Chapter 3 - Language and Literature as "Equipment for Living"

Chapter 3 of our book tackles a lot of great concepts within the realm of writing and healing that relate a lot to what we've been talking about. I really like the way Tilly Warnock breaks down her opinions on writing and how it has helped her frame her life in a way that is helpful. In this blog post I'm going to focus on how writing allows us to understand the constructs that we are raised within, and how to think around these boundaries to attain some sort of enlightenment. I really connected to Warnock's first paragraph about this when she talks about her name and nickname. Although her formal name is Sue Mac, she has gone her entire life known as Tilly, for a somewhat vague family reason. This struck a chord with me as I went through the same experience. Although my legal name is Robert I have been called Rocco my entire life (a decision made by my responsible and cautious parents). It's very strange to be aware of the fact that your name and identity are sort of a construct you're taught to believe. To this day I am extremely familiar with Rocco Praderio, but Robert Praderio remains this vague persona that seems to only show his face on debit cards and shipping labels. We live in a world of many arbitrary imaginary lines like gender, class, race, status, among many others. Writing helps us better understand these lines I believe because it allows us to explore how our world has been constructed and understand that we have much more say in these imaginary lines than we think. We can write fiction so easily and define the rules of the world for our writing pieces, so why can't we do that in our own lives. Warnock discusses the idea of re-writing our lives as they happen and I think this is an extremely valuable lesson. As she says, our lives are just rough drafts that can be altered at any time by ourselves and for ourselves. By writing about our lives we realize that the power we have as writers over text is the same exact power we have as humans over our own lives, and that is an extremely powerful realization.