Ambiguity of the future is one of the most stressful things for a human being. Having investments in flux, a family member in the hospital, or even terrible things that may or may not happen on the horizon…many of these things provide stress on a person’s life.  Often this stress can accumulate over the long-term to be greater than the worst case scenario.

The thing is, stress was never meant to be a long-term thing. As cavemen, we would have responded to stress, such as imminent attack or a threat, with an immediate response and plan. However, due to the structures of society in our everyday lives, we find ourselves removed in the ability to make an immediately impactful decision. That’s where long-term stress comes in.

When we are put in a stressful situation, our body takes a toll. However, over the short term, this allows us to react faster and more accurately. In the long-term, this temporary effect occurs and then our bodies continuously take a toll over time. The compounding effect of daily stress results in symptoms that can often lead to depression and lethargy.

Over time, these symptoms can compound to a point where the worst case scenario, though terrible, may have been better because it would have allowed you to experience pain, recover, and adapt to the new circumstances.

How do we combat this?

Piece it out.

As humans, we react harshly to stress and the best time to deal with it is immediately. Have a goal of getting a job? Use that energy. Set aside the first two hours of your day to individual projects and setting a tangible precedent for future habits. Like the paperclips method, it’s important to break it down to projects we can see progress in, knowing that there is a tangible work in progress towards a solution, in spite of the worst-case scenario.

Is there something looming on the horizon? A family member sick, or a financial issue looming overhead? Make the automatic decision one that supports you improving your situation or finding a new one. If you can’t find a better way to support a family member, spend time with them, share a favourite section of a book by their bedside, let them know that you are there for them. That will mean so much more than working late hours back at the office because it feels like the only thing you can do.

If we break down stress piece by piece, we translate it into temporary bursts of energy instead of a long-term detriment. It can be a beneficial support system in managing short-term projects, but we need to not forget the short-term requirements in spite of the scary big picture.

Piecing it out is a great way to do it.

In this week’s class, we watched Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell; witnessing a beautiful medley of story revolving around her siblings, her mother, and her fathers. It was fascinating as we watched the story of her mother being constructed by the voices of those who knew her. Starting by asking about “the whole story,” Polley questioned her family members about everything that happened since they were born, or in her father’s case, since his marriage to her mother. From here, focus went to her mother’s laugh, energy, and what the family believed she was going through, and her emotions. In spite of this, it is compelling how a very distinct and seemingly true picture of her mother is portrayed through this medley of snippets shared by those who knew her.

A part that jumped out at me, apart from the stories being told, was the actual process of exacting stories from the interviewees. Depending on her tone and questioning, Polley commanded a lot of control over not only the subjects’ wording, but their reactions to certain questions depending on their framing (which we don’t always hear). At one point, her brother says, “what did I say? I trust you more than I trust myself right now!” Do the actual truths of situations not only have a layer of memory difficulty, but also another layer of self-mediation (as well as interviewer mediation) that exhibits or inhibits various ways of expressing a memory? For example, at the beginning of Stories We Tell, each family member awkwardly adjusts, gets comfortable, or deals with the nervousness of sitting in front of a camera. Depending on how comfortable they are in front of the camera will dictate a lot of how their tone and recollection of events will come across to a viewer watching Polley’s documentary.

As all of these factors and shots culminate into Polley’s final product, the viewer is given a version of these stories that proposes trust in Polley’s accounts of the story. Whether her intentions are in line with her mother’s, we shall never know. However, there is no doubt that she has a profound impact on the direction and narrative arc of the entire “medley.” With this in mind, does this story of discovery, loss, relationality, truth, and love become a shadow of the actual story, or an entirely new story altogether?

Please feel free to comment and let me know what you think!

Have you ever tried to be different? To be special? In telling the stories of our own lives, one is expected to say something worth hearing, or that has some substantial social value to contribute. Within our class discussions, Professor McNeill brought up the idea that many life narratives are personal accounts grappling with identity, informed by certain cultural scripts, imparting enlightenment, or depicting exemplary lives. It is as if being a person is not quite enough, but one must find a niche within the lives of everyday people to tell a life narrative that is truly compelling.

In spite of this quest for originality, the rise of genres has helped to understand life narratives, due to genres functioning as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (Miller 159). This loose amalgamation of what sub-genres within the life narrative genre can be about threatens the originality pursued by writers in telling their stories. With this in mind, the rejection of genre and category by several life narrative authors brings to mind whether this is a compelling argument for a change in genre, or if this is more of a paratextual marketing ploy to differentiate their text as unique and original.

Fred Wah uses the biotext genre to resist how he will be read by others, learning about his own story with the same pace (and process) as the reader. However, this redefinition of the genre is compelling as this does not bring more space or a new opening for life narratives necessarily, but it gives Fred Wah a foot of originality to stand within in to convey his book as a story of mixed-race identity through biotext instead of just another life story. With multiple overlapping stories, subjects, and truths, the use of biotext is very connected with other issues at play as well, such as communal memory.

Art Spiegelman speaks on genre as well in MetaMaus, explaining that comics are a medium and not a genre. In this way, comics act as a medium to deliver genres, such as Westerns or romance (170). Though Spiegelman’s argument clearly functions in favour of his own medium of delivery for Maus, his rejection of comics as a genre also functions as an attempted restructuring of societal expectations upon comics to give Maus a comparatively unique origin.

With the genre-rejection strategies of Wah and Spiegelman in mind, the rise of genres brings problems for the typical life narrative writer, with the fear of being amalgamated into a genre playing a large role in how his/her text will be received. In this way, genre-rejection may not necessarily be a strategic move for a discursive niche, but simply a method of painting originality across a text within the life narratives genre, giving that text a better chance at market.

A couple weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending Hapa-palooza’s night of 8 stories, a celebration of mixed-race identity and culture. As a grassroots organization, Hapapalooza brought in many speakers from all walks of life with students, professors, music artists, writers, even a radio host! The talks were very inspiring in their general trend of questioning identity without a clearly identified race.

One of the most interesting parts of the night for me was a young woman’s story about the racism that her grandfather faced when he was alive as a Japanese-Canadian. Her mother was allowed to be exempt from the War Measures Act that interned Japanese people living in Canada due to being a Canadian citizen and half-white. At the end of the talk, this young woman said how she found it hard growing up between various racial identities, feeling the spit on her grandfather’s face as if it were her face, and feeling the racist words he heard in her own ears. As I sat there, I found this difficult to digest. Being able to “pass” as white allowed this girl freedom from not only racism, but it allows her inclusion into two cultural circles: Japanese and Canadian culture. How does being a passable mixed-race person allow one to take racism that has been directed at others and internalize it?

I feel uncomfortable with the rhetorical strategy of taking someone else’s pain and using it to situate one’s own narrative within the context of overcoming. Can we really feel the pain of use it as our own? In family, we can learn from the pain and suffering of our ancestors to inform our own understanding of their identity, but that pain was dealt to them. We can empathize, learn from, and be enraged by tragic incidents, but someone listening to a tragedy hasn’t had a crime committed towards them. Where does that justification begin?

We can’t pick and choose the ethnicities we are born with, but we can choose to understand how we identify with the cultures that they originate from. Picking and choosing, like Fred Wah choosing Chinese, the “struggle of being a Chink,” yet saying that one is “passable” and “on the hyphen” is difficult for me to digest as a mixed-race person myself.

I would love to hear your feedback, please leave any comments you have below!

Have you ever found yourself personalizing an experience for yourself? Be it in your room, your car, your notebooks, or even your Facebook profile, personalization is an often-used method of finding originality within our daily lives. However, Eli Pariser’s TED Talk is startling as he lays judgement on “personalization” done by sites and apps across the internet that tailor their experience to what they believe a user will like more, based on their personal data. A frightening thought, yet an interesting result of this phenomenon is the Facebook News Feed. In the News Feed, “stories” are published to a user from other users that are predicted to be more interesting to a user. As well, Facebook notes that “the number of comments and likes a post receives and what kind of story it is (ex: photo, video, status update) can also make it more likely to appear in your News Feed.” With all this in mind, well-liked stories populate a person’s newsfeed, prompting a certain type of exigence with positive, affirming posts doing the most successfully.

In a world that promotes the possibility of a person self-monitoring through sites such as Facebook, a problematic situation may arise when a person’s online persona doesn’t match up with their personality and actions in real life. This situation was comically taken on by the Higton brothers, as well as by Zilla van den Born, when she faked a trip to Southeast Asia using Facebook updates and by visiting various Asian restaurants in her home town. With such a disconnect between what is posted and what is true on Facebook, when such posts are being “liked” and reinforced as appropriate exigence for the context of Facebook, it contributes to the idea that the user benefits from self-monitoring to the point of creating whole personality, or social media alter-ego, that may perform differently than they would in real life.

This kind of action may result in “friends” and others within social networks only knowing an image of who their friends truly are, with that image being a shadow of what that friend may truly “like” and whom they like being. Are you the same person online? Does it even matter? With this in mind, do these accounts of our lives captured through Facebook “stories” and posts really portray an accurate account of human experience in general?

Please comment and add your thoughts! I would love to hear your feedback.