Your Opinion is Much Needed--Critiquing First Paragraph Forum

[Tigress]

"At age twenty-five, I underwent a new birth; the emergence of a self that hurled me from diffidence to defiance, a self that was perhaps all along there, forcibly buried beneath all my affectations at modesty and blind obedience."

Is this a banal or a good way to start a PS?

Are the punctuations correct?

Any other suggestions are much appreciated!

[jselson]

"At age twenty-five, I underwent a new birth; the emergence of a self that hurled me from diffidence to defiance, a self that was perhaps all along there, forcibly buried beneath all my affectations at modesty and blind obedience."

Are the punctuations correct?

The semicolon should be a colon, and the idiomatic phrasing is "there all along," but because that's a cliché, I would just write "always there."

Also, it's too vague of a first sentence to stand as its own paragraph. The sentence is a bit portentous, so you'll really need a clear and powerful narrative to come after - show and don't tell and all of that. But I don't think it's bad, it just needs to be connected to something more concrete in order to evaluate whether you're being hyperbolic or not, and to ground the abstractions. Whatever you do, don't get lost in abstractions.

[Tigress]

Thank you. That was really helpful.