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Run Along Now, 2020.

"Run Along Now" is an essay written for Scott Saul’s Creative Nonfiction workshop. The prompt for this assignment revolved around “performance”—about how we behave in certain situations, whether in public or private, and about the roles we play, the different caps we must put on. Around the time of the prompt, I had just experienced my grandmother pass away, put my dog down, and been in constant conversation with close friends grappling with the deaths of their loved ones. Between COVID-19 and other circumstances in my personal life, death—and consequently the attempt to understand and process it—had been more present in my life than ever before. Whether through journaling or crafting an essay, writing has always been a way for me to make sense of things I cannot otherwise organize in my mind. So, the following essay is just that: my attempt to reflect on, understand and accept the chaos my 2020 presented. My mother always told me that the two most powerful events you can experience are birth and death; as such, it was important for me to meditate on my own performance in a time of passing and what that could teach me about myself.

Darcy Burnham
B.A. English, Cognitive Science, 2022 | UC Berkeley Literature |
Darcy is an undergraduate from San Francisco who has been pursuing creative endeavors since early childhood—from painting, drawing and ceramics to digital design and writing. Until recently, Darcy saw her two main areas of study at Berkeley—Cognitive Science and English—as separate, non-overlapping interests. Over the past semester, however, she has been working on a Natural Language Processing project with professor David Bamman to advance a machine learning model to analyze literature in multiple languages. She hopes to further explore this intersection of literature and technology in her senior thesis this coming year.

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