Competitiveness

           I think that my competition with others has been a largely gender-based phenomenon. I can't help but think about Beyonce's song "***Flawless," in which she samples Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi's idea that girls are raised "to see each other as competitors, not for jobs or accomplishments which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men." When I read Emily Gordon's article on why women compete with other women, I was thrown backwards into my high school experience of being the guy's girl. I had a large group of friends, male and female, but when it came to the guys, I was there go to girl. Where Gordon found solace in her height and size hanging with the guys, my insecurities about my noisiness and less-than-womanly habits (ie. belching, swearing, even the way I walked) were put to rest when I hung out with dudes. Guys had so much less to live up to! My guy friends may have been competitive in sports or even over girls every so often, it wasn't the same as the competitiveness that ran rampant within my group of girl friends. When we got dressed together to go to parties, it was endless comments and backhanded compliments about breasts, hips, hair, asses and acne. The ways in which we had all learned to pick ourselves (and therefore each other) apart was astounding. 
          It took me a long time to realize that my hanging out with the guys was still an act of competition. I think I almost took a subconscious pride in being a "bro," even if that meant I got less attention than some of the other girls in mixed settings. I was considered "cool" by the male population, and that was better than being considered sexually desirable but "crazy" or "bitchy" or "uptight" like my other female friends. I didn't understand that I was taking part in gender-based stereotyping and discrimination by claiming my gender to be absent from all the part of me that made me a desirable "bro."
         
         

Chapter 7- From Trauma to Writing

I must say, there was something cool about seeing a published work in my text book by an Ithaca College professor. Marian M. MacCurdy wrote her this chapter, titled "From Trauma to Writing: A Theoretical Model for Practical Use," as a response to the idea of writing as healing fitting into the category of personal writing, and finding its place in what she outlines as the debate between academic and autobiographical writing in the classroom. She opens up the chapter explaining to the reader that "a debate continues in the profession between writing professors who believe students are better served by writing courses that require strictly academic prose and those who argue that students, especially beginning writers, are more likely to find their own voices when asked to pursue autobiographical prose."  Defenders of autobiographical writing claim it's honest and gives students a very important opportunity to "find themselves" after years of living with internalized parental views of the world. However, MacCurdy reminds us, "self exposure is not honesty." After a bit of this back and forth, the chapter moves to explaining what it is we're actually doing when we write autobiographically, specifically about cases of trauma.

Trauma, she explains, is such a broad yet personalized term that an event that may not have phased one individual could be a life-long traumatic event for another. What we do know about traumatic events, however, is that they "produce a shift away from verbal encoding of information toward encoding via 'emotional, pictorial, auditory, and other sense-based memory systems' (158). This shift helps to explain why a simple verbal statement of a painful event fails to convey accurately the horror of a traumatic experience." I find much truth in this statement, having many traumatic events connected to specific pictures, feelings, ect. It's so interesting to think about what we are trying to and what we can accomplish then simply writing about trauma. This made me think about what it would be like to engage in muti-media healing. For example, theres a story that's gone viral recently of Instragam model Essena O'Neill who re-captioned all the photos on her Instragram account as part [of a healing process from the extremely measures of beauty she had measured herself up against with the way she was really feeling when the picture was taken. She admits things such as "NOT REAL LIFE," "Would have hardly eaten that day," and "Standing there and looking pretty is once what I aspired to do as a young girl." She uses pictures and writing to help guide her through past traumatic experiences and "re-live," an essential part of healing from trauma according to this chapter.  

Micro-essay on emotion

My mother would do anything for me. I feel as if I have been certain of that my entire life. I have no real memories with her involving feeling neglected of any sort of emotional response I wanted or needed until later in life. I cannot say the same of my father. When I was very young, 4 or so, I went to Disney World with my parents and my brothers, who were 15 and 17 at the time. My brothers, father and I went on a 4-D simulator ride of Honey! I Shrunk the Audience, and so the story goes that when the cat jumped into a lion through my 3D glasses, I lost it. My dad refused to take me out of the room, and my more sympathetic brother (was it Josh or Stephen?) went outside to calm me down.

I rarely got upset growing up. Given this is probably because I was a gifted, affluent student with loving parents and friends. My elementary school janitor nicknamed me Smiles. As far as I was concerned, I was the luckiest kids in the world. I rarely was denied the things I wanted, whether they were clothing, toys or dance lessons. I played several instruments. I was part of the Gifted and Talented Summit education program in my middle school. I very rarely cried, even at sad movies or when I fell off my bike and scraped myself along the pavement. My father taught me there was pride in being "tough" (this terrified my mother). Negative emotional response (meaning sadness, laziness, rage) were not really tolerated in my childhood. My mom made it her goal that I was never upset, and my dad that I was never unproductive. Therefore, being happy and busy were very important to me. When I fell short of those expectations is the only time I released those emotions. I have very vivid memories of yelling "I hate myself" over and over again when I did something wrong, like overslept for school. My mother would get so upset, pleading me to stop. I started to develop extreme anxiety over being late and less than prepared. This kind of extreme perfectionist-thinking only got worse when I became a competitive dancer at 14. I would have a panic attack if my bun wasn't centered or my costume didn't fit just right. 

When I was 17 I was hospitalized for an eating disorder, released to an outpatient program shortly after. When I arrive home from my initial hospitalization, my father asked to talk to me. I had just had the most difficult, exhausting, emotional week of my life...the weigh ins, the body checks, the meds and the meals. I was proud of myself by the end of it and,  for the first time since the onset of my disease, was fully invested in getting my life back. I don't know exactly what kind of response I needed from him emotionally at this point. He paid the hospital bill, and the way my father spends his money is how you can see what he cares about. This has been true all my life. What I didn't need nor want nor expect was the first thing out of his mouth that evening: "How are you going to make sure this doesn't happen again?" 

I have never expected much emotional response from men, being taught by my father at a young age that "all boys are dogs." But I had a very long relationship in high school with one of the most emotionally unavailable people I have ever met. He, much like my father, took much pride in his 'toughness.' He refused to be known to have a girlfriend, and refrained from being seen with me in public, however well aquatinted we were privately at the time. He would never speak to me about his family life (he was adopted) or any of his emotional interior. Looking back now, I really have no idea how I had any semblance of who he was as a person. 

I really have no idea what my father's emotional life is like. I've seen him cry three times: once watching A Beautiful Mind, a second time talking about his deceased father, and again at my brother's wedding. Ironically, at my brother's wedding, my father cried (and I mean CRIED) throughout his entire speech. He actually had to cut it short, because we couldn't understand what he was saying. I swear in that moment he let out tears he had been holding back for years. 

Skype Session with Aija Mayrock

http://www.seventeen.com/life/real-girl-stories/a32006/my-bully-dressed-up-as-me-for-halloween/

http://www.amazon.com/The-Survival-Guide-Bullying-Written/dp/0545860539


How did you find the courage to write about something still so raw and painful when you wrote your screenplay? Can you talk more about what you men by "pouring your pain" into it?

I find it interesting that you wrote a "guide" as opposed to something short of an autobiography or memoir of this time in your life. Why is that? (focus switched from self to helping others)

Have you received any critique for your writing from those people who were involved in bullying you?

Thought Paper

            I am interested in the use of personal writing in the practice of cognitive behavioral therapy. This sort of therapy is based on the idea that by enabling persons to cognitively interpret and therefore react to a situation in a positive way, they can combat disordered thinking and feelings like anxiety, depression ect. Personal writing seems to me to be a perfect exercise in this type of therapeutic practice. This reminds me of what Julier discusses in her chapter “Voice on the Line,” in which she discusses the power of language through informing forward progress. This is exemplified by a tee shirt included in the Clothesline Project, which said “I have strength / I have control / I have self-esteem / I have Power,” linguistically moving victim from past to future in which one has all these attributes that allude to the idea of being healed. This kind of self-talk falls along the lines of the idea that if you can tell yourself you can do something, you can. Often, this positive, future-driven self-talk is essential to replacing the kind of blaming, negative self-talk victims often find themselves engaging in.

            Additionally, I am very interested in the power of this kind of negative self-talk, which can also take the form of writing, and how we can be sure to keep this out of our personal writing when attempting to heal. When I was active in my eating disorder, I used to write journal entries in which I would scold myself for eating too much food or not meeting my goal weight. This kind of writing actually furthered my very dangerous behaviors, clearly the exact opposite of what we hope to achieve with writing for healing. Many times this semester while reading chapters in the text on bringing writing for healing into the classroom, I worried about the idea that a student, consciously or unconsciously, could practice this personal writing in a negative manner like I once did, further perpetuating things like depression, anxiety or low self-esteem.

             Finally, if I can find a way to tie this in to my ideas above, I would like to look into fictional writing as healing. About 5 years ago now, I read a book titled Wintergirls, in which the author wrote a fictional piece from the POV of a teenage girl with an eating disorder. While the author had never suffered from a disorder herself, she claimed to have done research and interview of people who had and attempted to write the piece from that perspective. One could view this piece as a form of writing for healing, especially seeing that the main character does confront her unhealthy ways and ends up “healed” in the end. However, the book was a huge trigger for me, and instead of seeing it as a manuscript for healing, it ended up fueling a lot of my already present negative thoughts and feelings about myself, food and my body. I can see this being the type of text that a professor might be interested in complimenting a writing and healing-based class, however this could be problematic for students as it was for me. This brings me to the example of the student in chapter eleven who was enrolled in the class on suicide and found their once-dormant depression triggered by the work of Sylvia Plath as she described her experience with depression. The author of this chapter included this information, but proceed to sort of glaze over it, stating that this was the only student in the class who had expressed having this kind of experience, and that he ended up coming back out of the depression by the end of the semester. I think we need to be much more cautious about such situations when dealing with writing/text that could be triggering to students. 

Chapter 11- Writing About Suicide

This chapter reviews a graduate course called "Literary Suicide," run by Jeffrey Berman in 1994 at the University of Albany. He opens with a bold and beautiful claim: "it is possible to create the pedagogical conditions in which students write about traumatic subjects and achieve important insight into their lives." He goes on to explain the general success of his course, naming personal writing/journaling as the corner stone of this success. In fact, when he has taught the class two years earlier without the journal element, he found the class had seemingly less complete and less valuable interactions with the texts, which comprised the work of Woolf, Hemingway, Plath and Sexton. But in 1994, according to Berman, "students, by contrast, viewed [them] not simply distant authors writing about a theoretical problem, but as fellow human beings who were struggling bravely to transmute personal conflicts into art." In a final anonymous questionnaire, the class unanimously declared their experience of diary writing as valuable. In this way, Berman seems to argue for a relationship between understanding of the self and understanding of others and their work. 

In 2011, The American College Health Association reported that 31 percent of college students "have felt so depressed in the last year that they found it difficult to function" (NAMI). Furthermore, according to the National Alliance on mental illness, "seven percent of college student have 'seriously considered suicide' within the past year." And finally, the number one reason people claim to not seek help for depression and other mental health issues is the stigma surrounding it. As an advocate for reeducation of mental health, any class that can potentially give students insight into depression is valuable, and this goes hand in hand with suicide. Any class that encourages the deromanticizing of fictional suicide engages in important scholarly work. Writers' suicides seem to be particularly romanticized, as is their alcoholism and general mental health. My brain flashes a mental image of my creative writing TA in my study abroad program: a tall, blonde, talented poet with a whiskey bottle stuck to his hand and a cigarette permanently resting between his lips, rumored to have a Hemingway complex. No poem is worth that pain, but someone somewhere down the line made him think it was so. 

Chapter 12- Teaching Emotional Literacy

After reading this chapter, which follows one professor's journey attempting to teach emotional literacy at the university level, I had the feeling that there needs to be some kind of conversation about what the goal of an undergraduate education, specifically in English/Literary Studies or Writing, should teach. Furthermore, where are our programs outside of the university to help foster mental health and emotional healing?

The first person I thought of when reading Bump was my most recent ex. He came from a very tight-knit, upper middle class conservative family in which excess of emotion were seen as weakness. In fact, his communication skills regarding his emotions, as well as his emotional wants/needs, were so poor while we were together that it became one of the most emotionally abusive relationships I have ever been in. He would scream and yell when I altered my appearance - getting a new hairstyle or tattoo - and threaten to never talk to me again. The next day he would tell me he blacked out because he was so angry. He left broken chairs in our residence hall lounge. When he found out one of our friends had aborted his child, I held him while he wept for hours on end. His family didn't "believe in therapy" and his mother's response to my mental health was to stay away from people like me. In fact, one of the biggest divides in our relationship was his family's opinion of me and the fact that I was on medication and seeing a therapist for depression.

We both go to college now, but you would not find him in a class on emotional literacy. Emotional illiteracy is a huge cultural norm, and therefore needs to be tackled on a larger scale. It is upsetting to see the way the author of this chapter was attacked for his attempts, with worries about student safety and grading procedures. I think, possibly, this kind of teaching needs to find space outside the academic world before it can be discussed and analyzed academically.