This I Believe

I have one more week left in my essay writing course and while I have enjoyed the classes immensely, I have found the writing process challenging. As I sit down to write about meaningful episodes in my life, (with style and universal appeal) -I realize that I have been working through a fair number of dramatic issues and events over the last couple of years. Sometimes I feel like the stories are too gnarled to unravel -and I have trouble picking a starting point and pulling through on a single thread. My attempts are characterized by a lot of stops and starts and it has been frustrating. Our assignment for last week was to write a "This I Believe" essay. I did not know what this meant until I looked up the website: http://thisibelieve.org/
The following is lifted straight from the homepage:
"This I Believe is an international project engaging people in writing and sharing essays describing the core values that guide their daily lives. Over 60,000 of these essays, written by people from all walks of life, are archived here on our website, heard on public radio, chronicled through our books and television programming, and featured in weekly podcasts. The project is based on the popular 1950s radio series of the same name hosted by Edward R. Murrow."
Contributors to the project range from Bill Gates and Muhammad Ali to the everyman or woman of middle America. I found the exercise of writing a "This I Believe" essay more manageable and rather satisfying as a value-clarification kind of exercise. My first "This I Believe" attempt was about Clash (as in debate, dissent, opposing ideas) and inspired by my frustration of censoring myself while living in Denmark.