My sample turned out much better than how I had expected! It definitely was not as easy as I had first hoped; I had no idea where to start. I found myself thinking, should I come up with a meaning that I want to say before I black out the words? Or do I just start blacking out words and see what I leave?

            I ended up doing a mixture of both. I would find a phrase that I liked, or part of a sentence that could stand alone, and erase the words around it. Then, I would take that sentence and the meaning that it had and go off of it with phrases and words that followed. The final product read:

​

“An abusive drug addict and alcoholic can appear to be played out. We want to see relatable, but not to the point of distress; it’s too close to home. We have a comedic tradition of making fun of the people in those worlds, but these people live four blocks down from you and two blocks over.”

​

I was pleasantly surprised with the end product. I feel as though it almost completely encompasses what my essay tried to say in ten pages: that in portraying mental illness inaccurately, it harms those people that struggle daily to achieve the things that we take for granted. If I decide to pursue this experiment, my next paragraph would actually talk about the depictions of mental illness on Shameless.