A Writer, Evolved
This story begins in Massachusetts with a white, middle-class girl who never broke the rules. She went to private elementary and middle schools. She always did her homework. She always did her chores. She got straight As. She had a best friend who never tried to convince her to lie, or cheat or steal. She was a golden child. But every golden child has an inaugural moment in which he or she becomes a little tarnished. More often than not, in a golden girl’s life, that moment stems from one thing: a boy.
I met Jack in the third grade, but I didn’t really know him until the seventh grade. Middle school Jack wasn’t irresponsible or rebellious in any magnificent way. He just bent the rules – exactly the opposite of me, a proverbial rule follower. He refused to listen to what someone said simply because that person was an authority figure; he thought for himself and chose autonomously what he would think or do. Maybe it corresponded to the authority figure; maybe it didn’t. Jack never manipulated me into pushing the boundaries that had always enclosed me, but because of him, I did.
My eighth grade field trip was to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum attached to a Mohegan Sun casino. The class was leaving an exhibit of the museum when I noticed Jack, hanging back to read about one of the specimens on display – he was, by no stretch of the imagination, a history buff. I walked over to him, and we both stood, staring. Not at each other. At the creepy specimen on display. I didn’t always know what to say to Jack. I just knew I wanted to be around him. Eventually, I realized that the rest of the class had disappeared. Laughing, we ran to catch up to them. When we finally found our teacher and the rest of the students, Mrs. Flagg poked fun at our middle-school romance. At an earlier point in time, she would have succeeded at humiliating me. I would have been ashamed of straying away from the pack and our predetermined path through the museum. I would have apologized profusely to my teacher for being so irresponsible and floopy. But this time I wasn’t, and I didn’t.
The importance of this story isn’t Jack but what jack represented: disobedience. There’s something about breaking the rules. A thrill. A sense of possibility. All of these things, which I first felt with Jack, I felt again when I broke down the wall of the 5-paragraph essay, when I began experimenting with the rules of grammar, and when I confronted and complicated the most common themes of a self-reflective essay. For a long time, my relationship with writing could be summed up in a simple question: how much can I get away with? I didn’t want to think of a topic sentence that covered everything I was going to talk about in that paragraph. I didn’t want to write a complete sentence when a phrase would do or was even more powerful. And I certainly didn’t want to talk about my development as a writer. So I manipulated the rules in order to get out from under them. I cheated. And more often than not, I cheated so as not to expose too much about myself. But here is where I pause the current story about Jack. I can proceed in one of two ways. (1) Continue Jack’s story through to completion. (2) Tell a different story – a story about me.
* * *
I started running when I was a freshman in high school. I didn’t start because I loved to run; I hated it with every joint, breath and extra pound in my body. I started to run because I was self-conscious. I lived at a preparatory school in Connecticut, surrounded by girls who were thin and beautiful – these girls were beautiful – with an envy-worthy sense of style and the wallet to fund it. I, on the other hand, was hidden beneath the acne that had decided to settle a colony on my face. My wardrobe consisted of three shades of corduroy pants, a blue and white striped button down shirt, several sweaters, and a lot of headbands. Worse than all of this, my thighs touched. Every girl who has lived among the rich and beautiful knows that is completely taboo. So, my running was motivated by the omnipresent – on my mind but never my body – thigh gap. It was painful at first. Never an athlete, I took awhile to develop the muscle and stamina to run even a mile. But I soon became addicted. Not because running was having a particularly profound effect on my body – the effect was minimal at best – but because it was having an unexpected effect on my mind.
My mind is like a jailhouse. I am sensitive to everything anyone says about me or mine. I listen. I remember. I hold grudges. On top of this, all of my many thoughts and feelings remain imprisoned in my mind until I decide to release them. I am either fully contained or fully expressive. These two habits of mind augment one another such that the release of my emotions can be a daunting thing for the person on the receiving end. Yet as I quite literally ran through my first year of high school, all the thoughts and feelings I was containing came rushing to the forefront of my mind, demanding to be acknowledged and refusing to be pushed back into imprisonment. Every slam of my foot into dirt or pavement or machine was a release of the anger and frustration and sadness I felt, fueling me to run harder. I found myself mouthing words, things I wanted to say to people who were not around. My eyebrows furrowed and tears hung on my eyelashes. Running forced me to pace the release of my emotions; I confronted truths about others and me and allowed myself to experience the emotional reactions I had to these truths gradually rather than all at once or not at all.
As I grew older, running continued to have its therapeutic effect on me. Yet it became clear that it wasn’t enough. There was too much pain and grief and sadness to resolve in a 30-minute jog. In 2009, I found out my parents of fifteen and a half years were getting divorced. Being the internal type when it comes to my emotions, I didn’t want to meet with a therapist. I didn’t talk about it with my friends. I didn’t even really speak about it with my mother, as much as she tried. I ran. And I ran. And I ran. But still I would be ambushed and crippled by sadness and anger fighting to be recognized. So I wrote. Instead of facing a human and feeling waves of embarrassment and insecurity drown out my voice, I faced my computer. I saw a blank page waiting, sans judgment, for me to expose myself to it. This is one of the first things I told it:
I had missed my mother’s food perhaps more than anything else. And how from my designated seat at the table I could look out the glass front door and see the sun setting over the trees. Or how Max, our floppy eared dog with the relentless nose, would sit determinedly next to me and stare unwaveringly at the food on the table, like if he concentrated hard enough he could compel the food to hop off of the table and into his mouth. I was back in my very own paradise.
As, however, my mom brought out dessert and the conversation lulled, my dad spoke the words that will forever burn in my memory: “We have something to tell you.” I felt my heart drop out of my chest. I somehow knew exactly what was coming. It took all my strength to beg him, “No…” as my shoulders shrugged over and my body curled in my chair; my forehead wrinkled in confusion and desperation. The sharpest of “horror chills” ran through my body and turned my blood cold. My parents’ 30-year marriage was ending.
I wrote the essay from which the above excerpt comes in high school in response to a prompt, which required me to choose one of the quotations from Paradise Lost and integrate it into a personal essay. My parents’ recent divorce screamed for me to use the quotation, “On th’ other side Adam, soon as he heard the fatal trespass done by Eve, amazed, astonied stood and blank while horror chill ran through his veins and all his joints relaxed. From his slack hand the garland wreathed for Eve dropped down and all the faded roses shed” (Book 9 888-893). There is no greater paradise than family, and there will never be a greater paradise lost than my family. I couldn’t suppress the screaming, so I wrote it down instead.
Since this first encounter between writing therapy and myself, the dynamics of my family have overwhelmed my writing. Almost seven years post-divorce, my emotional responses still feel heightened: the joy in going home, the grief I feel when I lose someone I love, the sadness I experience when my father disappoints me (this one in particular). My relationship with my dad is variable and complex and infuriating. In my sophomore year at the University of Michigan, I decided to finally tell my dad exactly how I felt about our relationship. Not to his face, of course. But I did tell my computer all the things I wish my dad already knew – just from being my dad. The essay is called “Captain Morgan”. It begins with descriptions of my father’s appearance, his personality and our relationship pre-divorce. In all of these cases, I refer to him as “Dad”. After I reveal my parents’ divorce, however, he becomes “my father,” and we become greatly disconnected.
A few days after Christmas 2013, I looked around my father’s living room. The room was mainly unfurnished – the result of my father losing his job almost a year previously – except for one brown leather couch. Double glass doors opened onto the back deck and a view of the Annisquam River; Evie, the Yorkie, was laying in her bed snorting like a pig as she slept; and three pictures from my father’s wedding sat above the fireplace: one of Brooke, his wife’s daughter, one of Bridget, her other daughter, and one of Nick, my brother. My oldest brother, Jon, wasn’t able to attend the wedding. I had been there. Yet, no one would know my father even had a daughter from looking at any of the rooms in his home. I, like so many other aspects of his previous life, had disappeared.
Maybe someday I will show my dad this essay. Maybe not. The importance of this essay is not the final product, but the process I went through in creating it. I unleashed every negative feeling I had towards my dad into this essay. They didn’t all make it explicitly into the essay, but these emotions drove the stories I chose to tell and what I chose to tell about them. As I wrote, I let go of all the guilt I housed over my feelings toward my dad. The blank piece of paper offers no judgment, remember?
For a while I managed to cope with my intense emotions using both my running and writing therapies. But just as I had once experienced running without writing, I learned what it was like to have writing without running. My mother was in San Diego, and I was driving home from the beach when it happened. I say it, because I still don’t even know what it was. Here are some of my thoughts from that moment: Why can’t I feel the wheel beneath my hands? Why is the car slowing down? [Looks down at speedometer] Why isn’t the car slowing down? It feels like it’s slowing down. Am I hallucinating? Or becoming paralyzed? I can’t feel anything. Maybe I have a brain tumor. I didn’t have a brain tumor. But there was something wrong with me. It was the closest thing I can imagine to an out-of-body experience. And it was terrifying. I pulled off the road, and my father met me and drove me home. The essay, “What’s Happening to Me?” reflects on this moment:
Sitting in my mother’s family room, I second-guessed my autonomy. I had yearned all summer for some time away from my mother; now I felt myself craving for her to come home to me. I hated that I couldn’t handle such a tidbit of independence and that my mother would be able to use this incident as an excuse to never leave me without parental supervision again. Most importantly, I hated that my body had betrayed me. As I was finally gaining some liberation from my parents, it guaranteed that I remained dependent on them. For the rest of the summer, I was trapped in my house.
I remained trapped in my house, and when I returned to Michigan, I was trapped in my apartment. Essentially, I was having episodes, sometimes brief, sometimes prolonged. Of what? Who knows? Panic perhaps. Headaches, dizziness, blurred vision, heart palpitations, trouble breathing, and, my personal favorite, feeling like the earth dropped from beneath my feet. Needless to say, there was no running for me. But still, I wrote. I wrote about my confusion and fear and anger, trying to reconcile these three things in the process. I wrote until one day, I put on my running shoes, walked down the dingy staircase in my apartment building, entered the arboretum, took a deep breath, and ran – feet to dirt, pounding out everything I felt. There was no overcoming my episodes; I would never have complete control over them. There was only surviving them, navigating them. When I accepted this I saved myself from crippling meta-panic every time I experienced a symptom. I started going to class again. I made new and amazing friends. I got back in running shape. I applied for the MInor in Writing. I fell in love.
Neither running, nor writing gives me mastery over my physical reality. I still don’t have the estimable thigh gap. My parents are still divorced. Occasionally, I still feel my heart flutter or the earth drop from beneath me. But I still run, and I still write. I don’t write as a means of deception any longer; I write as a transmission of honesty, both to my audience and to myself. I write in order to navigate through the realities and emotions of my life. Writing is not a control mechanism; it is a coping mechanism. So as long as I continue to feel, I will continue to write.
Annotated Bibliography
Morgan, Christina (2011). Paradise Lost Personal Essay (Unpublished paper). The Taft School, Watertown, CT.
I chose to replace my Directed Self-Placement essay with the above essay, which I wrote toward the end of my high school career. For this Senior AP Literature essay, I chose a quotation from Paradise Lost and used it to describe a personal experience. If I remember and self-researched correctly, this essay was the very first I wrote about my parents’ divorce. Still struggling two years after my parents made the announcement, I think I finally realized that one of the best ways to work through it would be to write about it. And that’s exactly what I did. Reading through the essay, it is obvious that two years is not enough time to describe the emotion of the experience as in-depthly as I did in “Captain Morgan” or to gain a fuller perspective on the event and its impact on me. But it was a good first step in using writing as a means of talking about all the things I thought I was “not supposed to tell anyone” or expressing feelings I thought I was “not supposed to feel”.
Morgan, Christina (2012). The Game of Life (Unpublished paper). University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
This is the fourth and final essay I wrote in my first year writing course. Much like parts of “Captain Morgan”, this essay discusses a very private event in my life. However, the entire essay centers on my parents’ divorce rather than my father, who in “Captain Morgan” acted as a means of reflecting on the divorce. This essay also takes on much more of a self-revelatory and self-improving tone. At that point in time, I still felt guilty and insecure about shining a negative light on my parents, particularly my father, so I took on a lot of the blame for the after-effects of the divorce. The essay culminates with how I have matured and come to terms with my family situation, which is not entirely accurate. It appears that I was not able to honestly navigate my emotions yet, which, I think, ruins the effect of the essay on me as the writer as well as my readers.
Morgan, Christina (2014). Captain Morgan (Unpublished paper). University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
This piece functioned as my “person essay” in the upper-level writing course I took, English 325, The Art of the Essay. The main objective of this essay is to describe my father, both in physical appearance and in personality. But attempting to do so naturally caused me to evaluate my relationship with my dad in the essay. There was an obvious shift in that relationship following my parents’ announcement that they were getting divorced. That shift is evidenced in this essay by reference to Robert Morgan as “Dad” prior to the divorce and “my father” following the divorce. This was one of several pieces I have written that addresses a personally controversial topic – not controversial in terms of the subject matter itself, but controversial in terms of should I write about this? Should I expose these negative experiences and feelings about my dad? I think doing so allowed me to create a raw, complete and accurate picture of not only my father, but also his relationship with his daughter – a huge part of who he is. It also allowed me to acknowledge and express those feelings without feeling guilty about them.
Morgan, Christina (2014). What’s Happening to Me? (Unpublished paper). University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
This was the final piece I wrote in English 325, The Art of the Essay. It functions as my “process essay” and discusses my experience dealing with the health system as I attempted to understand and interpret some enigmatic and uncontrollable symptoms. While I was living with these symptoms I was incredibly embarrassed by them and by my inability to explain them to others. In my junior year, I chose to harness all of that uncertainty and try to explain and understand that experience through my writing. It was a very vulnerable piece, and I think I transmitted my fear, confusion and frustration well. I was able to describe on paper the symptoms I had so much difficulty articulating to my friends.
Morgan, Christina (2014). Write What You Think (Unpublished paper). University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
This is my “Why I Write” essay from the gateway course for the Minor in Writing. The essay functioned as a journey to finding an answer to the following question: why do you write? Essentially, the essay suggests that I write because it is always a journey – a journey to figuring out what I’m thinking and feeling. This answer served somewhat as the basis from my Writer’s Evolution Essay. Naturally afraid of my emotions, I, by writing, can explain and hopefully understand them in a more temperate way, but I know now I cannot control them.
Morgan, Christina (2014, Dec. 2). Growing as a Writer (Web log comment). Retrieved from http://writingminor.sweetland.lsa.umich.edu/2014/12/growing-as-a-writer/.
The title of this blog post mirrors the theme of my e-Portfolio for Writing 220. The post discusses, obviously, how I have grown as a writer, much of which is not relevant to the current essay. However, the last section of the post touches on how my writing has become more personal. I have now written several pieces that talk about my development as a person, which parallels my development as a writer. As I’ve written more honestly and emotionally, I have learned to deal with my emotions more realistically: I navigate rather than control them.
Morgan, Christina (2015). Genre 1 Final Draft (Unpublished paper). University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
In English 229, my two major assignments included the following components: choose a genre of professional writing, conduct a rhetorical analysis of that genre, compose a piece in that genre, and develop a reflective memo on the piece that you write. For the second of these assignments, I chose to compose a cover letter. Writing a cover letter is undoubtedly my least favorite part about applying to a job. It is very uncomfortable for me to try to promote myself. I think it’s difficult to be confident and qualified while remaining humble and non-conceited. Writing about one’s self, especially in this capacity when so much is on the line, can be very awkward, both for writer and reader. This piece is of a completely different genre than the ones included in my essay. However, I never would have been able to write a cover letter if I couldn’t reflect honestly on myself and my experiences.
Morgan, Christina (2014). Book Assignment Final. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
My major is Biopsychology, Cognition and Neuroscience, so the upper-level writing course I took within my major was Psych 302, Research Methods in Cognitive Neuroscience. In this class we had to complete a book assignment on Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Neuroscience. My paper had to answer four questions posed about the content of Brainwashed. The first required me to discuss the term, addiction. The second asked me to investigate the process of neuro-marketing. The third prompted me to think about the validity of lie detector tests. And the fourth asked me to decide if fMRI scans could be used to predict future criminal behavior. All of the two- to three-page responses to these questions were objective pieces. Going to school as a science major, in which opinion and emotion rarely color writing, writing with sentiment was all the more foreign to me. And all the more important.
Morgan, Christina (2014). Where’d the Dolphins Go? (Video blog). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ6rotSO-QA.
This video was my final project for the gateway course for the Minor in Writing and is acting as a replacement for my writing from outside coursework requirement. It is essentially a “Draw My Life” video version of the children’s story I developed. I filmed myself drawing the story’s illustrations on a whiteboard, sped up the drawing process in iMovie, narrated the story, and added background music and sound effects. This project was an exposé in an entirely different way. I wasn’t exposing my thoughts and emotions; I was exposing my creativity (or lack thereof). This was the first project over which I had total control – control over the content, control over the genre, and control over the form. Even though the content was not, the project overall was a direct expression of me.
Morgan, Christina (2013). Melville v. James: The Battle (Unpublished paper). University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
This essay was a strictly argumentative essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories. My professor for English 298, Academic Argumentation presented us with two commentaries about Hawthorne’s short stories. Henry James claimed that Hawthorne “played with Puritan principles and made toys of them,” whereas Herman Melville suggested that Hawthorne is “confronting his legacy”. In this essay I discuss four of short stories - Roger Malvin’s Burial,” “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and “The Birthmark” and come to the conclusion that Hawthorne’s stories tend to fall with the former interpretation. Taking this class was paramount in my decision to apply for the Minor in Writing. Argumentation was not the kind of writing I wanted to create. Analyzing literature is not what excited me. Writing with freedom and personality and emotion is what excited me.