There's Still a Person Underneath

I really enjoyed that this reading focused on a new genre that has arrived recently in our culture. I had never heard of pathographies before (and even Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize it as an actual word) but I really like that it’s transformed into a form of writing where people who suffer from illnesses can write about the experience in a narrative way. I thought it was interesting when she talked about how it’s come to be. The fact that it used to be done privately in journals or diaries but has now made its way into the public is pretty fascinating. It’s a topic we’ve grown comfortable with in talking about and reading, and so people are commonly writing about it, deserving of its own genre.

The way we used to view illness to the way we see it now is also something worth noting. Because medicine wasn’t as advanced back then as it is now, people viewed illness as a natural part of life, but because of modern medicine nowadays, we view it as isolated from the person, something to be corrected. To use the battle metaphor she so often discusses, a foreign enemy come to attack the person’s body. “But the person with the disease needs attention.” (223). Doctors tend to focus on attacking the ailment, curing the ailment, and forget that there’s a person underneath. “Disease can be treated and in some cases even cured; people, though, require healing.” (223). And that’s the fascinating thing that pathographies do, they place the person at the center of the discussion. The person writes their interpretation of the experience rather than just simply recording it. They see their self as a capacity for change (not just in how the illness is affecting them and altering them) but in how they respond to it. This transformative self, or the self-in-process as Rogers stated form the other reading, helps in that healing, as does the whole genre of pathographies.

Hawkins’s essay mainly focuses on physical illnesses, but I think it’s important to look at mental ones as well, especially when thinking about healing. I think it’s kind of scary the statistics of college students that will suffer from/already live with a mental illness, and it’s not something widely discussed throughout our campus. In fact, it’s not really talked about at all, and it still receives a negative stigma (take last year’s fight that CAPS had in trying to get another counselor for the department, it had to take so much energy and pleading). The influx of students CAPS was getting also says something: we all are going to struggle with this at some point or another. Last year was one of the worst semesters I have ever had, and I was way deep in depression and anxiety, still am too at times. Writing about it for other classes was extremely helpful for me in remembering that there’s still a person underneath it. I’m still me underneath it all. Illnesses in general really do place the focus on the disease, seeing it as not a part of the person. And that’s part of the stigma, we see it as something that needs to be fixed for the person to go back to “normal.” We don’t see it as something that we may now have to live with, something that is now and may be forever a part of us. We see it as a stranger, I know I did. I was not familiar with it at all, and it felt so strange for me to experience it then. But I think the significant thing to note is that, even if it’s something you develop, even if this illness comes into your life, you’re still the same person underneath, the only difference is that the illness has coincided with yourself, but it doesn’t have to define you.

Memory, Learning, and Emotions, Oh My!

This reading was a bit more difficult for me than the ones we’ve had previously. In fact, although she made some really great points, I thought that the title was very misleading. “Healing and the Brain” was not what a chunk of this piece was about. All I got was “brain, brain, emotion is more powerful than intellect, brain, and brain.” Yeah, she discusses healing in conjunction with some of the topics she brings about, but really doesn’t fully delve into the healing aspect, merely just skims over it and explores concepts of the brain. I understand we need that back history, but I feel like she could have shortened it and made the healing portion of her essay a lot clearer, because – and I hope I’m not the only one – I felt very lost at many points, not sure of what her argument was anymore or what she was trying to get at. The only place I saw her really start to get into healing where it made sense to me was towards the end, and then the essay just stops. She tries to tie it up nicely together and it just did not work for me at all, left me more confused, wondering if I was reading the right piece all along or not.

A few of the main themes I did receive, however, were that instead of seeing cognition and emotion as at odds with each other (do we think first and then act or is it reverse? Brand would argue that with recent evidence, our emotions act first), they actually work together. With our perception of sensory things or events, there’s a play between how they make us feel (amygdala) and how we interpret them (hippocampus). This brings me to one of my favorite quotes from the chapter which was, “Once our emotional system learns something, we may never let it completely go.” (209). In terms of traumatic events or sad experiences, this definitely is true. We may never be able to forget or move past from what happened, but we can take charge of it and learn from the experience that will benefit us in the end. Which brings me to her next argument on learning. You can’t have memory or learning without emotions. We can learn from our emotions, it changes the way we think and behave, and she leaves us with this notion that healing is a type of learning (or re-learning) which is definitely true. We are re-training our brain to think about the event in a different or new way that will help us instead of how it’s hurt us in the past, and you wouldn’t be able to accomplish that without emotions or memory and remembering.

You Gotta Test-Drive the Car Before You Buy It

Much like in Stephen Dunn’s piece, when I was in high school, my girl friends and I had our own kind of “locker room talk,” except this took place in our school’s cafeteria at our usual table.

I sat down in the only spot left, right across from the column with the mirror pasted onto it. I always hated sitting there because I’d feel uncomfortable when I would catch myself looking back at the person reflected in it, almost like I was undergoing some out of body experience as we all chatted. Letting my polka-dotted Jansport fall to the ground and taking out my brown paper-bagged lunch – the one mom still packed for me even though I was a sophomore in high school – I tuned into the conversation of the day.

“Yeah, we just alternated between watching the whole Lord of The Rings series and having sex.”

Oh great, a conversation I couldn’t relate with at all.

“That sounds like an amazing weekend, did you actually get through all of them?” Eleanor asked, taking a bite from her sandwich. She was no doubt the smallest in our group and always easily mistaken for a middle schooler, and with short brown hair and bangs covering her eyes, it didn’t really help that matter. But when she opened her mouth to speak, you knew she was much more intelligent and mature.

“Let’s just say we got distracted and stopped paying attention after a while,” Kyra replied with a wink, confidently sitting up tall.

Leah – who had been dating her boyfriend, Nate, for a few years – nodded and laughed, “Oh yeah, been there before. It’s a good thing your parents were away for the weekend.”

“Right? Could you imagine if they were to walk in? I would be scarred for life!”

The girls continued talking about their boyfriends, about being sexually active, and I just sat back, praying that I wasn’t the only virgin at the table. It’s not so much because of the fact that I was a virgin – I really admired that fact about myself – it was the fact that all of these girls had done so much, and I was so inexperienced, let alone I’d never french kissed a boy or had real boyfriend (the fake ones in elementary school or the quick ones in my early, shy middle school years didn’t count). I couldn’t relate to how “amazing” it must have felt, how “amazing” it must have been to be in a relationship with someone you mutually love and care about. I felt out of place in the conversation, like I wasn’t meant to be there or part of it. Until I chimed in.

“I think I’m going to wait until marriage to have sex.”

Silence. All eyes on me. What else did I expect for revealing this uncommon ideal I had that not a lot of girls or guys at that age had?

“But, like, what if the sex isn’t that good?” Leah asked, biting into her apple. “You’re stuck with that unless you get divorced.”

I remember thinking, is that all that matters in a relationship? It doesn’t have to be all based around sex. As someone who had always been a hopeless romantic, fantasizing about someday falling in love with someone who would love me too, the idea of sex seemed so miniscule. I may have been a bit naïve, but I thought that as long as you had one another, why does sex matter?

“Yeah, you gotta test-drive the car before you buy it!” Kyra laughed, shaking her head. I caught a glimpse of myself in that same mirror, feeling like I wasn’t actually present in the conversation anymore. I didn’t fit in with the group’s opinion, I was being laughed at for my own, I just wanted to shrink down and disappear and forget I had ever even said anything.

“I mean, maybe if I find the right guy who I’ve been with for a while, then maybe,” I finally uttered. And soon after, the conversation veered off into another topic. However, I’ve never forgotten that encounter.

Looking back on it now, sex frightened me. The idea of being that intimate with a person, naked and exposed, each of us staring at each other’s bodies, it terrified me and was something I was obviously not ready for. I think in part because I was battling with body image issues, and if I felt uncomfortable staring at my naked body in the mirror alone in my room, a boy would feel that same way too (although I know that’s completely false now). But when I got to college, I did find the “right guy” with whom I felt comfortable with. I began to feel better with my body and who I was, and the idea of sex didn’t seem so scary as it once had. I’m no longer a virgin, and I look back at that encounter with those girls that I’m not friends with anymore and judge myself on how naïve I was to assume I would wait until marriage, instead of seeing it as myself and my ideals, thoughts, beliefs changing. It was a strong belief of mine at the time, but that’s the thing, at the time. As I grow older, I continually change. And even in the future, possibly some of my beliefs will stay the same, but a lot of others will become something else entirely. I’m a self in process – a work still in revision, and I’m still not complete.

Works in Process

The definite essence I received from this piece is that Johnson wants us to move back to the idea that language or writing can heal because “it enable[s] one to experience one’s self as transformative, as an open-ended, socially engaged process that is always available for revision.” (87). A self in process as Rogers names it. However, through time, and hugely because of Platonic works, this idea has been discarded, arguing that when writing about one’s self, you’re trying to unlock this idea of an “authentic soul” or a true self hidden beneath your subconscious.

I thought working his way through the historical periods and explaining how all these different theories came about was extremely significant for his argument. He very beautifully explains the other side of the coin while trying to show us the differences, still hoping we agree with his point that when writing about a traumatic event, we go through “the process of ‘self-actualization’ or ‘knowing’ or healing [as] a process of coming to a vision of one’s self as flexible, as a changeful process always involved with the larger processes of evolving social contexts.” (109). We see ourselves and our pasts not as fixed points but as places for revision, we see ourselves as changeable, and these are conclusions we come to through writing, which I thought was extremely powerful and very reminiscent of Warnock’s piece about our lives still being written and revised.

One of my favorite parts and what I find to be very provocative and interesting is when Johnson writes, “…imagination and revision play a large part, not because one alters events, but because in the act of imagining and revising one reasserts a degree of control over one’s experience of events.” (88). It is very similar to what we read in the introduction about placing one’s agency back in the traumatic experience that took over their life, and I really liked the way he worded it.

The Rest is Still Being Written

            When we think of our lives, we don’t necessarily think of them in terms of writing or being written (or even rewritten). However, after reading chapter 3, I think Tilly Warnock is exactly right. The main point of her essay is that our lives our constantly being written and rewritten. Our previous experiences, our families, friends, and people, have helped in writing the very person we are, but we are also constantly in control of how our lives turn out. “We write our lives, and our lives rewrite us.” (34).

            One of the most provocative parts of her essay for me was when she was talking about the power of language and the way we use it. “…words entitle and say ‘let there be’ and ‘let there no longer be.’” (48). It really only hit me then how significant language can be in placing the power in us to choose what and how we write. What will we go back and change? What will we continue to change as we grow?

            During this piece, my mind kept flashing to Natasha Bedingfield’s song, Unwritten, which begins:

“I am unwritten, can’t read my mind, I’m undefined.

I’m just beginning, the pen’s in my hand, ending unplanned.”

           

This kind of treads back to the idea that our life is constantly being written and rewritten. We have no idea where it’s going to end up, where we are going to end up, but there is always this possibility for change, for revision.

I hope in class we can further discuss this idea of revision because it was what was most unclear to me in her whole conversation of rhetoric. I think I have some idea of what she meant, but I was just a bit confused.

I think our class discussion should focus on trying to break her piece up into parts as she had with the sections. It was very dense at times and hard to follow when she brought in her many personal accounts (never not once interesting though). Just further exploring her main theme of “writing and living” how we are constantly in charge of writing and rewriting our lives.