Amanda-Leigh and Respect

Yesterday evening, I came across the story of an eighty year old grandmother who was a blood clot survivor. This woman had surgery to permanently stop blood clots from forming. What I am left with is the trace of a smile on the woman’s face. As someone who has experienced the trauma of facing blood clots, smiling is a sign of strength and courage. This woman deserves to smile and feel at peace. I do not know if I could have such strength dealing with a third round of  blood clots. I would like to be optimistic at least. This beautiful woman sure is!

I have begun to realize that blood clots will be an active part of my existence. I have tried so hard to deny this existence. When I traveled to the transit center in September 2012, I saw my dream of college shattered once again. That devastated me. After recovering from blood clots, college became my passion. This path led me to making wiser decisions, becoming more stable and not having to depend on the natural flight-flight response to cope, and everything seemed to make sense. The woman in me felt threatened once again.

I had to take time off (yet again) to recover. This time Celexa was messed up in my body. I did not feel well mentally. I withdrew from my college. I could not handle everything at once. This was too much for me. Taking time off became a good decision. I was able to focus on losing weight and learned how to eat better. I did not like myself. The Emergency Room visit in September can be seen as a wake-up call.

 At the time, I weighed one-hundred eighty nine pounds. I was living on Dr. Pepper, foods high in sugar and fat, and all of that good, inexpensive stuff seen in aisles. Something had to give. Since the incident last February at dinner, I was on a downward spiral. I ate more to hide the pain. I felt ugly inside. My body was the first – and only – thing men saw in me. This really was not what I wanted.

I wanted people to see me the way I see the eighty-year-old woman. I wanted people to see my smile first and then my mind. I did not want people to see my curves first off. I find this degrading to a woman. A woman deserves to be respected. A woman does not deserve to be stared at like a sex object. I am not a sex object. I am a woman who wants to be seen for my mind. I want people to look at me for my mind and not my physical disability. I want to be hired at a good place that will lead to promotions. I do not wish to be treated as an unequal in modern society.

I feel confident about my decision to go back to college and work on my BA in Liberal Arts with a concentration in English. I desire to get more education than I currently have. This right is granted to me in modernism. I will admit, I have wallowed in self-pity because every door to job opportunities have been bolted shut because I have no Bachelor’s degree to show for my hours and hours of hard work in college. If I had an Associates in Applied Science, I would probably be taken more serious. Since I only have an Associates in Arts, I have been turned down. I do not regret the hours I spent reading, discussing, preparing for quizzes and exams, the courses I took, and the literary friends I have made. I am truly sorry employers are unable to see the efforts and  accomplishments people like me have contributed to our societies. We have worked extremely hard to overcome. We did not work this hard to be discriminated against. We are seen as liability issues rather than real people.

Amanda-Leigh and Arthur Miller

A man sits on a deserted stage. The lights are dimmed. I can tell this playwright has “been through the ringer” so to speak. The more I read this man’s biography, the more disappointed I become. In Arthur Miller’s college years at the University of Michigan, his plays advocated for a change from the exterior of a person’s environment. This contrasted greatly with the plays of the great Tennessee Williams. One playwright concentrated on exterior conflicts while the other used internal conflicts. Still, as a critic, I do not feel either man succeeded in meeting these two goals.

Had these goals been met, Arthur Miller would have written that his father became a success in his plays. This would have included Miller writing a play including his son Daniel, who lived with Downs syndrome. This would have led Miller to advocate for better treatment of patients living in institutions. Where else would this path have led Miller to? This is something we will never know. Why did Miller not mention Daniel in conversations with friends and publicly? Why did Miller write plays that featured the man down on his luck instead of providing a reasonable solution to the conflicts?

If Miller had failed as a playwright, I could easily see him written into Paule Marshall’s story “Brooklyn.” The antagonist, Professor Max Berman, fits quite well with Miller’s roots and decisions. I compare their lives because I read this biography with this thought: What if this college student from the University of Michigan did not ever gain literary success? I can easily place Miller in Berman’s bitter role. Their pasts fit like one perfect jigsaw puzzle. 

I am left with the conclusion that the Transcendentalism movement in literature might be better to read. I am not afraid to close Arthur Miller’s biography and move on. I must move on with my life. I do not wish to read about a man who institutionalized his disabled son right after birth. As a woman with a physical disability, this is not acceptable to me. I do not have respect for any parent who dumps a poor lonely child at the gates of an institution. I do not wish to separate the man from the playwright in this case. From now on, I will be sticking to my beloved seventeenth to nineteenth writers. They have never disappointed me in any way.