Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Micro Personal Essay

Emotion was a complicated entity in my household growing up, an entity I could never truly understand. 

I have always felt everything, both joy and sadness, deeply and with every drop of passion in my body for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are of me crying or throwing tantrums that were intense to say the least. My next door neighbor, Miss Fran, and I would frequently spend time together when my parents were out of the house. I can recall throwing a fit, over what I don’t remember. She witnessed it with patience and a heart swelling with sympathy for my overreaction. I begged her not to tell my mom. She promised that she wouldn't. 

My parents were not as understanding about my “temper.” I was often scolded, grounded, and otherwise punished for my emotional episodes. I remember hearing the word “cry baby” a lot. I remember a day, I might have been four or five, when I was sitting under my mother’s antique coffee table, sobbing uncontrollably. I remember my mother defeatedly telling me how I never go a day without crying, and up until the present day, her words are etched into my memory. I remember thinking at that moment, “wow, it’s true,” and made a conscious effort to go more than one day without tears. 

Before they separated when I was seven, my parents always fought. I remember my sister woke me up one night during one of their fights and the two of us stowed away across our backyard and into Miss Fran’s house. She was in the shower when we got there. She got out without washing the soap out of her hair. 

My father had a raging temper that no one ever talked about. My childhood was spent walking on eggshells, never knowing what would set him off. Six-foot-four and over 200 pounds, my father's untamable rage was more terrifying than the T-Rex that I used to think lived under my bed. Emotion was never predictable in my household. It was trial and error. It was crying for attention. It was yelling to feel heard. It was the secret, repressed love-hate relationship I had with the voices that I knew only I could hear. It was absorbing all the pains of the world into my five-year-old heart without a single crumb to lead me down my path of emotional literacy. 

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Entering the Pedagogy of Writing and Healing

I’ve always known that I wanted to teach, but not in the conventional way that I initially pursued. I came into Ithaca College as a secondary English education major, only to feel lost and discouraged for the first two years of my college career. I eventually switched to writing, which was the only aspect of the English education field that ever truly inspired me. I think what discouraged me from pursuing my education degree was that the pedagogy we learned was so narrow-minded. Much of what we were taught was about the infrastructural flaws in our public education system and how to maneuver around them. I didn’t feel inspired. I felt constrained. Within the first semester as a new writing major, I learned more about myself than I had in the previous four semesters. I explored language and the ways I can manipulate it to better understand my environment, our culture, my emotions and my own personal narrative. I became an essential part to what I was learning, rather than a separate entity from it, and was pushed out of the passive, disengaged absorption of facts and ideas and into self exploration through the learning curriculum. It was at this point that I remembered my passion for learning and my desire to be the same figure that inhibits and encourages the same learning experience in the lives of others. I still want to teach, just not in a traditional American school. 
The authors we have so far read this semester have more finely sculpted my intent to teach. Typical classroom settings reflect our overall society in that neither allow for space to address or explore trauma and general emotional literacy. Mental health and illness have always been both hushed and shamed through culturally embedded stigmatization. Yet, as we have discovered, isolation is one of (if not the most) aggravating force behind mental illness. In all the classroom and workshop examples we have followed in Writing and Healing, people heal most when working within a community to allow one to feel protected, accepted and heard by their peers. Many of our readings discuss the necessary environments that are conducive to a healing experience. 

In our two most recent readings, Jeffrey Berman’s “Writing about Suicide” and Jerome Bump’s “Teaching Emotional Literacy,” I gained a more detailed understanding of what it logistically takes to turn a conventional class into an opportunity for a deeper, more meaningful kind of learning—self exploration and healing. Both authors listed the necessities and obstacles they faced while transforming their courses. However, the more I learn about the pedagogy of healing through writing, the more questions I ask: does one have to be an established educator before introducing such a stigmatized and controversial curriculum? Is there a place in existence that focuses its teaching on emotional literacy and community learning? If so, where are they and how were they established? What other types of educational facilities teach in this way? Workshops? Private schools? I want to spend the rest of my time in this course researching how one enters the discourse of writing and healing and how I, as a perspective educator, can enter the field by focusing my teaching in this way while also incorporating other principles I value in education, such as sustainability and independent thinking. 

Monday, October 12, 2015

"Writing about Suicide" Response

This reading provided me with a tangible way of incorporating healing into traditional classroom settings and curriculum. More importantly, however, it provoked the question that I want to explore further in my 1-page write-up: How can I join the discourse of writing and healing? Or rather, how can I enter this discourse to mediate healing through writing? It's a career path that has become increasingly appealing to me and I want to use the rest of my time in this course researching what I need to do to logistically enter this field of emotional literacy through writing.

Berman's experience constructing a class for healing was a trial and error creation from scratch. He had to take numerous precautions to make sure he was not liable for worsening mental illness by clearly stating that his class was not an attempt or substitution for mental health counseling. He also had to warn his students that the material in his course may be triggering and for students to take the necessary actions if they react negatively. Berman's choice of making his students' diaries optional and anonymous was a great choice conducive for self-exploration in a no-pressure, self-driven manner, a manner that ultimately proved more beneficial than had it been required. He found a way to make his class focused on the writing, the stories being told, and the effort of his students, rather than attempting to make sense of their stories or trying to adopt the role of a therapist. For most students, including Jon, simply feeling heard was enough motivation to further his understanding about his childhood and family secrets.

Monday, October 5, 2015

"Voices from the Line" Response

I believe this essay is my favorite piece we have read so far. Julier does a phenomenal job describing and sharing the Clothes Line Project and the significant impact it has had as a collaborative work both for its participants and in the community. Julier wades through the different shirts, lightly grouping them into which stage in the healing process they might have been capturing. For some, simply telling what happened was enough; giving their stories a voice was a step towards wholeness and healing. For others, their shirts focused "on hope, or on searching for something missing, or at times on the reconstruction of a world view different from the one that was authored by the perpetrator, or one while made violence acceptable" (Julier 370). I took particular notice of the shirts that spoke to perpetrators directly, as a way to distance oneself from their victimized selves, and to claim a new, more empowered identity (Julier 371).

As someone who has experienced forms childhood trauma that have influenced my adult behaviors in different relationships, I can see how not only writing this kind of story but also having it hung up in solidarity with many others would make me feel capable of healing and taking back the control over my life. Julier integrates the idea of isolation and community, an idea we've seen since the book's introduction. Because the feeling of isolation stunts one's ability to heal, writing in this manner is definitely most effective in collaboration and unification with other voices. It brings power to their themes and messages, as well as draw awareness and empathy from the public.

I also find it important that Julier mentions that educators create a space for women to share traumatic stories by feeling protective of them. These women have been vulnerable in every aspect of addressing and coping with their experiences, and thus to allow them to heal through writing, one must do their best to protect their students from shame, judgment, misrepresentation, etc.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

"Pathography and Enabling Myths" Respone

This essay deeply resonated with many beliefs about the healing process that I've already formed and further developed my understanding in a way that was easy to absorb. It's true that when someone becomes ill, our society is quick to view illness as "a condition to be corrected, rarely to be simply accepted" (Hawkins 223). The focus in these situations is immediately put on the illness, while the person suffering from it is rarely acknowledged as needing his or her own attention. Serious illness is a traumatic experience for most people. Even after a cancer patient's illness falls into remission, his or her emotional response may not have followed suit. 

This is where Pathography comes into play. It allows those who have endured serious illnesses or other traumatic experiences to make sense of and organize their overwhelming and complex emotional reactions to their experiences. It helps a person reach out (either to others directly or to a vague general audience), leading him or her out of the isolation that frequently comes with trauma. Hawkins claims that "serious illness threatens not just the existence of the body but also the integrity of the self" (241). Pathography creates a space for those who have experienced illness to not only explore and understand their emotions but to also "go beyond it"-- to grow within the writing process itself and give new meaning to their experiences, as well as reach out to others who still suffer.