Obedience VS. Walwicz

I wouldn't say surprised, but rather in a mild manner, I was caught off guard. Being an academically obedient person, and having gone through multiple lessons from different teachers telling me what and what not to do when writing essays for years—this was a breath of fresh air. For years, I have been told to "avoid constantly starting a sentence with 'the' and write only what's necessary to avoid confusing your readers." Well, if a writer is genius enough to use 'the' over and over in an essay without sounding like total gibberish, perhaps I could pull off a stunt like that too. It's a fairly small detail, yet I thought about it all the time during and after reading the essay. It made me think: Were my teachers too rigid or was I too obedient a writer?

And this very thing led to me relating to the author's point.

The way the essay slowly puts me in the perspective of the writer really intrigued me. I feel like I was reading her thoughts, but in a way that she's allowing me to do so and it isn't in any way invasive—it's as if she was trying to say "this is what I think and I think you should think it too!" I related to her so well in the end. Creative Writing is indeed something that people used to see as "unnecessary to teach" or "a waste of academic efforts" which led to it being undermined in a society that sees science and technology as "true education." And so in academic spaces, there's very little regard for creative writers and forcing them to submit to certain standards of writing. The author despises this, yet she obeys. From what I could understand in the essay, the repeatedly emphasized lack of freedom drove her to what sounded like madness and ultimately she becomes what she needed when she was still a student—an actual creative writer.

The way she wrote the essay as if she was losing her mind was what disturbed me, although in a good way. Personally, I see it as her inner self's monologue. I felt every bit of her anger and I felt how excruciating it was for her to be a "docile body." I felt the intensity of her feelings as if they were my own. These thoughts are exactly what I too would think if I was forced in a box for a passion that someone else wants to mold.

"The institutionalized response of a student and a psychiatric patient." My favorite line in the essay. It sums up who she once was and from then on I thought she will end this essay with her breaking away from the chains of submission, and I was happy to have gotten it right!