Micro Personal Essay

                 My mother always told me I could tell her anything, even the scary stuff, especially the scary stuff. I’ve always been told I was mature beyond my age, and so didn’t always find applicable. I didn’t get int much trouble, not of the serious variety. I didn’t have much to tell her beyond friend drama and school issues. I was nine when my Popop died, I didn’t get to see my mother react in the moment, to this day I’m not sure how it affected her. My dad was the one to tell me, it was the first thing he said as he walked in the door from work. He told me like it held to emotional weight at all. No one ever made me feel like the risk of loss was real, it didn’t even feel real in the moment. I ran upstairs to my bed and clutched onto the stuffed pig he had given me and cried. I cried at the wake too, off the side with my head tucked into the poncho Nana made for me. My cousins teased me. A few years later my parents told me they were getting a divorce. I walked out of the room while my sister and mother were crying and my dad was talking excitedly about the house he already bought. We would get to paint our room however we wanted. I left and walked up two flights of stairs before finally collapsing in tears. They said they still loved each other but it didn’t make any sense. Love was supposed to mean we all stayed together. I returned to them in silence and spent much of the next three years that way. I was drowning in scary stuff and didn’t want to talk about it with my mother, especially not her. That night she came into my bed and asked me if I was mad at her. I thought it was unfair for her to ask. She wanted me to make her feel better, to ease the guilt she felt. It wasn’t fair. I deserved to be mad but I was never allowed. No, I had told her, I’m not mad. It was the first time I felt more mature than my parents. I had to become stronger for them, emotionally, and for my sister too. I could never tell them how I really felt, because that would mean becoming immature. I wanted to scream and yell and demand that it all go back to normal. I don’t want to be mature. I don’t want to detached. I wanted to drown. I wrote instead, bleeding only in ink. I thought about how as a child when I fell and got hurt no one rushed to my side. Instead I picked myself up and walked inside where mom was waiting with a bandage. Somehow things changed so that I’m still the one with the scrapped up knee but I’m bandaging up my mother. 

Thought Paper

         One of the things I appreciate the most about our class discussions is how much we all truly care about what we’re talking about; writing and healing. I can easily sense how each of us are connected to the issues we talk about, yet all those connections and experiences vary. This is because we all have our own perspective. Not everyone writes in the same way, not everyone heals in the same way. Each one is valid though, and really important to the greater ‘voice’. 

         With that said we are also a female dominated class. I love to talk about feminism, especially associated with writing. Taking Women and Writing last semester was truly a blessing, I was finally placed in a setting where the people around me also wanted to talk about female empowerment and feminism. We also talk about these kind of things in our class, particularly with the Clothesline project. As feminists we know that more than white cis women are affected by feminism. I think I would like to stretch our boundaries a bit. Talk about current struggles people face. The police brutality, the rise of transgender awareness and pride, Islamphobia, lesbians, and so on. I think it would be useful to look into communities that aren’t right under our nose, learn what life it like for people who struggle with things that aren’t easy to talk about, and are current enough that healing may just be in the beginning process. 

       I would love to hear voices of these people. I was glad to talk about Malala and her point of view on the violence against her and her people. I struggle with the fact that the book we read from, while still widely relevant, is a bit outdated. I want to focus on what’s going on now. 

       Another thing I might like to talk about is feminism for boys/men. Because it’s not just for women, often times I feel like I am most motivated for the little boys of the world. They grow up being told not to cry or show much emotion at all. They are taught to treat women this way and that, usually as things and not as equals. Something to talk about, no with. The way they are raised to view the world not only harms females, but themselves and other males as well. There are boys who suffer eating disorders but never get it checked out because it’s not ‘manly’. In fact mental illnesses in males tend to go overlooked while females are treated but also deemed ‘crazy’. Boys cry, girls cry. Women cry and no one looks at them funny, they just assume they are psming, when men cry they pretend it’s not happening. Both are extremely harmful. Feminism wasn’t created to bind men, but to release them as well. Men who struggle may never find the healing of writing, since writing is considered an art and art is considered feminine. 

         Lastly, there is Twilight Reimagined, exactly the opposite of what people wanted Stephanie Meyer to do. She took the complaints of sexism and decided to retell her vampire love story with a gender swap of literally every character. She could have used find and replace to just change the names and pronouns, since she kept the story near verbatim. But now there are now articles comparing lines from the two books. It’s easy to identify the moments of sexism. She turns emotional moments with Bella into emotionless ones with Beau. She honestly furthered the sexism in her stories past a point no one dreamed of. This might be an example of writing and NOT healing. Perhaps it was for Meyer, but not for the public. 

Chapter 11

I find the opening of this chapter pretty interesting. The fact the teachers are taught in emotions or how to deal with a depressed or suicidal student. When a teacher is confronted with something like this they have to decide whether or not to take action. Not taking action could mean a tragedy, taking action would mean getting involved in something they may feel unequipped to handle. But I think any teacher could handle something like this if only they remember to view their students as equals and not children, even if they are. Children still feel the same emotions as adults do, they are just as complex and oftentimes a lot messier because they don't have the experience to know when to let go and move on. They don't have the experience of healing. Teachers do though, whether or not they want to talk about it. I think teacher also need to keep in mind that the classroom isn't just a two way mirror. Teachers can learn from their students as often as they learn from their teacher. If they avoid creating lessons and assignments around personal experience I think they are really shortening the classroom experience. I took creative writing my junior year of high school, and it wasn't the first time I was able to speak about personal things, but it was close. That class changed my life, my teacher wasn't afraid of the nitty-gritty details of a teenagers life and so we got to express freely. Pretending that school is this emotionless academic place causes so many problems. It's a building filled with likely thousands of kids! Of course there are emotions, of course there is drama, of course there is depression. Ignoring doesn't make it go away. I say the best way to get schools to be more expressive is to have writing workshops. All students know in primary eduction is to write 'academically'. We are taught research papers with MLA and book reports and blah blah blah. It's awful. Most people don't ever develop their writing voice. I think it should perhaps be a thing at an early age. People write their essays and never want to pick up a pencil again. Writing should be used in schools as a tool of coping and understanding oneself. No one really even has to read it! Just giving them the opportunity to share the parts of life they have experienced. And yeah, sometimes it's suicidal, which is really awful, but it's always better to be proactive.

Unsilenced

Silence kills, not taking up a voice hurts, it does not heal, individual experience is seen as part of a larger social problem. This is demonstrated through the nature of the clothesline project. Each shirt stands on it's own to tell it's own story, but it becomes a statement when they are hung together. There is power in community, and that power lends itself to healing so well. Solidarity makes people strong, you can see it through this movement and Black Lives Matter and countless others. It shows the importance of working together to make big changes, especially societal ones. "There will be a time when our arms will be so wide that they encircle and embrace the entire world." I think that is a beautiful statement, and one that I believe whole heartily in, if there has to be one sentence to define what I am all about as a writer, friend, woman, and activist, this is it. You cannot achieve great change on your own, even if you are only trying to change yourself. When people stand together they don't feel like victims anymore, they can see the strength in the people around them and begin to recognize it in themselves. They are survivors and warriors. It's important to be the voice for your own cause, don't let others define your experience, this is particularly important for woman and other oppressed groups who often get spoken for.

Reading what the shirts say gave me chills. These stories are mostly older than I but they can still fully speak for the cause. The way they choose to word their story or the story of another is so telling. Just copying the newspaper headline or excerpt tells us so much how the media sees the story. The story is often about the man, the abuser, and the victim remains nothing more than a victim. These shirts are a way for them to take back what happened to them. Writing makes it so they can say something after being silenced for so long. Silence is a tool to manipulate the oppressed. You cannot heal in silence. Writing, speaking, telling, that's how you heal.