this book, I was truly able to put myself into my own work by incorporating my own feelings, experiences, and thoughts into the interviews of others. But other than the general ethnographic theme and learned ability of how to write an autoethnography that this book gave me, a few chapters particularly stuck out to me. “Revealing is Painful, Reflections on Living the Autoethnographic Life: The Pain of Revealing, and her chapter about “Balancing Vulnerability and Risk” are all ones I related to personally.
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Throughout my assignments, I was at first hesitant to truly let my guard down and reveal myself onto a piece of paper. I talked about two very personal aspects of my life, my basketball team and my relationship. I was nervous that neither would approve of what I was doing and was therefore reluctant in making my projects as good as I knew they could be. It’s hard to let yourself be vulnerable; it’s uncomfortable. We never want our vulnerability to be seen, that’s just an aspect of human nature. But eventually I learned that you have to let your guard down and let yourself out in order to truly be successful in autoethnographic work, so ultimately, that’s exactly what I did.
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