In the original one-pager, I talked about how freewriting was my form of meditation. Instead of freewriting this time, I decided to just sit down in my dorm's silent prayer room and be alone with my thoughts. It was a similar process, since in my freewrite I ended up writing a bit about my day and things that I was happy or anxious about, but I think it was a bit more reflective and satisfying to just sit in silence thinking about it.

This was originally a one-pager titled, "Forcing Myself to be Alone," and it was in response to the prompt of one part of Reclaiming Conversion by Sherry Turkle that stood out to me. The original essay was very unfocused, since I wrote for a bit in the first paragraph about a quote from the "Solitude" chapter and why it stood out to me, but then I completely switched gears in the second paragraph and wrote about my personal experiences with meditation and freewriting. In this essay, I decided to focus entirely on meditation, since I had some new experiences anyway.

This paragraph touching on White Mountain's association with Boston College was not in my first draft. I think my examples of ways that White Mountain is connected to BC helps to illustrate why White Mountain would be special to a potential BC student, but I don't think I executed it well. First of all, I was not reminded from the pictures that White Mountain has been "a staple of BC students for over 30 years," because I only knew that because I had looked it up. Moreover, I think I was reaching even more when I said that White Mountain is "just like" the community that was formed at Sugaree, my hometown ice cream parlor that I contrasted with White Mountain throughout the essay. They are actually very different, and Sugaree is probably much less diverse than I made it out to be, but I felt at the time that I needed to draw this crystal-clear connection between the two places. In reality, it is a lot more nuanced than that.

In the first draft, this paragraph was very similar, except at the end I said "ALL people in White Mountain came from a different background," instead of "many people." This would obviously be a reach to say that everyone is from a different background, considering it's most likely all either BC students or Newton residents whenever you go in there. What is also funny about this paragraph is that my friend wasn't even from Texas. He was from Virginia, and he didn't have an accent at all. I wrote in Texas because I thought it would help to illustrate the "diversity" of White Mountain, but as I read it back now it seems obvious that I was reaching.

This entire paragraph was not in the first draft at all. Since I had refocused the essay to make it more about the specific aspects of White Mountain that make it special, rather than why ice cream is special, I had to include a paragraph about the interior. Although I definitely had an attention to detail in this paragraph, it is obvious that I was not being 100% honest. When I wrote, "My friends and I willingly choose to consume frozen dessert on a night when it is less than 50 degrees, because the interior of White Mountain allows us to forget about that," I was quite obviously exaggerating here. The fact of the matter is that we chose to "consume frozen dessert" because we wanted ice cream, not because of the interior. Still, though, at least I elaborated on some details that made White Mountain different from any other ice cream place.

In my first draft, I had a similar sentence where instead of listing aspects of White Mountain that united a group of people into one space, I merely said that people gather in this space for one thing: ice cream. Since this sentence is essentially the thesis of my essay, it would be ridiculous for me to say, "I realized that people gather in White Mountain, an ice cream parlor, for ice cream." Of course people would gather here for ice cream, since it's an ice cream parlor. I tried to make it sound deep by trying to imply that ice cream is this uniting factor for people of all walks of life, but that doesn't explain why White Mountain is special, which is the goal of the essay. Instead, I framed this sentence and the rest of the essay around the idea that White Mountain's interior, workers, and association with BC make it a special place to gather for ice cream.

This section stands out to me because it highlights an interesting phenomenon that is present in many elementary and high schools today. While the school itself tries to promote individuality and "being yourself," the culture among young teenagers has been and still is to always blend in with the crowd. Therefore, in my opinion, sometimes it isn't the school's fault that kids can't express themselves, but the nature of teenagers. It's also noteworthy how the author mentions that girls especially can't be above themselves. This could be due to some internalized misogyny in young girls or just unfair treatment of girls in school. The author also mentions that schools sometimes half-heartedly try to make their work seem more "creative" and "interactive," but still implicitly require everyone to be the same.