Wither - Free Writing
Updated: Apr 24, 2020
In a free writing exercise, our students wrote down what "wither" meant to them. But what does "wither" mean to you?
Ameera AlSaid
Am I withering? No, I don’t think so. I sometimes feel alive then I feel dead, there isn’t an in between. But withering is slow in the process, it’s dying slowly, losing it slowly. But it's natural to wither. It is natural for flowers/plants to wither. Even humans, I think. The flowers on my desk all withered but I didn’t throw it yet. Do you keep watering something that has withered in hopes it revives or do you just give up? Do you keep the hope it's gonna relive? Maybe I should just throw it away because it's ugly now. I mean we don’t throw away humans when they wither aka get sick. We do our best to heal them even if the situation is hard. You don’t give up, you try to maintain.
Maryam Gamar
As the acts in the play progress to ‘chopped down’ I feel like I’m going the opposite direction. In my head I’m regrowing right now because I’ve gotten over my lowest point so far in this quarantine. I feel like I was chopped down and uprooted last week. Recently, I’ve been meditating and cooking and I feel more positive even though I still feel negative about so many things and I get frustrated with my circumstances sometimes.
My biggest issue right now is that I’m always tired and I don’t have motivation to do anything because I need a routine and structure in my life to feel productive. I feel like I’m on a really bad vacation like the time my whole family went on a road trip but we stayed in really cheap motels and only ate at diners. We all got sick and fought the whole time and ran out of gas. I I feel like that now; there’s not much to do and part of me wants to go back to class, but part of me wants to have fun and relax but neither is completely possible.
Muhammad Muneeb Ur Rehman
There is something really weird about the word whither. It gives me this feeling of a slow and gradual process that takes months if not years. Weird, right? In other words, opposite words like bloom or sprout or shine do not feel like that at all. They rather seem like something that just passes, not very slow even if not very fast. That is the curse of the human mind, I guess. We tend to elongate negative experiences. Maybe it is the survival instinct that helps us do that but it does. We associate negative words and connotations with longer periods of time or gradual processes that probably are miserable and hurt. Does whither of a flower really take longer than its bloom? Is that really a thing? In real life? In object reality?
Sana Hussein
At this point, life feels like it’s in a constant state of witherance (don’t even know if that’s a word). Every day is a little bit worse – I learn about more sick people, and I learn about more dead people. Just like the life gets taken out of the plants in my room that I can’t seem to care about, feels like the liveliness is being squeezed out of whatever is left of life now. But wither feels like such a place of comfort., and I don’t understand why.