Habitus 2

With exposure to new things and new people my habitus has changed. My exchanges with people have given me more to think about and broadened my understanding of the world. Learning about a different place and watching movies about a place is one experience. This is the first step towards understanding. Actually talking to different people gets you an understanding on a different level. There is a lot of learn from the exchanges themselves and how you relate to one another. You get to know how similar you are, you see yourself, and you see the differences.

My experience has made me more aware of my own surroundings. Me and my HKBU partner have being sharing pictures and stories from our daily life to go towards her assignment. We were sharing these things before, just casually as a way of getting to know each other but now it’s more deeper. She is planning for us to write “a day in the life…” type of story, where we write a story from each other’s perspective. To do that we send everyday things. So I am starting to develop a pattern of thinking and trying to capture everyday moments. Most of these things go over our head but there are stories and things to learn in the everyday if we really search. I see this when she sends me things – I see our differences, and I see how similar we are. It has made me more attuned to differences and similarities.

I have become so aware of my surroundings that I am finding it very difficult to write fiction. I used to write fiction that was quite far from me and when I didn’t really think of my surroundings in terms of me and my life, but rather I fed everything through imagined characters and imagined worlds. Now I try to write fiction but poetry comes out. My thinking has become more fragmented and more association based. I am struggling to think in fiction, I am finding it easier to write non-fiction because I am beginning to notice a lot more and think about where I am and who I am and what my habitus is.

Fiction is not impossible, however, lately when I write fiction I can clearly see where it has come from, it is usually derived from something in my life, in a more personal way than my fiction before had. This may be a good thing as I am picking up on the differences and details in my life and world. However, I also find it a little hindering – I used to be more experimental with perspective and world, and imagine worlds and life far from me. But there’s no reason why I can’t use what I have learned to feed into more “imagined” worlds and narratives.