Author: Rhinson

Major Project Rebecca Hinson and Stephanie Rizzo

Word Count 1704

Write up:

For our major paper project we decided to write a “Found Poem”. We wrote a collection of shorter poems that travel through the life of an individual with mental disabilities. We tried to express as many mental disabilities as we could to portray the different types of mental disabilities and the variety of symptoms. We focused mainly on depression and anxiety. As 2 people who have dealt with mental disabilities, this assignment means a lot to us. It was nice to be able to express some of the emotions we feel in a poetic way, while connecting to our readings this semester. However we don’t claim to know the extent of each disability, we just want to highlight some of the struggles. We also wanted to highlight the lack of visibility of these people in our society.

For our poems we mostly wrote them from our own point of views, but we incorporated lines and pieces of works that we have read this semester in 384. We did this by first breaking up our poems into 7 parts. Each poem represents 10 years of a person’s life.  For example, our first poem is from the perspective of a child less than 10 years old, and our last poem is from the point of view of an older individual, around 70 years old. We then looked through the syllabus and pulled out the works we felt would be a good fit for each poem. After that, we read all of the works and pulled out the lines we felt matched what emotions we were trying to express.

The first poem is a representation of a child with anxiety and phobia of the darkness. We tried to show that even young children can develop severe mental illnesses. There is no such thing as being ‘too young’ to be anxious and that’s the main point in this poem. The child experiences hearing voices in his head when in the dark. The line from Symptoms, by Laurie Clements Lambeth, “The cure is rest, they tell me” represents that most adults don;t understand mental disabilities in children and tell them to ‘just go to sleep’ or ‘stop being scared’. Adults sometimes don’t understand that these feelings are things the child cannot control.

For poem 2, we focused exclusively on depression. Depression is such a common issue in teens and young adults. We felt it was important to highlight this. The speaker talks about feeling disconnected from the world and always feeling alone. There are many different reasons an individual could feel this way, but the most important piece we wanted to discuss was how many people have these feelings. As a society we need to check in on each other more, make sure our friends, family, colleagues, coworkers and neighbors are doing okay. A simple “how are you today?” could go a very long way.

Poem 3 is different from the first two, in the sense that it focuses more heavily on physical disabilities than the others before it. We did this to show that an individual with any mental disabilities can have any physical disabilities and vice versa. We wanted to portray that all individuals are different. Some people take a physical disability and put a positive spin on it. While others, such as the speaker of poem 3, have a more negative view on having a disability. Poem 3 shows a person who has a terminal illness that is wearing their body away. The media tends to show disabilities as romanticized and beautiful when that is not always the case, as we learned from the talk we had in class with Donaldson. We chose to spin this poem in a different direction to continue the variety of disabilities that an individual could be faced with.

The 4th poem talks about the struggles of acceptance when society puts a norm into a person’s appearance. Or how even the medical field doubts you, instead of lifting you. The fifth poem is a tribute to deaf people. We live in a world where we constantly expect more from them, like reading lips or writing in our grammatical way. Society does not take the time to learn even a basis of ASL or understand how hard it is to read lips when you don’t even know the sounds coming out to begin with. It goes back to the idea that as an ablest society, we don’t adhere to the needs of the few, we only care about the many.

For the final poem, we went with a very disconnected speaker. We wanted to step inside someone’s head who was diagnosed and suffering from dementia. We drew from personal experiences of being beside the hospital bed and not understanding why they couldn’t remember something as simple as someone’s name. We wanted the reader throughout these poems to feel a connection in some way to the speaker in any form, be it connecting with the speaker’s hardships or seeing the speaker in the people around them.

Poems:

Poem 1:

I wake up, I’m always up.

I feel sleepy, I’m always sleepy.

I heard the voices again

They make me sleepy

“The cure is rest, they tell me.” – Symptoms

They keep me awake

They are really creepy

They are dark, like a cloudy sky in my head.

They make me scared

Nobody listens to me, but I listen to them

They hurt me inside

Nobody listens to me

“My time is not mine” – Crip Time

Poem 2:

Is this falling apart?

Is it just me?

Every day I fight the storms in my head

“She thinks of the 4a.m. loneliness that have folded her up like death” -The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window

I feel sleepy, I’m always awake.

Simple things are not so simple anymore

“I was simple enough to imagine it might be so.” -The Birthmark

Conversation is difficult

I can’t get through a single one,

It’s like nobody cares.

Stomach turns upside down, I want some interaction.

I am alone. The world is quiet.

I don’t need advice. I need companionship

“In moody sadness, on the giddy brink”- 70


Poem 3:

They tell me I’m an                             inspiration

But that’s not what I want to be.

They tell me I’m                                  strong

But that’s not what I want to be.

They tell me it’s okay to be                 different

But why do I have to be different at all?

They tell me it’s                                   never going to go away

But why did it ever have to come at all?

They tell me it’s                                   okay to be in pain

But I don’t feel any pain at all

They tell me it’ll be a few months

But why can’t it be now?

“I may not live long. When you know it’s something wrong with you and you may not live long, well then…” – Good Country People

Well then… don’t call me an inspiration

Well then… don’t call me strong

Well then… don’t tell me I’m different

Well then… don’t tell me it’ll be okay

Tell me I’m free to go

Tell me it’s okay to be done

Poem 4:

I was not particularly born this way

I was predestined to lose my arm

I was just leaning on the excavator

I was just leaning when it hit the power lines

I was in an ambulance.

The said to my wife I may not wake up

They said I may lose my legs

They said I may lose my hands

They said I’d never drive again

They said things that were wrong

I did wake up

I lost some toes, who needs those

I lost an arm, and some tattoos

I can still drive my stick shift

I am living their lies

But for some reason people look at me funny

When I don’t have my prosthetic arm on

As if for some reason I need it to be out in public

As if I need it to complete me

As if I am incomplete.

As if that body they tried so hard to fix, straighten was simply mine. – What You Mourn

Poem 5:

I am not incapable of walking if I am deaf
“Like Helen Keller?” They ask.
No, like me, like the people I went to school with
cause my parents couldn’t wait till I was normal enough
to associate with them
Helen Keller is to blame. – Deaf Blind: Three Squared Cinquain

I learned how to speak without words
It is the others who don’t know how to talk to me
It is like dancing with your hands, even if I can’t hear the music
I am not unable to hear
the word is not a hearing world
It is a world of sight
and touch
and taste
I am not limited by one sense
The world is limitless in that sense.

Poem 6:

When I was in the war I saw the most horrifying things a man could imagine

I cried tears of joy placing myself back in her arms on the day of liberation

Who was she again?

I can’t seem to remember, it’s on the tip of my tongue

Anyway,

When I was in the war I saw the most horrifying things a man could imagine.

Ella, no, Anna, no, Delilah!

How are the kids? Are they behaving for you?

Did Davey like his baseball glove I got him for Christmas?

What do you mean your name is Charles?

You look just like my Davey.

Dammit! They keep putting this thing in my arm!

It hurts, I just want to go home.

Sue can make her bread rolls

I can smell the yeast as it raises the bread in the oven

I can smell the sweet perfume she dabbed on her wrists and behind her ears

Oh yes, her name is Sue.

My wife’s name is Sue.

She was the prettiest thing that walked through the doors of my daddy’s drug store.

Just let me go home! I just want to go home.

I’m not causing a scene you are!

“You watch me though you are discreet. I must be something to see.” – Obviously

Sue isn’t dead.

You aren’t my children.

Who are you?

Who am I?

Rebecca Hinson’s Response to Robert McRuer’s “Introduction: Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence”

Heterosexuality and able-bodiedness has been defined not by what they are, but by what they aren’t. To give meaning to homosexual and disabled, it has been written down as deviations from the norm. In this case the norm being heterosexuality and the able-bodied. Much like Audre Lorde often focuses on the intersectionality of her many characteristics, these four categories rely on their other, to exist; you cannot have one without the other.

            There is much similarity in the LGBT movement as there is in the Disability movement. Both have roots in the constant normalizing of what makes them different. Both have terms used previous as harmful and derogatory, now at the face of their theories (queer and crip.) However, most importantly they define what it means for society to be normal. Society requires these definitions so that they can label and pursue and prosecute the “abnormalities” from a “perfect” society to stabilize institutions that were thought to be in jeopardy from this deviance. Queerness was defined in the 19th century as an oddity. Eventually defining it as a homosexual, which is the defined as someone who deviates from the “norm” and has relations with a member of the same sex (discluding women at the time, because of course they cannot be trusted with the knowledge that they can have relations with other women.) The definition was morphed into many different terms like gross indecency, or sodomy, or my personal favorite “somdomite.” The point being that without defining what queerness is, you cannot have these institutions like the law governing it, which is what society wants.

            Society wants to govern personal aspects of life, so that life runs more smoothly. In theory, the more people deviate away from that norm, the more chaos it causes. With disability, society defines it as someone with a body unable to function “normally.” This normal being that someone is not hindered by how society has created buildings, jobs, school systems, government, etc. To deal with this deviance, instead of working to make these institutions and places more accessible, society created ways of moving them out of these environments. For example, literal institutions were created to move them away from society itself.

            McRuer says in his introduction “According to the flexible logic of neoliberalism, all varieties of queerness ­— and, for that matter disabilities — are essentially temporary, appearing only when, and as long as, they are necessary.” (29) He is calling attention to the idea that definitions are not all encompassing. Where it is considered a disability in one setting, it can be the norm in another because nothing is being hindered.

            The “norm” is personal. My norm is different than my roommate’s norm, or my professor’s norm. My norm is different than someone with a disability. This does not make someone else lesser of a person. A queer woman with down syndrome is just as important as the next. The fault is with the way that people with disabilities are ostracized because they cannot conform to the way society wants, because their norm is just too different than the mass population’s norm.

Word Count: 516

I Pledge: Rebecca Hinson

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