Setting a Time

Every summer, my mom, my sister, and I watch Beaches. It’s a classic tear-jerker starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey as two best friends from opposite coasts and opposite lives. Midler’s C. C. Bloom is a dynamic Jewish singer-actress from the Bronx and Hershey’s Whitney is a WASP whose family has been attending Stanford for four generations. At the end, Hilary dies of a long-running sickness. The shot right after—the best shot—is of a black car moving to reveal the funeral with C.C. standing in dark sunglasses as Whitney’s young daughter cries on a nearby chair. And without fail at this shot, every year, my mom says, half-sarcastically, “get the tissues!” and my sister and I reach to the nearby box and distribute. For ten whole minutes it’s perfectly fine to let the tears run down your face. No one can see you cry because everyone is watching the screen. Some could say this is artificial because the moment is made by a movie. But that’s the accessible thing about it, too. It’s a time carved out to let yourself somewhat go, and in front of other people.

Over the years, the family has been more open about emotions that spawn beyond tear-jerkers. Recently, I had special on my weekly radio show called Frank in Philly in honor of the Pope’s visit. The first hour consisting of Frank Sinatra and the second songs of the Philadelphia sound (a sub-genre of R&B and the beginning of disco). I was too proud of my concept to be shy of playing Sinatra. Not that Sinatra is controversial, but because my grandmother, Connie, died in February. Whenever I was playing golden oldies I called the genre “Your Grandmother’s Music” and she would request Sinatra’s “My Way.” I knew I had to play it. So I did. While it was playing, my sister texted in the family group text: "Connie." It was simple, and that was all that was needed.

This was a set time to be sad, and it wasn’t for a general sadness, but instead for something very recent. The healing of this is part of a project, in a way, of how to deal with my grandmother’s departure.

Mid Term Thought Paper

Over the first half semester of this course, this class has discussed many topics, from the science of the brain to how we see our voices. So far we have discussed how people look at feeling and healing through techniques like journals, community memorials, and the classroom. Our conversations sporadically go from idea to idea, and some get lost between everyone’s different focuses. A topic I would like to focus on is having privilege to feel.

In out textbook, Writing & Healing, academics discuss what they have found about feeling and how they teach it, mostly through writing. Some articles are simply retelling their experiences or a scope of people’s experiences. Something we have to read in the book yet is the idea of having the privilege to take time to work these feelings out.

Troubling thoughts and feelings can happen to anybody, no matter their socioeconomic or cultural status. However, the resources available to people on how to handle the issues differs. Most students luckily have the school system to provide some help. But even that could depend upon the school. There could be a range of what is deemed worth a therapist or counselor’s time. A psychiatrist in a “struggling” high school with a fifth of the student population living with someone other than their parents and every student knowing at least one relative who has been in jail may be busier than one in an “average” suburban school. A kid dealing with a tough break-up may have to wait in line behind the fourth girl so far this year to get pregnant.

 And what if a person is not a student? In order to have the luxury of going to a therapist or a group, they need the money. Under the parity law, many insurance companies offer copays for mental health issues, but not all therapists accept all types of insurance and the copay may not be ideal. Twenty dollars for a session could also be spent for kids’ jeans or two meals for a family or four. If you’re a single parent juggling two jobs and three kids, you may have to think about these costs dearly. And more so, the issue could be time. You may feel guilty for leaving your kids with your sister and holding off on night classes for a nursing degree.

Besides money, time, and availability, there is also the issue of social acceptance. As a writing major at Ithaca College it wouldn’t be unusual if I used creative assignments as an outlet for whatever personal issue I was grappling, and if it’s written well, have people be supportive to me in return. It wouldn’t even be super out of the ordinary if I saw a therapist from CAPS. If my stress and anxiety got so bad I could e-mail my professors and push back my due dates one time without much of a judgement from them, because I do not work from them. I’m so lucky that there are ways that I can deal with the issue that won’t drastically change how I am viewed in my working environment.

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How can we reach those who feel they don’t have the time or money to deal with their issues? How can we provide information on accessible means of healing? How can we encourage people to invest in their mental and emotional health?

Chapter 14

Writing about Suicide was about the class Literary Suicide.

What I found peculiar was that Jeff chose Jon's entries as one to co-write with. I'm still unsure why. Jon's entries were vague and a times a little forced in the metaphors. Am I mean to say that about a personal journal? Yes. I am. I don't know, maybe from the title of the chapter I wasn't expecting to hear about a kid who had a bottle of poison in his garage. There were too many other unanswered questions, like why the hell was the bottle there? Who the hell would let a bottle of poison be next to the extra key?
Not to say that what Jon wrote about wasn't helpful to him, or interesting to see how a mind heals without much edit. But for such an important subject I can' understand why Jeff would choose such an outsider to it. A fascination with suicide has nothing on actually being suicidal. Everyone has pain, everyone could use healing, but there are some points where I personally delegate what to pay more attention to because it's what's more important. All those statistics in the beginning seemed so distant from the focus on Jon.

Who knows, I'm super hungry right now so maybe I missed a couple things.

On another note, this passage:
"In a sense I now consider reading Darkness Visible as a kind of inoculation against depression. You know the way inoculations work: you get injected with a little bit of the virus and your body develops a resistance to it that protects you from it in the future. In doing so, however, you may come down with some symptoms of the disease you're being immunized against. So I suppose in this analogy, my evanescent depression was simply a side-effect of the inoculation."

I've experienced that and I think this was an example of literature and art allowing a space for someone to feel stuff they probably wanted to for a while-- they just now have a guide to feel less lonely.

Chapter 12

A lot of Jerome Bump's essay talked about how to manage feelings. How does one separate thinking, feeling, and thinking about feelings. I can relate to much of what he said-- I, too, tend to focus on thinking about my feelings because there is more control. Or is there? It all depends on how I am managing them. Not necessarily thinking, or trying to put logic to them, but simply understanding what the hell to do with them.

I admire his attempt to have the red-side and the left-side work together in one space -- because let's be honest, we're always feeling. So at some point we should try to hear what is going on. I think balance, too, plays a large part. Because one can easily overthink a feeling and turn it into something else. I think it's dangerous to try to manipulate a feeling or consistently ignoring it. Feelings come and go-- it is you that has changed. Not them.

Clothesline Project

The Clothesline project allows for space to heal for many on a public level by having women decorate shirts that show "their personal experience of violence" as well as "to celebrate their transformation from victim to survivor in a powerful statement of solidarity."

Julier gives an explanation of the project and the differences between it and other memorial projects. Unlike the Vietnam Memorial, the Clothesline Project includes individuality. This gives so much power to the survivors and those affected by the events by giving them control over what they want to share and what they don't. The Clothesline Project also  provides an active event of creating the space. The article did not touch too much on this, but I wonder how much community is there prior to the display and after.

Julier also gave text and some pictures of shirts. She breaks them down into categories to show the variety. I found that this article is one that we actually get to participate within the feeling while also academically learning about it. Each shirt required its own specific attention, as there were in different styles. Some were vague and focused on the feeling, and some included specifics. Either way, I felt for each one.