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Jim McCrory

Reflections on Writing Personal Essay at Master's Level

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Tuesday, 1 Oct 2024, 20:23

"For me, the process of writing personal essays during my master’s 

was not only an academic exercise

 but a way of processing the world and my place in it 

at a time when both seemed uncertain."



Image kindly provided by https://unsplash.com/@kellysikkema


Writing personal essays as part of a Creative Writing degree is an experience that draws you into an intimate relationship with your own life. For me, completing my master’s at the end of the Covid pandemic, much of that journey involved writing personal essays—reflecting on who I was in a time when the world itself was in a state of deep reflection and isolation. The personal essay, by its very nature, forces you to look inward, to craft narratives that not only feel true to yourself but also engage with broader human experiences. But that is where the journey begins.

On the one hand, writing about personal experiences demands a kind of authenticity that doesn’t always come naturally. It’s not simply about recounting a story or an event but shaping that memory into something meaningful, something that resonates with others. There’s this constant tension between telling the truth of your experience and presenting it in a way that meets the demands of the genre—structure, voice, literary techniques, all of which have to be woven into the emotional core of your story. That can feel like a tightrope act. You’re trying to be honest, yet you’re also crafting a piece of art, refining and manipulating your experiences for the sake of the story. Sometimes, in the process, it’s easy to wonder whether the pursuit of craft pulls you further away from your own truth.

The vulnerability of writing personal essays was especially intense during my time in the master’s program. The workshop setting adds another layer of emotional complexity. Sharing something deeply personal in a group of peers, knowing it will be picked apart for the sake of improvement, can feel deeply exposing. I often found myself wondering how to separate my own feelings from the essay itself when I received feedback. Was their critique of the narrative, or were they indirectly critiquing the person I was revealing on the page? The boundary between the self and the written self becomes blurred in that kind of environment, and it takes time to develop the emotional fortitude to accept feedback without internalizing it too deeply.

At the same time, I also faced the pressure to perform, to produce essays that not only explored meaningful experiences but did so in a way that impressed. There’s this unspoken competition in academic writing programs where you’re aware of how your work measures up against your peers. It’s tempting to dramatize your experiences or choose topics that you think will hit harder in a workshop setting, but that can sometimes lead to a kind of performative vulnerability, where you sacrifice your own emotional truth in the pursuit of recognition or approval. I had to constantly remind myself that the power of a personal essay doesn’t come from how sensational the story is but from the depth of insight and the honesty it brings.

This was compounded by the fact that I was writing in a time when the world felt precarious. Finishing my degree in the aftermath of Covid, when life itself was filled with uncertainties, I found myself navigating difficult emotions—grief, anxiety, loss, and isolation. The pandemic pushed all of us inward, forced us to confront ourselves in ways that felt raw and unfiltered. Writing personal essays during this period felt, at times, like peeling away layers of myself that I hadn’t quite come to terms with. Finding the right distance from those experiences to write with clarity, while still being emotionally connected, was one of the hardest parts of the process. How do you write about something that still feels unresolved within you?

Yet, even in that struggle, there was something profoundly human about the process. Writing personal essays is a way of processing, of turning over experiences, seeing them from different angles, and eventually finding some meaning in them. For me, it became a way of making sense of not only my personal history but also the collective experiences we were all going through during the pandemic. However, there were moments of emotional exhaustion. Continuously mining your own life for material, especially when it involves revisiting painful or unresolved memories, can lead to burnout. There’s only so much emotional energy you can pour into your writing before it starts to feel draining.

As with many others in my program, I found that navigating identity, culture, and expectations added another layer of complexity. The personal essay often draws on themes of identity—who you are in terms of race, gender, class, or culture—and the workshop setting, with its diversity of voices, can sometimes feel like a spotlight on those aspects of yourself. It’s easy to feel like there’s an expectation to write from a specific perspective, to represent something larger than yourself, even if your experience is far more nuanced or complex. I often questioned whether I was writing for myself or for an audience that had certain expectations of what my story should be.

Ultimately, the personal essay is both a deeply rewarding and challenging form of writing, especially in the academic context of a Creative Writing degree. While it offers a platform for exploring and making sense of your own life, it also asks for a great deal of vulnerability, emotional labour, and the willingness to confront parts of yourself that may not always be comfortable to examine. But despite those challenges, or maybe because of them, it remains one of the most powerful ways to connect with others—through our shared humanity, our stories, and the truths we uncover along the way. For me, the process of writing personal essays during my master’s was not only an academic exercise but a way of processing the world and my place in it at a time when both seemed uncertain.


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