"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.

"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.

"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. 

"Healing and the Brain" Response

Honestly, this reading was probably my least favorite from our selected works. Alice Brand focuses 95% of her piece on explaining the functioning of the brain and very little time actually writing about healing, even though she makes a few connections to healing within the reading. I also found her writing to be choppy and her syntax was a bit hard to follow. Regardless, she does make some interesting and useful claims that can apply to what we're learning in class.

Brand argues that the psychology behind emotions and healing are more complex than most people know. She emphasizes the amygdala, which seems to have the most power in producing emotional responses. This small part of the brain "gets the message forty milliseconds before the intellectual part of your brain does" when someone sees something that resembles a snake (Brand 201). She revisits this idea later in her essay when she claims that "the amygdala can register 'memory before it even reaches our senses...prior to and independent of' the intellect" (Brand 208). These findings reminded me of our first reading and people who suffer from PTSD. Flashbacks occur when something resembling some aspect of a memory triggers an emotional response, before the person can reason their way out of it by realizing there is no real danger here in the present moment. As a person who suffers with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), I often am unable to reason my way out of a panic attack or some other state of anxiety because whatever triggered me sent me spiraling into a certain emotional response, and my reasoning abilities go offline for a while. However, writing is a way I can better understand these emotions, which prepares me to deal with future anxiety.

Complicity

For twelve years of my life, I spent several weeks of every summer at a Girl Scout day camp. After my twelfth year, I decided not to return. Something wasn't right--there was a constant feeling of always being watched under an unseen eye of judgment. Trips to the porta-potty would almost always turn into privately bashing a girl from the group. I wasn't innocent, either. Kicking up gravel with sneakers that would have made a great topic for gossip themselves, I would listen to my fellow camper's abrupt topic change. I would nod in agreement. Eventually I would chime in. We would laugh at some insignificant quality of another, a quality we would use as our own form of twisted entertainment for days. But it all grew old, and I moved on from Oak Spring Day Camp. In my high school, I still gossiped in cramped muggy bathrooms during homeroom, assuming the complicity of my listeners. It would take years before I considered what caused my desire to shame others, that it was really a reflection of my own insecurity, and more years still until I saw the pattern of girls bashing girls, how our society teaches us to hate each other, rather than build each other up. 

For these epiphanic reasons, I decided to return to Oak Spring as a counselor, to positively influence the lives of these girls, and with a certain amount of idealistic hope, redirect the course of their social futures towards one of female peace and solidarity. I drove my Honda-CRV up the gravel, tree-shaded entrance with unfiltered optimism. I had plans for team work building activities and self-esteem exercises. But after a few days in breathing in the frustratingly hot and humid air, I realized something: my coworkers were no better than the girls-- that they'd gossip about each other even worse than the campers. 

On an afternoon during my second week, I brought my campers to run through the sprinkler. While they frolicked through the water, a camp-aid (a slightly younger, volunteer counselor) joined me on a bench. The two of us had been working well together all week, bonding over shared stories and experiences. What seemed to be out of nowhere, she began talking about another counselor at the camp. 

"She's so fucking lazy," the camp-aid said. "She just doesn't do anything." 

Here I was, listening to my coworker perpetuate the very behavior I sought to cut out of the girls we were mentoring. The worst part is that I agreed with her. Her claim about the other counselor wasn't untrue. The counselor was in fact extremely lazy and put a burden on the rest of us. But there had to be another way of handling this, of turning it into a solution. 

I listened to her attentively. I paused a moment before responding. 

"What do you think we could do to make it better?" I said. She looked at me, puzzled.

"How can we make this into a solution?" I said, rephrasing my question. At first she seemed hesitant, but eventually opened up to the idea of creating some kind of solution. By this point, two other counselors had joined us on the bench. 

"I came to this camp because when I went here years ago, I realized how girls are taught to hate each other. Why are boys taught to work together, while girls are taught to bring each other down? I want to lead these girls away from hate. I want to teach them how to build each other up and to work together. I'm sad to say that I've already heard gossip between counselors here. But how are we ever going to teach this to our girls when we don't do it ourselves?"

They all looked at me with sad, understanding eyes. I thought I smelled change in that hot, humid air.

"Language and Literature as 'Equipment for Living'" Response

In Tilly Warnock's essay, she explores the influences of unquestioned and usually unnoticed aspects of our identities that were handed to us at an early age, sometimes since birth. Our "directions" are something that usually, we don't have the privilege or opportunity to choose for ourselves. Our "life, time, history, race, class, gender," and names had all been chosen for us, simply by our births (Warnock 41). When these children grow up and write about themselves, they must completely reconsider the idea of "I" and "me," as they both were constructed by others and one's interactions with these social constructions. Therefore, excluding life from one's writing limits how much one can grow with her words. Life-writing should be limitless. It should involve as much revision as one needs or desires to unbound the possibilities for the meaning in the writer's life. A writer's life should mean whatever she wants it to mean, and limiting that at all will surely restrict her growing process.

For me, Warnock's most provocative idea was using her own life story to exemplify the molding factors of social constructions and the endless implications they created for her in her early adolescence. Acknowledging the unchosen circumstances of one's identity will allow her to more knowingly explore herself in her writing. I would like to further delve into the idea of chosen and unchosen identity, and how writing can aid in the deconstruction and reconstruction of who we are. 

Personal Experience

I've always been terrified of being abducted. I've envisioned it more than once: in high school self-defense classes and in dreams. I turn around every fifty steps when I walk alone late at night. I have a rape whistle on my keychain. Despite the fear I held onto, I  always pictured myself as a fighter. I'd see myself grappling and struggling, clawing and kicking. But when it actually came down to it, I didn't fight; I froze. 

It wasn’t my first music festival—it was already my second one just during that particular summer. I’d been going to concerts, raves, dances, and music festivals for years. I started partying young—around seventeen— so dealing with the occasional inebriated, obnoxious or ill-intentioned creep was nothing new. I knew all the rules: stick together; go nowhere alone, stay aware of your surroundings. But when unlucky timing mixes with getting a little too comfortable, anyone is vulnerable. 

* * *

It’s nearing the end of the first night of Moonrise, a two-day electric music festival in Baltimore. I’ve danced for ten hours straight, running between multiple stages with my boyfriend, Adrian, and another couple, Luke and Erin. But by this time in the day, I have the satisfying mix of feeling happy and exhausted. We’re toward the outer edge of a large crowd when I tell them to keep dancing without me, that I’ll be sitting against the fence that was in their direct line of vision. 

As I sway to the beat of the music, eyes closed, enjoying the moment, I feel something indescribable, like being watched. I open my eyes and there he is: a forty-something, greasy man, with a nasty five-o’clock shadow. He stands over me and sticks out his hand. 

“Hi,” he says.

“Hello,” I say hesitantly. He shakes my hand, but doesn’t let go of it. 

“Come with me,” he says, tightening his grip on my hand. He starts pulling me toward him. His free hand grabs my forearm. 

* * *

It  was like those dreams when you need to run but your legs only move in slow motion or the dream when you want to scream but you can’t utter a sound. I wonder what my face looked like as he pulled me farther off the ground. I was barely able to make out the word “Adrian." My boyfriend didn’t hear me say his name; it was entirely too loud and I practically whispered it, but he happened to look over at the same time, ran over, and quickly diffused the situation. 

Nothing actually happened to me. I walked away without a scratch, took a moment to collect myself with the support of my friends, and we made our way to the closing show. But what did follow me after that night was exactly that: what didn’t happen: my ability to fight back—how if no one turned to look at me, how easily I could have been taken.