Jessica Sede

Sometimes I lie...but doesn't everyone? I know you lie, Mr/Mrs reader...you probably lie more than you are willing to admit. I am about to tell you a story. Surely some of it is not true, but that will be for you to decide. Maybe all of it is true, and I am too embarassed to admit it, but what other choice do you have but to believe me?

I dated a boy when I was fourteen named Philip, maybe that was when all the trouble started. On second thought, he was more of a syptom of the already brewing trouble then the cause. I had been suffering with an eatting disorder since I was about nine. I know that sounds young, but I guess when you come from such dysfunction ( a delusional mother, a junkie father) problems surface early.

I met Philip in middle school, we were in the same class, and he was really popular. I was an outcast with a pink mohawk, but he liked me. We stayed together for about two years, even after moving on to different high schools. The relationship was very rocky. Overall he was a shithead trying to live up to an image. The girl he had liked before me was a teen model. She was tall and skinny, I was not.

Like I said, I had struggled with food since nine, and I had just started eatting again. Philip thought I needed to lose weight. My legs were fat, but my butt wasn't big enough...go figure! I didn't fit the barbie doll ideal he had in his head. I started dieting again.

I lost my virginity to him...he claimed he had had sex before. Thinking back on that day, I now realize he was lying.

Our relationship is a bit of a blur. I remember a lot of hitting and cursing ...drugs and drinking...and breaking up every other week. Yet, we loved eachother..."love"...whatever that is...however possible that is as a teen.

We broke up around Christmas. We were standing at the bus stop after shopping at the mall. I had all the packages in my hands. He was talking about how he had gone to Hooters with his friends for wings. I never thought those girls were that great looking, and I told him that any girl with semi-big boobs could work there. I knew someone whose sister worked there, she was only a B cup...she had a good push up bra.

He told me I was jealous because I wasn't pretty enought to work there. "Your just cute...not everyone can be beautiful Jessica." I believe those were his exact words. I snapped. I threw all of the clothes he had just bought into the street. They were run over by a bus..ruined...I laughed. I was so mad that I walked five blocks in the wrong direction before I realized I was heading the wrong way. That was how my first relationship ended...clothing in a street. I never cried over him...even when I would find out five years later that he had died.

Or did I? Sometimes all the lies get so mixed up in my mind I forget the truth, but like I said before, what choice do you have but to believe me? My side of the story is the only one that exists anymore, and besides, isn't the truth relative? All that matters is what you remember...not what actually happened.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly scared the hell out of me. It was by far the scariest thing I have ever read, and I am an avid reader, and watcher, of horror. I can not even begin to imagine what it must be like to be locked in my body. I find it hard enough expressing myself as it is. I couldn't deal with not having language or movement. I kept thinking about Johnny Got His Gun, and morse coding "Kill me...Kill me."

Yet, Bauby seems to deal with his situation quite well, and that is very inspiring, but the fact that this can happen to anyone is enough to keep you up at night. My neighbor had a major stroke a few weeks ago while in Maine. When my grandmother told me what had happened to him I immediatley thought of this book. Apparently he lost all ability to see and move. He lived for three day, and then passed away. I saw his wife a few days ago, and she told me that he had the ability to hear, because when people spoke to him his blood pressure changed. I told her about this book, and we both agreed that he was lucky that he went so fast.

One thing that I kept thinking about while reading this, was if the person recording his blinks embellished anything. Bauby wouldn't be able to proofread it, right? Wouldn't the person physically writing be able to add or remove whatever she seemed fit? That makes me question the authenticity of the book.

Overall, I found this to a very thought provoking read, and have recommended it to many people.

Okay...Okay...I've heard people say a lot of strange things about Harry Potter, but I was very surprised to hear J.K Rowling come out with Dumbledore being gay. This really pissed me off. Now, don't get me wrong, If Dumbledore was gay I'd have no problem, but he isn't...he can't be...because Dumbledore isn't real!

I am not a huge fan of Harry Potter, but I have read the first two books, and I know people who followed the entire series...and i've spoken with them about this sexuality issue...and they all agree that nothing in the book suggests Dumbledore's sexual orientation, which makes me feel that Rowling is doing this to sell more books...and that makes me mad.

All this controversy over Harry Potter, and people claiming that it promotes satanism and evil and homosexuality and blah blah blah. It's just a book...a fun little children's book that, if anything, teaches loyalty and courage. Now Rowling has to put this out there, and stir up more crap.

I just don't get it. The thing that I wondered though...is would this have bothered me if I wasn't taking this class. All I could think about was ToM, and how we pretend that characters in books have lives outside of the pages. Dumbledore isn't gay because he doesn't date or have sex with anyone in the book. There are no secret love affairs unless Rowling writes them into her novel...and to date...she hasn't. She has just made a public statement about it.

So, there is my rant...and if anyone has some deeper insight into the book than I do...please let me know so I can stop hating Rowling.

This book review was written with The Village Voice in mind. I typed it tonight, as my life has suddenly become filled with interruptions. It still needs a lot of work. The book was published in 1993, so pretend that is when the book review is being written.

I still want to add details about Borderline Personality Disorder into it, and also do some research on Mclean Hospital. Find out if it had any scandals, since mental health care was not at it's greatest in the 1960's.

Pardon the Interruption

Sometimes it takes a good book to help us realize just how much we take our lives for granted. Our days are filled with interruptions. You are running late for work, and the dog has an accident on the carpet. You are about to take a nap, and the doorbell rings. We have all been there, and we know just how annoying these interruptions can be, but how many of us have really had our lives interrupted?
Imagine that you wake up one morning, and you begin going through your daily routine. You go into the kitchen to get a glass of milk, but you can’t get to the refrigerator because the black and white squares on the floor won’t let you. They appear to be moving, there are shapes in them, and you can’t take your eyes off them long enough to do what you have to do. Suddenly everything feels wrong. You are struck with panic, and you decide to skip work and stay in bed all day. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day, but then you wake up, and the same thing happens again. Things get worse and worse until you can’t deal with it anymore. You cry as you realize you have lost control of your life, you even begin to contemplate suicide.
This is what happened to Susanna Kaysen when she was eighteen years old. She woke up one day, and realized that something had a hold on her life. Something that wasn’t going to let go without a fight. This lead her to commit herself to Mclean Hospital, be diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, and later write the national bestseller Girl, Interrupted.
One minute Susanna Kaysen is at a therapy session, the next she is in a taxi being sent to a psychiatric ward. It happened just that quickly, part of the world one day, locked away from it the next. Upon entering the ward she finds herself mingling with a strange mix of people. There is Polly, a young girl who lit herself on fire, and has one whole side of her body scared. Daisy, a rich girl who is addicted to chicken and laxatives. Later on there is a new girl who appears normal, but by the end of the book is playing in her own feces, and reminding the girls just how lucky they are to be on the minimum security ward. Then there is Lisa, a so-called sociopath who enjoys making monthly escapes, and passes the time by making trouble around the ward.
When paired with such an interesting cast of characters, Kaysen’s mental problems begin to seem less severe. As she becomes friends with the other girls in the ward the reader witnesses a change in her behavior. The once quiet Kaysen begins to act out in ways that just don’t seem to coincide with her thoughts. She seems to be making a conscious choice to allow herself to sink into insanity, which will leave you questioning if the ward is the best place for her.
The memoir is brilliantly pieced together with small chapters that focus on different events that Kaysen experienced during her two years in Mclean. These chapters are pieced together with copies of Kaysen’s actual medical records, and made coherent by juxtaposing memories of Mclean with recent reflections, and Kaysen’s new knowledge of mental illness.
There is a great market for books dealing with mental illness, both fiction and nonfiction. Why is that? The thing that makes Girl, Interrupted so fascinating may also be what makes it so frightening. All of the characters in the book have suffered from emotional turmoil so severe it has prevented them from living a normal life, but they don’t appear all that different from us. They have hopes and dreams, and some even have endearing personalities.
The memoir begins with a photocopy from Kaysen’s case record folder, probably added for authenticity. The fact that someone had to go through two years of emotional and psychological turmoil is frightening, but what is even more frightening is what she writes on the second page:

People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in their as well. I can’t answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It’s easy.

Many of Kaysen’s thoughts during her “mental breakdown” may not be that different from thoughts we’ve had during times of severe stress. Does this mean that this can happen to us too? That it is possible that we will wake up one day, and find our lives completely changed? Furthermore, does this mean that all the people in the psychiatric ward were once like us? Did they give into the abandonment of being confined and choose to let themselves sink into “insanity?”
Girl, Interrupted grabs the reader’s attention with reality and dark humor. Kaysen guides us through the roller coaster ride that is mental illness with a smile on her face. She realizes that she was never that different from those outside the ward, and it gave her the strength to overcome one of life’s interruptions. This book is a must for anyone who has ever been depressed, confused, or questioned their sanity. Life is full of interruptions, Girl, Interrupted is a worthwhile one.

This final project has really been driving me crazy. It really made me wish that I had the ability to make a Radiolab type of thing, but alas, I am not computer savy enough.

I once had a professor that told me that all good writers suffer from substance abuse problems. After doing some research online I did find that many famous writers have used various narcotics during their career. I don't know if all of these claims are true, but i'd like to find out.

My essential question for my paper is : What effects do drugs have on creativity?

Many people argue that drugs open locked parts of our minds, others argue that drugs simply destroy the mind. I want to write a paper that looks into the subject.

So, I've been doing a lot of thinking about this final project, and here is what i've come up with:

Drugs are popular in creative circles. Many, but not all, famous writers and artists have experimented or abused drugs. Why is this? Many people who use drugs argue that they expand the mind. This argument can be seen in a lot of the writing done during the 1960's, especially about LSD. Yet, drug use among writers did not simply begin in the 1960's. Drugs have existed, and been used as early as Ancient Greece ( don't quote me on this, a neighbor told me that the some oracle in Greece was actually emitting a toxic gas, and was making people high, which is why they thought they were having a religious experience).

There has been a lot of work done about the literature of the 1960-1970's. We all know about writers like Hunter S. Thompson, and William S. Burroughs, and while there are many resources to write a paper around the effects of LSD on these writers, I have chosen to go earlier than the 60s.

19th century romantic poets such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron experimented with opium, and a mixture of opium and alcohol called Laudanum. In my paper I would like to look into the effects that opium has on the users sensory perception, as well as the more clinical effects on the brain. Does opium enhance creativity? Or does it damage parts of the brain used for creativity over long term use?

Possible Texts:

Opoids in Mental Illness: Karl Vereby

Opium and the Romantic Imagination: Althea Hayter

Opium and the People: Opiate use in 19th Century England: Berridge, Virginia, and Griffith Edwards.

Poetic Vision and the Psychedelic Experience: R.A. Durr

Intoxicating Minds: Cieran Regan

"Drugs of Abuse- The Myth of Creativity and The Reality of Destruction": Sylvester Vizi

Can someone send me the link to the Psych 801 blog????

I can not find this blog, and therefore can not do the assignment that asks us to comment on one of the entries on the site.

HELP!!!

Here is a copy of a blog by Cheryl Dym:

The Pill Society
Ok, lately everything reminds me of a movie. In discussing the implications of medication for PTSD and ADHD, I was reminded of the movie Equilibrium.

In that movie, following WWIII, society is forced to take pills which prevent them from experiencing emotion. Without emotion, people cannot hate others and the world can remain peaceful. While the movie is extreme, with all these kids being medicated, how far away is it? It makes one wonder, are we leading toward this type of society - where people cannot experience their emotions or "true self" and instead are medicated so they can be kept in line...

anyway, its a really good movie and ladies, Christian Bale aint that bad to watch either :)

Here is my response:

Hi Cheryl:

I am commenting on your blog as part of an assignment for my class The Literary Mind. I was very interested in this particular blog because i've often questioned the use of medication myself.

It seems that everytime we turn on the television we are blasted with pill commercials. If you are sad...take this. Can't sleep? Here...take this. Too Happy? We have a cure for you!

Then years later you see a commercial advising anyone who has had side effects A,B, and C from this pill please contact a lawyer...etc..etc

What exactly are these pills doing to us? I mean, if someone is depressed, does a pill really fix them? Or must they now rely on the pill to function...not really much better than a drug addict.

I also think that pills are prescribed way too quickly. The pill seems to be the cure all solution and is prescribed before attempting other treatments.

Personally I have had experiences with SSRI's and found that when the pill no longer seemed to be working, the answer was to prescribe more pills! Higher dosages of pills! It's ok to be a walking pill popping zombie, because you can't feel sad if you can't feel anything!!!

Besides, isn't it interesting that many pills for anxiety and depression can make these problems worse? I don't know if it is like this for ADHD medicine, but I do know that ADHD meds can have bad side effects.

Are we really helping people? Or simply masking the problem because we don't have the time we would need to really fix it?

Ah the imagination is such an interesting thing!

Dissapointment comes from things not working out the way we planned. We use our imaginations to plan for the future. Do other animals do this as well? Do dogs and cats daydream and plan for their week? Or just humans...i'm guessing probably just us.

Keats looks at this urn and thinks about how lucky the figures on it are, they will never get old, they will never change. Of course, these figures aren't real people, they don't have feelings, and they don't really love each other. Yet, Keats revels in the fact that even thought they will never have each other, their love for each other will never die. The girl will forever remain fair.

Someone once told me:

"We love someone the most the first day we meet them. Things are wonderful then. People fall out of love as they get to know each other. If you fell deeper in love, people would never break up."

I don't totally agree, but I do see what that person was trying to say. I have a friend who met this wonderful girl in college. They dated for three months, and then she was killed. He was devastated, and is left with only good memories of her. His next gf was jealous of the dead one, she said he loved her more than he'll ever love her, or anyone else.

In a way, she was right. Yet, the only reason the first gf is being held in such high regard is because they didn't have enough time together to start to annoy each other. They never had fights or big disagreements. Who knows what would have happened if she had lived, maybe they would have broke up and hated each other.

The point is...the things we never get...the melody we never hear...we always imagine as being that much sweeter.

Here is my initial plan for my final project

Intro: I want to start with a short discussion of the 1960's. I know that when I think about drugs and art I think about the 1960's and 70's. During this time there was the explosive popularity of LSD. Writers like Thompson and Burrough's wrote drug induced works, as well as the Beat generation of poets. Yet, drugs have been used for inspiration for hundreds of years, dating back, I believe, to Ancient Greece. We think of the 1960's as the major drug era, but what about the 1800's and the popularity of opium? Many great writers and thinkers of the 19th century abused opium.
Do drugs help writers tap into creativity, or do they ultimatley lead to addiction and mental decline? This is what I want to find out by exploring the effects of opium, and using two writers as a case study.

Part 1: Opium: I plan on looking into the history and science of opium. When did it become popular? What are it's uses? What are the psychological and physical effects? What happens to the body and mind after long term use? I may also add a list of artists that used the drug

Part 2: Coleridge and opium. I will look at his poetry and biography. Apparently opium had a very negative effect on Coleridge's life as he became a raging addict.

Part 3: Poe (I still need to do research into Poe's opium use, so I may or may not use him). I would like to use him to show that opium use was not only popular in England, but also in the U.S. I would be examining biographical information of his drug use, and exploring how it effected his writing.

Closing: : I haven't gotten this far, but I will add to it when I know...