Chapter 9- Pathography and Enabling Myths

Pathologies, as defined on the first page of the chapter, are autobiographies and biographies about illness. "It is only in our era that the illness narrative constitutes a genre all its own" (222), writes Hawkins. This type of narrative gives the patient a voice. This voice tells the story of the illness, a story that is both more and less than the truth of the experience. Memory is deceiving in this way. However, this creates a sort of myth that often encompasses a particular social phenomenon. In this chapter, the example given to us by the author is the autobiographical piece A Shallow Pool of Time, which perceives AIDS as a cultural disease. Another illness that might be written about in this way is eating disorders. This idea of the pathology as a social document is very compelling indeed.

Hawkins explains that the mythical thinking "serves a healing function," as pathologies "interpret experience rather than record" (229). This is essential to its role in the healing process. 

Chapter 8- Healing and the Brain

This chapter, written by Alice Brand, discussed the idea of human's "emotional biology" and connects it to writing for healing. What struck me most about this piece was the attention the author calls to our common misconception of the roles that emotions play in our life. Growing up, emotions and rationality did not coexist in our house. If you were getting emotional about something, you clearly weren't thinking straight and your argument or position no longer valid or rational. To this day, my father's biggest criticism of me is that I am an illogical being. "You're too emotional, just like your mother." I've learned to not let it bother me as much as it used to.

Brand expresses similar frustration, saying, "I was angry with cognitive scientists for insisting that intellectual enterprises have sovereignty over emotion, for insisting that with human intellect comes an objective reality, an ineluctable truth." It is interesting to think about why this out-dated fiction continues to prevail in the public sphere as well. In fact, when it comes to learning, we find that emotions are the best way we can remember what we learn. Brand explains "...that in any given situation, fundamental feelings may be more immediate than the intellect, however crucial both are to learning and remembering." This is probably why some of our most vivid memories are our most emotional ones. This also makes me think about how the areas in which most students strive in are the areas in which make them feel something. When I think about the subjects in which I have excelled the most in, they are all the ones in which my passion (or frustration) has made me the most invested in.

I think we knock down emotions around a lot in colloquial language when really they are equally if not more intrinsic to our memory, learning and healing than intellect. Anyone who has been through a traumatic experience can tell you that they likely did not intellectually find their way out of it. The rational mind has no place here: it wants to know how and why, for which in many traumatic experiences, there are no answer to. In fact, it's been proven that one of the most common reasons for recurring depression is the patients obsession for figuring out logically why they're depressed. We need to become more comfortable with emotion, in our own lives and in academia, whether it be rhetoric or science.

Mini personal essay- A Night in Istanbul

            When I was studying abroad in Greece last semester, we took a school-run spring break trip to Istanbul. This was not exactly every American parents' ideal place to send their young daughter (my school had 18 female students and one male student) on a vacation. However, our program director, Terry*, took all questions and anxieties at ease and managed to convince almost all the parents in the group to let their child go.

            It is commonly understood that women are not treated as equals in Turkey. Walking the streets of Istanbul, passing beautiful mosques and the famous Grand Bazzar, my female friends I were grabbed at, catcalled, and constantly verbally harassed. By our third day in the city, most of us had decided to wear scarves around our heads in the fashion of a hijab to try to deter the men. Getting back to our hostel became our safe space, particularly as Western women experiencing this culture (most for their first time).

            On our final night in Instanbul, Terry, who had been mysteriously absent at to the majority of the guided trips around the city that week, invited all the students out for a drink at a nearby outdoor bar after dinner. We were escorted there by our TA (who consistently carried the smell of whiskey on his breath), and within the first few minutes of getting seated around the table, it became apparently clear that Terry too was drunk. And I don't just mean enjoyed a glass of wine, but had clearly been drinking rum and coke (his favorite) for hours up until now. He order us a bottle of wine and insisted we stay for the food he was planning to order.
          I was seated directly next to Terry, who was also my philosophy professor at the time, and attempted at light table conversation while simultaneously trying to ignore his intoxicated state. But soon enough, the conversation came to be about the way we female students had been treated by the Turkish men. We all answered politely and dishonestly. The food came on a large, family-style plate. I was hungry (usually am) and helped my self to a healthy sized serving. To this, Terry felt so inclined to turn to be and say, "Atta girl" (in that way so many men do when they see a female who isn't self concious about eating normal portions) and then, "Hey babe why don't you and I go upstairs to my hotel room and make babies that have an appetite like yours."
            My stomach still turns writing that. Comments of that nature continued, while he laughed in between and threw in the occasional, "I'm only kidding," as if he would only dare seriously say those things to me if he had the cultural 'excuse' as Turkish men do. He moved his attention down the line to a redhead two seats down from me. He questioned her sexuality, and after politely declining the question to then be asked again, she answered that she was bisexual. He said he just didn't see her ending up with a woman. Other students sitting around our table heard; it was not a quiet affair. Most looked as if they were trying to pretend there was nothing to hear, making forced conversation with the person next to them and occasionally looking over at us. My friend Kaitlyn*, who was sitting directly to my other side and had zero escape route, admittedly found herself only able to burst into laughter.

            I ended up reporting Terry for sexual harassment to the US study abroad program that accredited his school, and they followed up with an apology "on their behalf" and nothing more. There was never a moment that night in which I felt genuinely unsafe – Terry was an older man in his seventies who I could knock down with a shove of the shoulder – but I felt violated, betrayed and overall very uncomfortable. The entire time I was numb with disbelief, attempting the occasional forced laugh. My silence did not protect me.

*Names have been changed

Chapter 5- Writing as Healing and the Rhetorical Tradition

This article explores the relationship between writing as healing as it has transformed through pre-classical, modern, and postmodern views on rhetoric. Pre-classical theory believed that language could heal. The author refers specifically to Antiphon, a healer-Sophist whom believed in studying the tension between discourse and the body in order to heal. This is the idea that the body or natural self may be at conflict with its discourse/position in society, causing illness. He used sacred songs and chants that he believed could heal the patient of this tension.

However, upon the uprising of literacy leading to the modern era, many oral practices lost their value. And as far as rhetoric was concerned, the greatest thinkers of the time were not too keen. Plato is known for his backlash against writing as a new technology that did not aim at the truth or greater good but rather manipulation of absolute Truth. He claims, "medicine rests on knowledge and rhetoric does not." However, the author of the article argues that expressionist rhetoric is not aiming to discover the absolute true self, rather that it embraces their being no such thing and rather the self as a fluid process.

This brings us to postmodern expressivist rhetoric/logotherpy, which our author claims contains, "orality-within-literacy upon which the old verbal medicine was based." Plato was wrong: this kind of writing doesn't encourage a kind of naive search for one's true self, but rather the ongoing process on discovering new selves and identities based on one's experience within discourse. The issue then becomes one of pedagogy. How do we teach this kind of writing if "generalized truths" about composing it do not exist? Jerome Bruner argues for the teaching environment being about to provide students with what he calls a "library of scripts." The teacher's most important job, in this way, may be to provide students with environment and material to promote composition. Johnson writes, "Bruner's cognitive approach clearly roots itself in the discourse of the community, for he constructs the self in terms of intertextual play and intersubjectivity."

This was a very interesting read for me, as I found myself agreeing with things being said on both sides of the argument. While I do think Plato was off in saying that rhetoric is not rooted in knowledge, I see the possible misinterpretation of logotherapy as a kind of search for the true self. However, I think what we really search for in writing as healing is self-knowledge. The postmodern view can be described as the process of "'coming to vision of one's self as flexible, as a changeful process always involved with the larger processes of evolving social contexts." This is a statement I cannot argue with.

Chapter 3- Language and Literature as Equipment for Living

Throughout this essay, Tilly Warnock makes a continuous comparison between writing and life. In the opening prologue, titled "A Revisionary View of Writing," she lays base for this claim, stating, "...most people I know live rough-draft lives. We write our lives and our lives rewrite us..." In this way, the messiness and unpredictability of day-to-day life can be seen as a metaphor for the working rough draft. She goes on to explain, "Some days, our writing takes the upward way...but at any moment writing takes the downward way, which may lead to revision and rebirth, that is, until the negative sets in again." I find I can easily replace the term writing with lives in the latter statement, as I believe many of us can.

This metaphor is carried throughout, as Warnock continues to make insightful points about the importance of revisionary work both in writing and life. As an example, she points to growing up in the south during segregation to then later learning that racism is in fact immoral and illegal. This is a perfect example of a case where life need revision. She writes, "While life, time, history, race, class, gender and subjectivity were always up for grabs, though seldom acknowledged to be, we were taught explicitly in school what was true, once and for all and forever." The ability to transcend these "truths" through writing is arguably what it means to live as part of a growing society. Warnock's examples of intersections of language and life and don't end there. In part three, titled "Revised Lives," she introduces the idea of the humane goal of life to all get along better, another case where revisionary writing is key. She includes the terms "strategies for coping" and "equipment for living" to come to terms, not war, with each other and ourselves. Language functions as said strategies and equipment. In this way, Warnock refers back to the idea of writing as healing. She cites several women in this section who, in order to avoid living the narratives laid out for them, rewrote their own lives. "...writing and reading, by expanding our experiences and repertoire of strategies, can provide additional possibilities from which we may choose in order to live and act effectively in specific contexts." This reminds me of the stories of women who had overcome their eating disorders that I read during my recovery. To see someone else in the same place as me, transcend their believed "truths" about food and body image played a large part in me learning to do the same.

We are the stories we tell ourselves. This is something I've come to believe through years of using (and abusing) language in order to create the realities in which I've lived. In a world full of peace and war, miracles and tragedies, we often have more of a choice than we (esp. as privileged students of academia) realize in the lives we choose to lead. It can be easy to tell ourselves one-sided stories, to reread the same narrative over and over again in our lives. But that gets us no where, just as writing the same story over and over again will never grow our writing.

Mini personal essay- Grounded

I have been keeping a journal since I was about 13 years old. These journals are some of my first memories of writing. In them I wrote about myself. I wrote lists of things I wanted to buy at the mall, the clothes I was going to wear to school for that week and one very amusing pros and cons list trying to convince my parents to let me register for a MySpace account. On some pages I made bubbly doodles or practiced my signature. As my thoughts matured, so did my writing. Writing has always been a way to organize, to see the words in my heads written down, bearing physical weight and importance. Writing made sense.

My third journal I ever filled was light blue and square with big pink and yellow flowers on it, connected by green felt stems. When I look at the journal now, it's pretty easy to see the progress of my depression as it began to bloom the summer of 2010. My handwriting changes as I flip through the coffee-stained pages. My letters became thinner, just as my thighs and wrists that year. I went from celebrating my braces coming off on May 11 to writing on September 3, "I want to run away. I fucking hate all of this." From that entry forward, my writing only gets worse. I became borderline abusive, writing things like "I will get skinnier...I will get prettier....I will get happier" and "NO FOOD FUCKER" (after a particularly long night of binge eating). On New Years Eve I was celebrating something I never thought I would be: weighing 111 pounds. Needless to say I was sick. This went on for about five more months until I accepted help and was admitted to an impatient unit in Connecticut. For this time spent, I wrote in a royal blue journal with a cover that reads, "Silver Hill Hospital: Restoring Mental Health Since 1931." The writing in these pages is different.
Healthier, but not healed.
Honest and exhausted.
Raw.

As part of my therapy sessions I began writing letters. Letters to my eating disorder, my parents, my friends. I write about my obsession over a boy who didn't love me, the demise of my nonexistent self confidence and sometimes about how much I want to cut. But on June 6, I celebrated the day I was trusted with a razor and was able to shave my legs for the first time in weeks. I never cut myself again.

With these journals, I have come to accept (and attempt to understand) a part of my life that, without writing, is just a reel of pain and ghosts stuck on repeat in my head. The writing reminds me of how I felt, not just the physical symptoms of my disease. It reminds of a reality I once lived and helps me not to reenter it. Writing about it now continues to ground me.

Chapter 2- Whose Voice is it Anyway?

In this chapter, Anne Ruggles Gere speaks to the idea of voice and the term we most commonly use to refer to a writer's voice - authentic. Gere claims that "many of our current discussions about voice presume a stable, coherent self while our conversations about other aspects of composition take for granted a more complicated and less unified concept of the self we call 'the writer'....I believe that the finely textured personal and autobiographical writing now emerging in the academy leads us to the public and social contexts rather than the private and individualistic ones." She goes on to explain that the academy often forgets that an authentic voice is a relational one. Student's voices cannot be separated from his or her particular family history or the specific people and events that helped shape them. Furthermore, an authentic voice is not autonomous; an authentic voice has relationship to other voices.

As someone who is constantly hackled about her voice, I relate to Gere's story. However, I find myself on the opposite spectrum of volume. I am constantly told how loud I am. I have early memories of friends sush-ing me in public settings and my vocal coach begging me to go to speech therapy (I never did). To this day, friends and classmates pass me in the halls of Ithaca College saying, "I knew that was your voice," and "I heard you coming this way." And like Gere, my voice has a history. I have my mother's voice as well. Ironically, her robust voice earned her a spot on the cheerleading team in junior high, as well as nodes on her vocal chords by her early 20s. I am currently recovering from self-induced laryngitis from a music festival I attended over a month ago.

I would like to discuss whether or not my classmates agree when Gere claims that writing instructors see their student's voices as something to be fixed. I personally have never felt that my professors were trying to change my authentic voice, only improve my craft.

Introduction

Writing for healing is actually where I began my journey as a writer. As a sixteen-year-old struggling with severe depression and lack of self esteem, my journal was where I sorted out all the mess inside my own head. I wrote things I would never say out loud (at least not until much later when I would seek professional treatment) and discovered more about myself than I have from any other activity. Once I started taking medication and being treated for my eating disorder, I continued to write, this time not about how I sinned but why. This opened the door to understanding my own emotional patterns, triggers, ect. 

In the introduction to Writing and Healing by Anderson and MacCurdy, the authors speak to the idea of writing as being an integral part to the healing process. Given our time and place in the world, these writing instructors find it to be almost impossible to come across a student in their classroom who hasn't experienced some kind of trauma. They explain, "We now know that every instance of trauma has the potential for grave psychic harm and that even witnesses to disasters can be susceptible to the effects of PTSD." This almost calls for a kind of responsibility as teachers and fellow writers to acknowledge and even discuss traumatic events, as we've found that silence is the environment in which PTSD festers. The authors go on to say, "Children who survive these and other kinds of overt and covert traumas become young adults, and many find their way into our classes, where the writing they do about what they have experienced challenges our practical, political, and theoretical assumptions about the power, place and purposes of writing." I found this statement to be particularly powerful; as we know, the stories we tell ourselves and others are extremely important. The latter statement suggests that we only have more to learn and grow from inviting stories of trauma and healing, often seen as taboo, into the academic space.

One of the most important pieces I found in this text is: "As trauma survivors, we share one very important characteristic: We feel powerless, taken over by alien experiences we could not anticipate and did not chose. Healing depends upon gaining control over that which has engulfed us." A way in which to do this type of healing is described as "re-externalization" in this intro. Writing can be a way of re-externalizing our trauma, articulating and transmitting it into the world without all the ghosts of the pasts swimming around as they often do when we simply mentally reflect on our trauma. 

Another important piece to note is the risk we run when we discourage writing students to write about themselves and their own lives and to separate public from private and personal from political. The authors state, "..writing teachers find themselves more and more and alienated from students who seem less and less attentive and more resistant to the increasingly abstract benefits of academic literacy, which students experience as increasingly removed from the circumstances of their particular histories." This reminds me of my own experience in a Women's Studies class on the Goddess that I took while I was studying abroad in Greece. We studied the many Greek goddesses found in mythology, and I took up issue with Hera being praised as the role model wife and mother for women of that time when she essentially was married to an asshole who raped and cheated on her. Was my commentary based on my own personal traumas with domestic abuse and rape? Definitely. But my teacher's response was that I was doing myself a disservice by not being able to separate my own very "modern" views on such issues in order to fully engage in the content being taught. I wonder what the authors of this texts would say back to her.