Hm, this wasn't as tough as I thought.

Brainstormin' Time!
Where to begin...

-My intent in writing this is to sort out my memories and figure out how I got here. I've always been a really moody, conflicted person even before (though to less of an extremity) my hardships started and I've always wondered what factors contributed to that.
-grandpa died when I was five of bone marrow cancer, before I knew him, before I was old enough to understand that deep of a loss, I didn't realize... even until a week ago.
-pretty whitebread childhood, close with family, the youngest, teased, impressionable, curious, look nervous or indignant in most old pictures, but I was a crybaby and have been teased a LOT over the years...
-I don’t remember my personality as a young kid
But remember happiness,
in my ignorance
-moved to IL from CT at 7
-don't like to admit it but people have stepped all over me my entire life, and hardly done anything about it
attention
-Sweater season,
one of my loves.
Reddened faces in our backyard
beneath the tree,
a snowball to the spine,
the times when I’ve been coldest,
I’ve felt the most alive.
-Always wondered how the fibers
tied together,
how I’d tie together
when I never fit in,
a building for my age
and maturity as well.
Never wanted that responsibility
or attention.
-never knew what I wanted
-rarely knew what I had,
like that day in October
sat at the counter,
spied my reflection in the knife,
how cool the edges felt in my dry palms,
how easy it would be to break the ties
-but family grounded me
my parents, sisters, my cousin (who said I was her hero, my proudest moment)
-my parents sacrificed so much for me, hours totaling days in waiting rooms, time sifting through
-while I was forced to grow up, to face the truth. “You have cancer”
-“….another neurosurgery…” TWELVE.
-“Are you scared?”
-My mother always on the phone.
Bothered the hell out of me.
But she was worried,
I see that now,
scared out of her mind.
-“Everything’s going fine.”
I had a tube in my neck.
Blood on my hands.
in my hair.
Where did the ties end?
-“Back for Christmas”
barely. Eating Christmas eve dinner on paper plates
feeling awful.
“Radioactive.”
“Don’t touch the cat.”
“Yeah I’m spectacular grandma.”
The strands of Christmas lights
twinkling, blurred,
Monday, December 3rd.
Slicing a bottom-shelf orange,
had to guilt myself into eating it,
my hands green with bruises
and nails chipping, fake holiday red,
scars over scars,
hair smelling like plaster,
I felt twelve, weak
and didn’t believe in anything.
-Shunt taps-
needles through the fluid space
“Squeeze my hand if you need to.”
I didn’t.
-Numbness. Sleeping pills, television.
4.5 years of wondering, aimlessness.
Depression.
-Christmas, my favorite holiday,
All the effort for colored boxes,
heartfelt gifts
no one remembers,
ornaments to box away again
with all the other
disappointments.
-“You’re amazing.”
Doesn’t sink in.
-A pool of spinal fluid
1am.
Slamming the emergency button.
Bright hall lights.
“Are you okay?”
No.
-The words no one ever means.
My predicaments.
“Whoa, he still likes you?
It’s been like ten years.”
Eleven.
Yeah I don’t get it either.
-No sidewalk in my old neighborhood,
Not learning to ride a bike ‘til I moved,
Fell on my face,
scraped my knees,
elbows, nose;
first day of school.
-Running barefoot in the grass,
when I used to be happy,
used to feel safe.
It was always too much
Even without my mother, the protector,
The lies ripped away
like swathes of bandages.
No, I wasn’t fine.
-Kicked off the stone wall
at my great aunt’s beach house,
cut my foot on the barnacles,
it stung but it was truth
I bled with the sea,
for the sea.

"Perhaps one needs a different type of approach altogether. Perhaps literature is definable not bywhether it is fictional or 'imaginative', but it uses language in peculiar ways. On this theory, literature is a kind of writing which, in the words of Russian critic Roman Jakobson, represents an 'organized violence committed on ordinary speech'. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from ordinary speech. ..."(Eagleton, ?).

“In problem-posing education, men develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. Although the dialectual relations of men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action men adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-student and students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action” (Freire, 76).

Curses, don’t have my book with me… I just remember it really striking me, Viswanathan’s idea of education being a form of power. I’d cite it if I could but I wasn’t able to find it online anywhere.