This week we read and discussed The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. This book is an in depth novel about a human being experiencing grief. So far, we have read books about institutions and cultures of death. However, this is the first book we have read that is a personal experience. The discussion in class about this book was a different feeling than the rest of the books we have discussed.
Joan Crawford is a true successful Hollywood actress that had her life completely figure out except she was unable to have children. She decided to adopt her daughter Christina and later her son Christopher to fill her life with happiness. Christina is a very healthy young lady, but is treated with little dignity and love by her mommie dearest. Her mother’s issues with men, alcohol, and show business got in the way of her being with her children. Joan became mentally ill and abusive to her children.
The fact that we cannot understand our body and how it reacts to different situations makes us vulnerable to fear and suffering. We enjoy things because we fill pleasure out of it; however, when something bad happens in the process, we tend to live in it forever. According to Lucretius, this is one of the things that contribute to the suffering and fear that we are frightened of. For example, a person falls in love and when they break-up it becomes a fantasy that someone cannot wake up from. The mind plays an important role in dealing with the experiences.
The poet successfully illustrates the magnitude with which this disease can change its victim’s perspective about things and situations once familiar to
She includes a psychiatric report where the doctor notes, “In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure” (“The White Album” 15). Didion purposely avoids giving personal input during her descriptions of experiences, including this excerpt gives insight into her attitude and mental state during this chaotic time. This description reflects how the time period took a significant toll on her mental health. By including this excerpt, Didion makes the implication about her opinion of her surrounding environment. Didion gets lost in the darkness of the stories that she is dedicated to document through her journalism.
Wednesday, October 22 Reading Response 2 “Living Will” by Danielle Ofri is about an author who is a doctor who came across a patient that is suicidal. “They All Just Went Away” by Joyce Carol Oates is about a young lonely girl who finds herself attracted in entering abandoned house and is entranced by other peoples lives and what they left by. Although these stories are very different, I believe both the authors share a similar idea, but different outlooks, of how the main characters in each essay struggle to do the right thing. “Living Will” gives us a better perspective of what doctors today have to face with their jobs. The author, Danielle Ofri, came across a severely ill patient, Wilburn Reston, which really makes her think.
He somberly replied that she had rheumatoid arthritis. He opened to tell me how, despite the available treatment, she was unable to complete her education or have a job because she could not walk in the evenings and had severe pains all night every night since her teenage and that she was never married and was dependent on her parents. For a 15 years old me, it was distressing. This experience exposed me to the reality of human suffering. It’s not just the disease, the pain, there is also a taboo which one must endure.
Susanna says “I was trying to explain my situation to myself. My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it, even I had trouble knowing it.” (153) This quote is very effective at demonstrating what goes through Susanna’s head, and the minds of many others. Many people who have existing
Intro: “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane” (PHILIP K. DICK, Valis). In present day America laws have been placed that prevent people who are “insane” to be guilty of the crimes they commit. In short, insanity is the state of being seriously mentally ill relating to madness. This is presented in the book Medea written by Euripides through her point of view. In Medea, a surge of insanity purges her after she is betrayed by her husband Jason causing many cruel and harsh actions to follow from her.
In the essay, The Devil’s Bait by Leslie Jamison, Jamison emphasizes her paper about Morgellons Disease. Throughout her essay, Jamison introduces the urgency of the disease by going to a location that is known to have many people asking the doctors to believe them. The reason Morgellons Disease is an urgent topic that must be discussed is because many people feel like their voices are not being heard and ignored. Many have a disease whom they see as needing emergency treatment, however they are being told it is their brain playing tricks on them. The rhetor is compelled to speak about this issue for it gives those whom she interviewed a sense of voice and a call out to doctors to be more understanding of their patients.
In “Education as a Pharmakon in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,” Shun-Liang Choa argues that when the Creature learns how to use fire and learns the human language, he is experiencing “a pharmakon, the me ́lange of both remedy and poison, pleasure and pain” 223). The Creature learns that fire can be used to cook food for pleasure, but also causes pain when used to for destruction. In the same sense, the Creature’s mastery of the human language allows him to gain more knowledge about the world and humans, but “the more knowledge he is able to gain, and the sharper his awareness of his deformity and his friendless life” (224). Both are examples of “a mixture of pain and pleasure”: a hindrance and a benefit (224). Choa’s article expresses Shelley’s incorporation of knowledge leading to destruction in Frankenstein.
This combination of many mind and life altering diagnoses leads to an interesting point of view, and a deeper look into the lives of people living with the
Although this quote describes Catherine’s anguish about her health and her obsession with the novel’s antagonist, Heathcliff, it’s prevalent for feelings of social anxiety as well. Contrary to common belief, social anxiety is not the incapability of speaking to people, shyness, or just makes people nervous with crowds of people. Social anxiety is nervousness in social situations, but it affects the body both physically and cognitively. Social anxiety can morph into paranoia, but for me, it stays within the territories of over-thinking. For one, anxiety differs for each person, while the traits may be similar, the experiences are
The novel analyses the impact of misery and pain when society establishes the false
This would be further reinforced when she goes into details about the effects of the migraine, which the reader could also relate to. When Didion then states that there is “nothing wrong with [her] at all”, she could word it to be a warning to the reader. By adding “and there won’t be anything wrong with you, either” would cause her to be speaking directly to the reader, comforting them that although the doctors may not find something wrong, there actually is a problem. She then describes how she continued her life, “ignor[ing] the warnings it sent”, instead of trying to fix the problem. While she presents this example as one that can be learned from, she could still present it in a more direct way to this new audience.
