One of the things I’m finding difficult about grad school (during covid, even though that isn’t relevant here. why do i want to qualify this? i will never know how things would have been otherwise and i feel like i just have to accept that im going through everything with a fog over my face, which is actually a pretty normal feeling for me.)
more than half the days.
is wrestling with different writing styles. this is my first time off school since christmas. i have a month, so the time is very similar.
in the first semester, everything felt wildly intense. overwhelmingly intense. up until november was absolutely constant wondering about whether or not trump would be elected and what would happen as a reaction. i once fully believed my cat had mouth cancer and was going to die. i had to go through the covid tunnel to get to the hospital to get my second-in-my-life mri (for the same reason? i don’t remember but when i was 18 i was thinking WAY MORE about livers than ovaries. i have to go look up whether or not it was for my liver or my ovaries, and that’s a memory from my own life!). We were in the midst of the second wave and thing were still escalating. I got my first flu shot and felt sick and was told by public health I couldn’t go home. I was already packed. Left to my own devices, I would not have been able to function. My partner had to talk me down and tell me how to “self regulate.”
Not his term, obviously, but that’s how I feel I’m writing when using academic terminology. Other than criticisms about living under neuroliberalism re: “self regulation”, I feel like I’m using short hand to reference specific memories from my own life. Using academic language to tap into a common vocabulary, but also to put up boundaries around my own life. It is healthy and reasonable to have boundaries, but my instinct is to be rebellious about this (something I’m wrestling with re: medicalizing).
Indigenous storytelling is a methods of abstracting and making accessible. Similar to how a rock holds the past present and future, storytelling holds multiple meanings. Wreslting with academic and pathologizing language can be in a piece without being explicitly present.
I’m interested in storytelling because I’m interested in auto-ethnography because I’m interested in creative non-fiction. (Hunt and Holmes.)
Visual vocabular, written vocabulary…