In Emily Dickinson’s “I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain,” the speaker experiences a mind that seems to work against her. Sometimes our own thoughts can make a situation feel worse than it actually is. Describe a time when overthinking, worrying, or doubting yourself affected the way you handled a situation. What did you learn from the experience?5

 i have to catch up on a lot :/

Prompt Response
I know not many people will read this, so I'll be quite honest. I definitely have been in lots of moments where my thoughts drowned out the world, drowned my common sense, hindered on making the right decision. The only event I can really think of is that time I was having a very bad anxiety attack after the whiplash of some very sad news that turned out to not be true, all while dealing with that turmoil, I had to deal with the school administration demanding me to act like nothing ever happened; to act like I didn't feel those very legitimate, agonizing feelings. It felt like my mind was ripped into two pieces. One was working overtime on dealing with the psychological fallout, while the other stayed arguing the administration for my own mental health. It took some serious decisions under pressure. Having to push my way to get the help I needed that day.
I learned that we have to endure and stay strong to make the big decisions. Sometimes we need to fight for ourselves even when the system fails on us, the system that promises to save us. But most importantly, I learned that your emotions are the most vital portion of your psychology; that sometimes it will feel unbearable to push through a situation, but time will pass on anyway, and that too shall pass. Overthinking, worrying, or doubting oneself is a part of the process to solve the problems that are endangering us in that moment. That we shouldn't ignore these emotions, but embrace them because they exist. They are here to tell us something about ourselves that we don't know. It's how the mind communicate with our conscience. If we work together with our emotions, no matter how emotionally taxing, it can help us work under the pressure to feel better again.

Summary
Today (August 24th) we analyzed one of Emily Dickenson's poems about the phenomenology of grief, "I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain," answering questions about the text and directly analyzing it line by line.

Reflection
It's a strong piece, I had read it before on my own time before this class. It always surprised me how Emily could describe grief so systematically but poetically. Her metaphor was so strong since it cut exactly through each stage of grief so elegantly and simply.