Chapter 12

I understood this chapter better than the others but I couldn't help but roll my eyes as I read. I don't know if it's the job of schools to teach people how to get in touch with their feelings. I also didn't understand the narrators anecdote in the beginning, he claimed the more academic he became the less in touch he was with his feelings. I feel that the more I'm forced to think about different subjects, the more in touch with my feelings I become. Whenever I learn about something, the first question I ask myself is how I feel about it.


I've been taught to keep family issues and personal problems to myself. When people talk about deeply personal information or family issues I can't help but think they're betraying their family and themselves. No one should know every single thing about you. I've said this in class and I still believe it. 

Chapter 9

I recently reread ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. The part where Dina states her mother's fear of her father is what killed her stuck out to me unlike before. Illness is a not only terrible because of what it does to a person's body but what it does to the person overall. How does it feel to be sick? Besides the aches, pain and discomfort there is a large emotional aspect to illness that the author, Hawkins describes as being left out.

 It is admirable to create something out of pain.

"The pathography itself can be seen as a reformulation of the experience of illness, as the artistic product and continuation of the intrinsic psychological act of formulation: It gathers together the separate meanings, the moments of illumination and understanding, the cycles of despair, and weaves them into a whole fabric, one wherein a temporal sequences of events takes on narrative form."