Growing Up & Other Important Mistakes A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts Elizabeth E.W. Christman May 2013 © 2013 Elizabeth E.W. Christman. All Rights Reserved. 2 This thesis titled Growing Up & Other Important Mistakes by ELIZABETH E.W. CHRISTMAN has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Eric LeMay Assistant Professor of English Robert Frank Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT CHRISTMAN, ELIZABETH E.W., M.A., May 2013, English Growing Up & Other Important Mistakes Director of Thesis: Eric LeMay This thesis is a collection of creative work. As the title implies, the collected personal essays all deal with issues having to do with my personal growth. The problem they address is the idea of personality, and how we go about acquiring one. My argument, in this thesis, is that our personality is the result of negative experiences throughout life. The negative (referring to anything traumatic, embarrassing, scarring, etc.) leaves an impression on us, and through a psychological reinforcement, teaches us to avoid such situations and directly affects the outcome of our adult personas. Growing Up & Other Mistakes is a series of essays that document my own personal set of "negative experiences," all of which constructed my current personality. In them, I attempt to outline my struggle and the resulting attitude. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 5 Foreigners, Invisible Toddlers, & The Social Pitfalls of Tuna Salad ............................... 12 Me & His Old Lady .......................................................................................................... 22 Amsterdam ........................................................................................................................ 33 White Girl Dreads: A Brief Affair with Funky Hair ......................................................... 39 A Brief Medical Journal of My Depression ...................................................................... 46 The Old Man & The Sea ................................................................................................... 47 Excerpts from Liz's Personal Dictionary of Misguided, Depressed, & Otherwise Broken Things ............................................................................................................................... 53 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 58 5 INTRODUCTION Philip Lopate, discusses the often melancholy tone of the personal essay in his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay: It might be called the voice of ‘middle age.’ If the personal essay frequently presents a middle-aged point of view, it may be because it is the fruit of ripened experience, or at least realism...It is difficult to write analytically from the middle of confusion, and youth is a confusion in which the self and its desires have not yet sorted themselves out. A young person still thinks it is possible—there is time enough—to become all things: athlete and aesthete, soldier and pacifist, anchorite and debauchee. Later, knowing one’s fate and accepting the responsibility of that uninnocent knowledge define the perspective of the form. The personal essayist looks back at the choices that were made, the roads not taken, the limiting familial and historic circumstances, and what might be called the catastrophe of personality. Lopate uses the word “catastrophe” at the end of that excerpt to describe the sum of human experience. If you look up the word “catastrophe,” you will find several definitions. “The final event of the dramatic action, especially of a tragedy.” “A violent and sudden change in a feature of the earth.” And, rather obtusely, “utter failure.” 6 I think “catastrophe” is a very good word when talking about personality. This brings us to that ever-nagging question: who are we? What makes us who we are? What is problematic about this question is that we are always changing. We learn, and our personalities evolve. That is the catastrophe Lopate refers to: personal evolution. Marcel Proust said in The Past Recaptured, the seventh volume of his semi- autobiographical novel, “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.” What is it about our grief that eventually forms who we are? And when I say grief here, I do not mean simply the things that affect us in a big way: death, loss, trauma, etc. We experience smaller griefs daily through small embarrassments and sadnesses. We learn from these “little griefs” as well, and they can affect us almost as profoundly as more disastrous ones. Yet our daily joys affect us minimally and are forgettable at best. Why is our happiness seemingly unimportant to the final product? The answer is in a book. Any book. Fictional or otherwise. Or films, or television, or magazines. Any form of entertainment contains it: conflict. Without confrontation, there is no narrative, and this certainly applies to the personal essay. How many memoir- style essays have you read that discussed the author’s best summer vacation? Their happiest family dinner? Their perfect wedding? Personal essayists write about their painful memories, not their happiest ones. As Proust points out, we do not learn from our happiness. These memories often blur together. Everyday joys fade in and out of each other, becoming indistinguishable and faint. 7 Grief does not tolerate this sort of treatment. Grief is the diva of emotions. She commands the center stage and the spotlight. She demands your attention, and even if you don’t want to give it to her, she will force you. This is because, in our pain, we learn something so we can avoid pain in the future. There are lessons to be learned in these darker memories. Lopate argues that the beginning of the end of youth—middle age—is what ultimately creates this catastrophe. Experience and reflection are required, according to Lopate, for our experiences to ultimately mold us. He views life as an accumulation, slowly filling us until we can finally appreciate our past in our twilight years. The problem with this idea about reflection and learning is the emphasis put on the age. The implication that the youthful and childish cannot experience or be affected by the “catastrophe of personality,” and that that catastrophe begins to end as we age doesn’t agree with my own experience. At twenty-five, I am not the same person I was at eighteen. At eighteen, I certainly wasn’t the same person I was at eight. This is because we learn through grief, and everyone can experience grief, no matter their age. Life does not culminate into an all-defining “you” after your personal tragedies begin to make sense. Life is much more like a series of stepping stones—stones constructed from our personal tragedies, big and small. Humans are, as a general rule, relatively quick witted, children especially so. The younger we are, the harder these tragedies hit us. And we learn from our pain. We appreciate them so we don’t repeat them. Then we move on to the next stepping stone. 8 We often see this sort of “learning” in memoir. Memoirs, unlike personal essays, must construct a novel-length narrative about themselves. The essayist is following the conventions of the essay form, rather than those of the novel. Like most essays, the personal essayist introduces a question or a problem. Lopate says, “Personal essayists are adept at interrogating their ignorance. Just as often as they tell us what they know, they ask at the beginning of an exploration of a problem what it is they don’t know—and why.” Some rhetoricians would call this “thesis-seaking,” and in many ways, it is. We are searching for a reason, a purpose, or a point, our readers in tow, helping them experience the grief so they can learn from our darker memories as well. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf points out this kind of exploration of the self: Until she proved by summoning, beckoning and getting together that she was not a skimmer of surfaces merely, but had looked beneath into the depths. Now is the time, she would say to herself at a certain moment, when without doing anything violent I can show the meaning of all [this life]. And she would begin—how unmistakable that quickening is!—beckoning and summoning, and there would rise up in memory, half forgotten, perhaps quite trivial things in other chapters dropped by the way. Woolf is describing here how a writer can infiltrate memories and find meaning within them. Even the most trivial of things can carry significance: one small, innocuous comment that means nothing to the speaker but everything to you; a disappointing 9 vacation; a stranger you spoke to for less than a minute who wanted desperately to mean something to you. Personal essayists are searching for the deeper meaning of their memories. We are not “skimmers of surfaces.” We try to dive deep, try to find the hidden things in our lives that made us who we are. As Proust says, “The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes” (The Captive). Memoirists do not necessarily