#ill never write a properly structured essay in my life
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hi! how do you recommend i should prepare myself for college? im currently in the final year of high school. in what capacity would i need to change myself for college? i plan on developing habits this year which can help me in college. your suggestions will be helpful.
Hi, sorry for taking a while to respond, I've been ill all week and wasn't sure what I wanted to say. I was partly uncertain because I think you are from the US? (Correct me if I'm wrong!) And your college experience is very different from university here in the UK. However, there are a few universal tips I can give for anyone leaving compulsory education and entering into higher education for the first time.
Firstly, don't think about this as changing yourself! It's just another step and you will naturally fall into it. Everything I THOUGHT university would be like ended up being a lot of nonsense. You'll naturally fall into your working rhythm and find your place wherever you end up going! Be your authentic self and you'll have a blast. Seriously, going to university should be the best thing you do for yourself, otherwise it's not worth it!
Secondly, habits/learning tips. This is an easier one to give advice for, but it will probably feel incredibly vague right now:
Learn to how to skim and scan texts when reading (they are different!). Start practicing now and you'll thank yourself during your first term! You rarely need to read a whole text, so learn how to quickly and efficiently find what you need by learning how to find key words and arguments. Make skimming and scanning your first instinct when reading academically. It's hard and you'll find yourself slipping into reading the whole book/article a lot to start with, but I promise you it will save you A LOT of time and frustration.
Start developing a good routine for you to study. Learn when, where, and how you're most productive and make this a routine. I've learnt that I CAN'T concentrate properly in the afternoon, my brain gives up! But it took me YEARS to internalise this and I wasted so many hours trying to work in the early afternoon. Now I structure my study days around when I work best (seriously I get up at 5:30 so I can be working between 6:00 and 11:30, then have the afternoon off before doing a couple of hours around 8:30 at night) it can be irritating but I have a good study/life balance now AND I'm more productive!
Experiment with note taking styles. I've gone through SO many different systems, platforms, and techniques for note taking. It took me a while to work out that I need to take linear, bullet pointed notes BY HAND to remember information. I used to type everything and it went in one ear and out the other. Now I take notes by hand and it's been revolutionary.
Start everything EARLY. Don't let yourself be that person pulling an all nighter to get an assignment in on time. Start early, give yourself time to reflect on what you're doing, and finish a couple of days before the deadline. This way you have a buffer in case something goes wrong. I was never the person working up until the last minute (I'm too anxious to do that to myself) but I watched friends have breakdowns because they didn't start early enough.
Learn to draft anything you'll submit for formal assessment. Don't be the idiot who writes an essay and submits it without checking it... It makes you look stupid and you'll lose marks. Take the time to do a second and third draft, your grades will thank you. And proofread (I say having not proofread ANYTHING on this blog...)
Get out of the habit of thinking I don't want to go to X lesson/class. You might think it's harmless now, but as soon as you leave compulsory education and don't HAVE to go to that dreaded class you won't. Then you start skipping lectures, fall behind, and risk failing. Again, I watched too many people do this...
Practice self-discipline and motivation. Right now you HAVE to work on things, so you do. When the external motivators go away all you're left with is your own drive. For some people (me) this was GREAT because I hated performing to school systems. However, for others they can crumble without a teacher encouraging you to work... Learn to motivate yourself. If you take ANYTHING from this list then work on this one, seriously it'll be a life saver!
Honestly, the rest will come with time. The biggest thing you can do is work out what kind of learner you are, how do you LIKE to learn when away from the routines of school. When, where, and how do you like to learn? Practice notetaking and reading skills. Otherwise, the rest will depend on what sort of college/uni you end up at and what course you're taking.
The final thing I want to say is not really a tip, but something I think EVERYONE on the cusp of going into higher education should hear. Find out why you want to learn. Higher education is a big investment. It's years of your life and A LOT of money (especially in the UK and US with tuition fees and living expenses!) It's a lot of time, energy, and resources to throw into something if you're only doing it because it's expected of you or you don't know what else to do with your life.
So take some time to think about WHY you want to learn. What is it about your specialism that makes you love it? Why is it your passion?
I live and breathe history because I can't face living without it. For me it's the discipline where I really get to understand humanity, explore what makes us "tick". I feel connected with people through history. I'm fascinated by, and a little bit in love with, humans. I don't necessarily like speaking to people! But I love trying to find out who we are through what our history says about us. Fundamentally, humanity is both terrible and beautiful! And through history I get to see the best, worst, and crucially the most mundane of human existence... And it's in that mundane space where I find myself happiest because that's who we are. It's why I study popular religion, not high Church movements... But it is the curiosity about people that drives me to learn more. THAT'S why I study, THAT is why I bothered to drag myself out of bed a half 5 on a freezing January morning in 2018 to get to an 8:30 lecture and listen to a truly MAD man tell me about 17th century English preaching styles (real story, I loved that lecturer deeply... I was the only person at that lecture and it is the reason I am the historian I am today, I have so much respect for him and I am STILL inspired by what I heard that morning!)
Anyway... Find your reason to keep going with your studies, even when it seems pointless and you'd much rather give up. I'm not saying it has to be a grand, abstract desire to understand humanity - I'm a pretentious humanities student who is far too fond of religion. Your reason could be anything, a dream job, a desire to "get out" of a situation, academic brilliance, spite! Seriously, it doesn't matter! As long as it gives you a purpose and drive to learn. Without that reason you'll be wasting your time.
So, before you go, have a think about why you're going to university at all and make sure it's strong enough to get you out of bed ridiculously early on a freezing January morning. That way you won't miss the most inspiring moment of your life. Or you'll get a fantastic degree. That's also nice 😉
#studyblr#gradblr#i may have gone off on one at the end there#i stand by what i said#asks#anonymous#try not to think too hard about going to uni#it will work itself out#i promise!#and enjoy your time! I'm very jealous and want to be an undergrad again!#long response
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I just realized that Blake running away from her team is the dumbest writing decision of the show so far. Here's why: Adam said he destroy everyone she loves so running away won't protect them. Blake doesn't tell her team about Adam. Blake wants to lay low from the WF but is surprised they are operating in Menagerie homeland of the faunus? Then she blows her cover by confronting them and they tell Adam where she is. Then she places her parents in danger. Also she never disguised her name before.
UTHSIDKOSKDLSD I MEAN-
Yeah blake and adam are both just confusing and inconsistent as hell anon
The plot of Blake running away due to being overidden with fear and guilt and just needing to get away from her past catching up to her was something I really liked. Her being a person who runs away from things when they become too much was set up well enough, in my opinion, and characters need to have flaws. Its just everything else thats tied up with blakes plot that makes the whole thing so confusing and weird. Blake dipping from beacon wouldn’t have kept Adam from killing her loved ones, or anyone else for that matter, as you said. Actually it should have been easier for him to “Destroy everything she loves” now that wasn’t there to oppose him. He wouldnt just say “Oh she left? Nvm then 🤷🏽♀️” and screw off. Hes till an anti human maniac who would keep doing horrible things regardless of whatever tf Blake is up to, so her idea of “Im staying away to protect them UwU bad things happen because of me UWUU” makes zero sense and makes her selfish, because now she’s not even back there to help. And even if she was banking on the fact that Adam would chase after her instead of going after ruby or weiss or jnpr, then why did she head to menagerie??? she was leading him straight to her parents. Actually, if adam’s plan was to destroy everything she loves, then wouldn’t he have gone to attack the belladonnas at some point anyway?? blake wasn’t acting rationally and her arc was about pulling her head out of her ass and realizing that running didnt solve shit.
I feel like the bigger issue is how they handled Adam with all that. He shouldn’t have cared about wasting time going after whoever blake loves. His priority was always the faunus, not hate-loving Blake to the point of emotionally torturing her for leaving him. We were shown him making a deal with cinder to help with the Fall of Beacon. He wasn’t there for Blake, he was there because his goal was to heck up humanity. Yet they still give blake this idea of “uwu this is my problem, i have to deal with the concequences cuz they are mine” Adam isnt only blakes personal enemy. If he wasn’t gonna one-shot yang in front blake, he was gonna run into her later on and do it then, and if weiss or ruby had been the one to run in to help blake he would have one-shot one of them instead (adam should have been involved with weiss not yang hHhwjksje)
A whole lot about Blake makes no sense dude even from the beginning. She says she’s a “criminal hiding in plain view, all with the help of a little black bow” but how does covering her ears mask her past as a WF member? She doesn’t cover her face or change her name or make any alterations to her appearance. As we see in some flashbacks and the black trailer, she wears the exact same outfitif, she wears her hair the same, and she never seemed to have worn the white fang mask while on the job with Adam, so its entirely possible someone on remnant could see her and recognize her from a WF raid or smth. That line should have been switched out for something like “ive had it pretty easy as far as oppression goes, all with the help of a little black bow” since thats the only actual benefit that bow gives.
But even thats funny to say since we baRELY ever get to see any actual faunus oppression in screen in this show. Its funny how they chose Blake as the one we get to see the story of the faunus from when shes suffered NOTHING compared to other faunus on this show. While we’re shown adam working in the dustmines and getting branded on the face, and ilia losing her parents to a dust mine collapse and people laughing about it, velvet getting harassed and made fun of by cardin and even sun getting a rock chucked at him by the police, we see Blake using her bow to protect herself from any racism and simply pass as human. All her friends and school headmaster know shes a faunus but love her anyway and nobody ever picks on her after the word of her being a faunus gets out. Her flashbacks of attending white fang protests as a child made it seem like she came from a poor/Not So Great home/family situation- if she even had one- only to reveal that shes actually the pRINCESS OF MENAGERIE whos family owns the biggest mansion on a comfy, PEACEFUL, tropical island, a mansion she could return to anytime she wanted where loving parents were waiting for her.
And tbh it would have all been fine if Blake ever acknowledged the privelege she has, yet wanting to make things better for her kind anyway, but she never does. She says ilia is the one who deserves recognition for doing so much despite the fact she could pass as human, but doesnt see herself similarly. She instead just comes off super preachy and victimizes herself to the gods.
And then v7 shows up to completely demolish any character we had set up for blake since all she did was stand around and not do anything about the faunus situation in mantle/atlas. This could have been a volume where she really shined and the opportunities were there. They were given time off, she could have easily attended the political rally with ruby. We could have gotten some desperately needed blake and ruby interactions, but that got traded out for bb dancing at a club and some renora drama that didnt amount to much. Maybe she was so meek this volume cuz shes still shook from killing adam, but idk if the writers were going for that since yang was all smiles and not bothered at all this volume with her ptsd magically gone, and blake seemed to be completely over her fear of adam when she bitchsmacked him on the head at haven and told him “honestly?? I got more important things to deal with uwu”
#ill never write a properly structured essay in my life#but here are my thots#i really hate love blake man#i can see what they tried to do with her but the execution of it couldve been a lot better#rwde#anon
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thoughts on evil Forrest 😈
We are going to start out by apologizing. This is very very late. I’m sure when you sent this ask, you meant it to be in the same joking tone that I approach all of my other propaganda posts. Sadly, this is actually going to be a deep dive into a few Evil Forrest related things, including the moment I feel they changed directions, the perfect wasted build-up, and the implications of the change/how it then negatively impacted the story. As I’m sure you already know, by being on my blog at all, I don’t think the story was good to begin with, so we are going to focus on the weird hoops they made themselves jump through to make that story still work. Additionally, I am only going to mention once, right now, how much of a waste it was to not have Forrest ‘fall for his mark’ and complete one of my absolute favorite tropes. Honestly, I think “because I want it” is a completely valid reason to like Evil Forrest. But, the question was “Thoughts on Evil Forrest” and these thoughts have been developing for over a year and a half. So, I apologize in advance.
The majority of this is under a cut, with highlights in the abstract. If no one wants to read this, I understand completely. Go ahead, skip it.
Note: it pains me greatly to not actually have full sources for this essay. Just know that in my heart I am using proper APA citations, I just absolutely do not feel like digging through tweets to find sources to properly cite.
Abstract:
Previous research indicates that Roswell New Mexico has a history of repeating excuses to explain mid-season changes to plots. This essay explores how those excuses are not only loads of crap, but how they hinder the show’s ability to tell a coherent story, misuse the multiple-plot structure to enhance the themes being explored, and lead to decisions that mean the show continuously goes over budget. This also means that characters are not used to their full potential and has led to what some fans consider to be “out of character” behaviors. While these behaviors are not universally agreed on, evidence can be shown that these behaviors directly contradict emotionally important character arc/plot points in the show.
The author of this paper acknowledges that the show took some strides to mend this problem. However, once again no consensus could be found on whether Forrest was a low-level member of Deep Sky and thus just allowed to fuck off on a bus, or his job was recruitment because he did a piss poor job of making Alex not join.
The concept of Evil Forrest has been with the fandom as early as New York Comic Con (NYCC) in 2019, when it was revealed that Alex had a new “blue-haired love interest”. Speculation abounded within the fandom, with some people, including the author, going “yeah, he’s evil” while others rejoiced in the concept of Alex having a loving partner. Speculation increased as fans discussed Tyler Blackburn’s seeming disinterest in his new love interest, prompting some once again to scream “EVIL” at the top of their lungs to anyone who would listen. Very little was revealed, beyond the fact that the new character would show up somewhere around episode 3 of the second season.
Episode 2.04 aired with some commenting on how he barely interacted with Alex- prompting more evil speculation- and others excited to see the characters interact more. The character appears again in 2.06, where he invites Alex to dubious spoken word poetry (which Alex attends); 2.08, where they have a paintball date and go to The Wild Pony; 2.10, where the two are seen writing together briefly at the beginning of the episode; and 2.13, where Alex performs his song at open mic night, tells Forrest his relationship with the person in the song was long over, and they kiss. Forrest was not revealed to be evil during season 2.
Amidst the season airing, Word of God via Twitter post announced that yes, Forrest had originally been planned as a villain, though not the main villain, but it was changed as filming progressed.
The Word of God Twitter post revealed that Forrest had originally been planned as a villain, but they decided that they could not make their “blue-haired gay man” a villain. This mirrors a similar situation and excuse used the previous season, where the character of Jenna Cameron was originally planned to work with Jesse Manes against the aliens, before it was changed because they just “loved Riley [the actress] too much”. Both of these examples occurred while already filming and reflect on a larger problem with the show. Though not the topic of this essay, it is important to note that both characters are white, both in the show and by virtue of being played by white actors. The fact that they couldn’t be villains for one reason or another is not a courtesy extended to the male villains who are all the most visibly brown, and thus ‘other’, members of the cast.
This also highlights the fact that, via Twitter, it has been revealed two other times that occurrences that were reported in season 1 also occurred in season 2. During the airing of episode 1.02, it was revealed that the single best build-up of tension in the show- when Alex walks to the Airstream not saying a word to Michael after a dramatic declaration- happened because one actor was sick at the time and they had to go back and film the kisses later. At the point of airing for episode 2.08, it was revealed that one of the actors were sick and unable to film a kissing scene. Allegedly, this caused the writers to retool the entire scene and deviate from the plan to make that subplot about Coming Out. The execution of this subplot will be explored later in this essay.
The last occurrence revealed via Twitter also revealed larger issues within the show: lack of planning and poor budgeting. During the airing of season 1, Tyler Blackburn was needed for an extra episode beyond his contracted 10. A full explanation was never given, but speculation about poor planning and to fill in because Heather Hemmens had to miss one of her 10 episodes due to scheduling conflicts for another project. During the airing of season 2, yet another tweet came out saying they made a mistake and Tyler would once again be in an additional episode. No explanations beyond “a mistake” were given, though once again speculation occurred. It is the opinion of the author that this was due to changing plot points over halfway through writing, while episodes were already in production. It has been speculated by some that these changes occurred during the writing of 2.08, which was being finished/pre-production was occurring roughly around the time of NYCC 2019.
Previous Literature:
A brief look at different theories of plots and subplots
Many people have written on the subject of plotting, for novels and screen alike. The author is more familiar with film writing than tv, but a lot of the concepts carry over. Largely, the B- and C- (and D- and E-… etc) plots should reinforce the theme of the A-plot. This can be through the use of a negative example, where the antithesis of the theme is explored to reinforce the theme presented by the A plot, or through other examples of the theme, generally on a small scale.
A movie example of this would be Hidden Figures (2016), where the A-plot explores how race and gender impact the main character (Katherine Johnson) in her new job. The B-plots explore the other characters navigating the same concepts in different settings and ways- learning a new skill as to not become obsolete and breaking boundaries there (Dorothy Vaugn) and being the first black woman to complete a specific degree program and the fight it took to get there (Mary Jackson). A TV example that utilizes this concept of plot and theme is the 911 shows. Each of the rescues in a given episode will directly relate to the overall theme of the episode and the overall plot for the focus character. This example is extremely blunt. It does not use any tools to hide the connection, to the point you can often guess the outcome for that A-plot fairly quickly.
This is not the only way to explore themes within visual media. Moonlight (2016) looks at three timestamps in the life of Chiron. Each timestamp has a plot even if they feel more like individual scenes or moments rather than plots as some are more used to in films. Each time stamp deals with rejection, isolation, connection, and acceptance in different ways. So while there is no clear A-, B-, or C-Plot, each time stamp works as their own A-Plot to explore the themes in a variety of ways, particularly by starting out in a place of rejection and moving to acceptance or a place of connection to isolation.
Please note that there are many ways to write multiple plots, there are just two examples.
While there are flaws within season 1 of RNM, overall the themes stayed consistent throughout the season, mainly the theme of alienation. The theme threads through the Alien’s isolation/alienation from humanity which is particularly seen through Michael’s unwillingness to participate and Isobel’s over participation. There is Rosa’s isolation from others, how her friendship with “Isobel” ended up compounding her existing alienation from her support system due to her mental illness and coping mechanisms. We see how Max and Liz couldn’t make connections. This theme presented itself over and over in season 1. While this essay is not an exploration of the breakdown of themes in season 2, it should be noted that there were some threads that followed throughout the season. The theme of mothers/motherhood was woven throughout season 2, with some elements more effective than others. Please contact the author for additional thoughts on Helena Ortecho and revenge plots.
One of the largest problems within season 2 was the sheer number of plots jammed into the season. These plot threads often ended up hindering the effectiveness of the themes and made the coherence of the season suffer. Additionally, a lot of them were convoluted and difficult to follow.
Thesis:
Essentially, season 2 was a mess. To look at it holistically is almost an exercise in futility. Either you grow angry about the dropped plots and premises, you hand wave them off, or you fill them in for yourself. Instead, this essay proposes to look at individual elements to explain why Forrest should have stayed evil.
We first meet Forrest in 2.04 when he is introduced on the Long Family Farm, which we later learn was the location where our past alien protagonists had their final standoff. He’s introduced. He’s largely just there. The audience learns he has more of a history with Michael. In 2.06, we meet him again with his dog Buffy (note: poor Buffy has not been seen again and we miss a chunky queen). There’s mild flirting, Alex is invited to an open mic night, which he attends. For the purpose of this essay, the author’s thoughts on the poetry will not be expressed. Readers can take a guess.
It is after this point that the author speculates the Decision was made. This choice to make Forrest not evil- paired with the aforementioned ‘can’t kiss, someone’s sick’- impacted the plot. We have Alex have a scene with his father- which the author believes could have been pushed to a different episode- and then have Alex go on a date and then not kiss Forrest at the end of the night. Here, the audience sees Forrest hit Alex in the leg, allegedly not knowing he had lost his leg despite ‘looking him up’, which parallels the shot to the leg that happens to Charlie. Besides wasting this ABSOLUTELY TEXTBOOK SET UP WTF, it also takes Alex away from the main plot and then forces a new plot for him. Up to this point, Alex’s plot was discovering more about the crash and his family’s involvement. Turning Alex’s date from a setup for evil Forrest to a Coming Out story adds yet another plot thread to a packed season. It is also the author’s thought that this is where the convoluted kidnapping plot comes in. With Forrest already in 2.10 for a moment, a plot where Alex is evil has Forrest attack him for Deep Sky rather than Jesse abduct him for a piece of alien glass Alex was going to give him anyway and then for Flint to abduct Alex from Jesse. It’s messy. In a bad way. Evil Forrest would have been a cleaner set up: no taking back a piece of alien glass Alex gave to Michael in a touching moment. No double abduction. Instead, there is only Forrest, who Alex trusts, breaking that trust to take him as leverage over Michael.
Implications:
Now, Alex has two plots (Tripp & Coming Out). The Coming Out plot is largely ineffective, as they are only relevant to scenes with Forrest and have the undercurrent of there only being a certain acceptable way to be out. This could have been used for Alex to discover his comfort levels, mirroring Isobel’s self discovery, but there was not enough screen time for that. Additionally, Isobel’s coming out story was about her allowing herself the freedom to explore. Alex’s story was about the freedom to… act like this dude wanted him to. Alex’s internalized homophobia played out often in the series but it was also informed by the violence he experienced at Jesse’s hands and the literal hate crime he and his high school boyfriend experienced. With that in mind, the “kissing to piss off bigots” line comes off poorly. This is a character who experienced what a pissed off bigot could do- reluctance to kiss in public is not the same as not being out. There is more to be said on this topic, but as it is not actually the focus of the essay, it will be put on hold. To surmise: Alex’s coming out is attempted to be framed as being himself, but it is actually the conformity to someone else’s ideals. It does not work as an antithetical to Isobel’s story, as the framing indicates that the conformity/right was to be out contradicts Isobel’s theme.
Further Research:
MAKE FORREST EVIL YOU COWARDS
Author Acknowledgements:
The author of this paper acknowledges that the show took some strides to mend this problem. However, once again no consensus could be found on whether Forrest was a low-level member of Deep Sky and thus just allowed to fuck off on a bus, or his job was recruitement because he did a piss poor job of making Alex not join.
#anti forrest long#i guess#evil forrest propaganda#I asked and no one said don't post it so...#here it is#I started writing this roughly 7 months ago
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A Tribute to Chester: Life, Death, Rebirth, and How He Lives on in Memory
How do you properly memorialize one of your childhood idols? Are you supposed to scream, cry, and gnash your teeth? Or do you put on noise-canceling headphones and block out the ambient noise of the outside world for a while? All of these are difficult questions to answer. I guess that’s why they’re rhetorical. It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost two years since Chester Bennington passed. So in a way, this simple little essay is how I can honor him. It feels nice to write something that isn’t fiction or related to a blog for a change[1]. Let’s see how it goes.
Part Zero: Notes from the Underground
I must confess that I was never a member of the official fan club, the LP Underground. I suppose in retrospect that’s how I could have proven I was a legit fan despite never seeing them live in concert except via live stream. But even then, that was a rare occasion. I do remember a t-shirt I got from Hot Topic when I was 12 or so – it had the faces of all of the guys gathered around the classic script font of the band’s logo.
I don’t remember what happened to it. The last time I remember wearing it was in August 2014. I supposed by then I had outgrown it. But still, buying whatever merch I could and getting all of the CDs and eagerly anticipating the next music video all had to count for something. I knew the names of all the guys, even Mark Wakefield, who was never an official member, and Phoenix Orion (Dave Farrell?), who left before Hybrid Theory but was back in time for Reanimation – more on that later.
But I digress. Let’s get on with the real meat of why we’re here. In terms of structure, I thought it would make the most sense to go album by album, discuss some memories I have associated with each, and attempt to unpack why they remain so important to me even as time has marched on since then. Growing up with the band, as I’m sure many of you did, you might feel a similar connection that you never fully grasped until the night of the tribute show in December 2017.
Part One: Hybrid Theory
#Forfeit the game/Before somebody else/takes you out of the frame and puts your name to shame/Cover up your face, you can’t run the race/the pace is too fast, you just won’t last. [HT Track 4: “Points of Authority”]
Although Hybrid Theory came out in October 2000, I think the first time I heard it was for another month or two after it came out. It’s still one of the most vivid memories I can still recall, the first time “Papercut” blared out of a cd player. I was sitting in the basement at my buddy Andre’s house and we were playing Perfect Dark with our mutual friend Alberto. It was honestly the perfect soundtrack for the game. Here’s what I said back then: “Dude, who is this? This is awesome!”
“It’s Linkin Park.”
Even then I thought the name was cool, the way that they intentional misspelled Lincoln – the rule of cool and all that. Elementary school hadn’t even ended yet, but it was still part of my formative years, musically speaking. Before then, I had never discovered any music on my own – my friends had always shown me. My parents didn’t raise me to enjoy music – I hated classical and most of the “standards” went over my head. My parents were still throwing karaoke parties. My old neighbor John showed me James Brown. That’s how I latched onto my first favorite song of all time “I Feel Good”. Then came Third Eye Blind, another early love of mine. But that’s a story for another time, as is my recollections of Limp Bizkit. This tale is about LP.
I wouldn’t realize it at the time, but Hybrid Theory would continue to be one of the most important albums to be me as I left elementary school and hit middle school. The days of Perfect Dark and WCW/nWo Revenge began to fade[2] as Diablo II and Starcraft emerged. The sound of Chester’s howls and Mike’s swagger along with the rest of the bands driving instrumentals provided a backdrop like you wouldn’t believe. “In the End” stood out in particular, although as middle school came to an end, it became clear that those reasons weren’t ones I wish to discuss here, now. Ask me again another time. It was at the end of middle school (hell, even before) that I confronted the notion of how deeply uncool I was, and probably tangled with imposter syndrome, anxiety, and depression long before I knew what any of those terms meant.
I already knew I was an introvert who was much more inclined to stay inside playing video games, reading, or writing instead of going outside to play street hockey or anything like that. That shouldn’t have meant that I was an easy target for bullying, but hey, it was the 90s and then the early 2000s, so what could you do? LP helped me cope, even if I couldn’t always express my anger in responsible ways.
I think here is a good place to stop and point something out: mental illness has been something that has been immensely important to me – it affects me and I know it damn sure affects my wife and mother in law. I went through a very dark time in my life roughly five years ago that LP also helped me pull out of – but I’ll get to explaining that more in-depth later on. Right now we’re still in the HT era; I just wanted to talk a little bit more about my motivations for writing this piece.[3]
Part Two: Reanimation
#Keep that in mind/ I designed this rhyme/ when I was obsessed with time. [RA Track 3: “Enth E Nd]
Full disclosure: when I first heard Reanimation, I thought it had its moments. But it wasn’t something I could listen to end-to-end and love every single song. Heck, even HT wasn’t like that, since some of the songs had to grow on me. The video with the robots and aliens having a war while the disembodied robot heads of the band sing the remixed version of “Points of Authority” by Jay Gordon of Orgy was definitely awesome, but I don’t know, I had mixed feelings about the album that took years for it to resolve into me think of it as one of the LP’s early era classics that would culminate with Meteora and Live in Texas.
I have a very distinct memory of popping this cd into the car’s stereo while we were out in…Houston? Taiwan? The details are blurry now because it’s been too long. Seventeen years was a long time ago, and 2002 me was simpler, less refined, and yes, much dumber and naïve. On an emotional level, “p5hng me Aw*y” stood out, and even though it wasn’t actually a true Linkin Park song, “It’s Goin’ Down” stood out from this time period too.
Part Three: Meteora
#I’ll never fight again, and this is how it ends…I don’t know what’s worth fighting, or why I have to scream, but now I have some clarity to show you what I mean… [MA Track 9: “Breaking the Habit”]
Meteora is one of those albums I more clearly associate with Diablo II and Starcraft more than any other games. Just something about the overall darkness and broodiness of the album really fit both of those games. Also, this essay project is making me want to go back in time. Not really from a nostalgia standpoint – okay yeah I guess from a nostalgia standpoint. But it was during this era that I really started to enjoy their music videos. Believe it or not, for the longest time, not all of the songs on the album were rated five stars. I used to be stingier with that rating that I am now. It took a while for some of the songs to grow on me, but “Somewhere I Belong”, “Faint”, “Easier to Run”, “Breaking the Habit”. “Nobody’s Listening”, and “Numb” were instant standouts. I’m still not sure what happened to my original copy of this album. The last I checked, I had a burned copy, but not the real deal.
Part Four: Live in Texas
#When I look into your eyes there’s nothing there to see/nothing but my own mistakes staring back at me# [LIT Track 8: P5hng Me A*wy – Live]
Man, I remember this too. It must have come out six months or so after Meteora did, and grabbing it from Kmart was one of my best days. I think it was also the first LP album to have the dreaded Parental Advisory sticker on it, and this is probably the album I blame most for me disliking the edited versions of songs. Sometimes edits can be clever, but when they’re just bleeps or certain naughty words are blanked out, then it gets annoying. Then again, I probably wasn’t a stranger to this concept thanks to early exposure to Third Eye Blind and Limp Bizkit, as I mentioned before. Was this the first time I heard “live” performances of LP? I think it was, and it probably stoked my eagerness to see them live in concert. Alas, it was never to be.
Part Five: Collision Course
#Yeah/Thank you, thank you, thank you, you’re far too kind# [CC Track 4: “Numb / Encore”]
It’s fitting that as I pick this up on (7/21/19) it’s the day after the 2 year anniversary. I meant to have this finished by the 20th, but it just didn’t happen. Plus “Numb/Encore” was one of the first songs that started up on this go-through of the playlist. If you’re interested in listening to it, I can direct you to my Spotify profile! Numb is one of those songs that have taken on new meaning since his death, but out of all the collaborations on this mashup album, I think it’s the one that works the best sonically and thematically, especially with the juxtaposition between angst and bravado[4].
Part Six: Fort Minor & The Rising Tied
#So sick, if he’s gonna think/That the good lord would come take him/I’m shaking him, “Wake up, you son of a bitch!”# [TRT Track 14: “Red to Black”]
It was four years between the era of Meteora and Minutes to Midnight. In between that time, there was a sea change. First there was the mashup with Jay-Z, and then this came along in November 2005. I remember being more stoked for it than probably any other music that I discovered that year – and this was when Fall Out Boy, 50 Cent, and Coheed and Cambria dawned on me, among others. For those who don’t know, Fort Minor is/was Mike’s side project. He’s since done other solo stuff under his own name but between then and now he would bust out verses from The Rising Tied and incorporate them into existing songs. I always thought that Red to Black was the most LP-sounding song on the entire album and that for the longest time I thought Chester used Jonah Matranga as an alias and it wasn’t a separate person.
Part Seven: Minutes to Midnight
#In this farewell/There’s no blood, there’s no alibi/Cause I’ve drawn regret/From the truth of a thousand lies/So let mercy come and wash away# [M2M Track 6: “What I’ve Done”]
In the interest of time, these entries are probably going to get shorter and shorter. At this point, I just want to get the damn thing over with. “What I’ve Done”, the lead single was the one that struck me the most at first; I remember LP making a big deal about how they wanted to start a new sound after leaving their classic era behind. The music video was awesome, and I think LP was one of the best choices for the Transformers movies. I always thought that “What I’ve Done” would make a great wrestling song. Not necessarily as an entrance theme, but as a hype video for a PPV or a feud or something like that. EWR back in the day helped reinforce that belief though I can’t exactly remember what I associated it with – anyway, that’s neither here nor there. The day that I got this album was the same day the shooting at Virginia Tech happened. Finding out that the shooter was a mentally ill Asian dude spooked me. In today’s parlance, I was shook.[5] That’s something that has always stuck out even though it’s something I’ve not been fond of discussing, for obvious reasons. Still, for our purposes here, it is for once, actually relevant.
Part Eight: Dead by Sunrise and Out of Ashes
#Don’t want to lose my innocence/Don’t want the world second-guessing my heart/Won’t let your lies take a piece of my soul/Don’t want to take your medicine# [OOA Track 2: “Crawl Back In”]
The melodies that emerged on Minutes to Midnight, especially when it was Chester’s turn to take the mic, evolved. They turned into another platform for his music: the side-project Dead by Sunrise and their only album, so far as I know: Out of Ashes. I lump this album in with Welcome to the Masquerade by Thousand Foot Krutch and Dear Agony by Breaking Benjamin. All three emerged during my sophomore year of college[6], which was another difficult year for me. I think that is when I had the most trouble sleeping, either by choice or for other reasons. Out of everything LP-related, I think I have given this the least amount of attention. It’s probably time for that to change, ten years later.
Part Nine: A Thousand Suns
#Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds/I suppose we all thought that, one another# [ATA Track 2: “The Radiance”]
If Minutes to Midnight was an attempt to step out of the shadow of Hybrid Theory, then A Thousand Suns represented an aural breakaway. It was vastly different, integrating more spoken word and turning up their signature sound to 12. I can’t remember exactly if it was in 2009 or 2010 that I was meant to go see LP as they rolled into DC. Ultimately, I couldn’t go because of a lack of transport. It all ended up moot anyway because that was the show that got canceled because of Chester being sick. Trying to dig up that post on Facebook is probably beyond me now because it’s a day late. Maybe someday I’ll be able to find it again because those days were golden (at least my pathetic little eulogy for him that I wrote two years ago.)
Part Ten: Living Things
#Fly me up on a silver wing/Past the black where the sirens sing/Warm me up in a nova’s glow/And drop me down to the dream below# [LT Track 6: “Castle of Glass”]
So if LP had been striving to break away from the sound that made them famous, it was at this point where they were “Nah bro” and went full bore back around into an ouroboros[7] of awesome. While the vast majority of A Thousand Suns[8] had to grow on me over the intervening years, Living Things grabbed me by the throat and never let go. It followed the Hybrid Theory blueprint to a T. After all this time, “Castle of Glass” still stands out as my favorite from the album, but as is often the case, it’s hard to pick favorites.
Part Eleven: Recharged
#When I was young, they told me, they said/Make your bed, you lie in that bed/A king can only reign ‘til instead/There comes that day it’s off with his head# [RC Track 1: “A Light That Never Comes”]
The less said about this, the better. It had its moments, especially “A Light That Never Comes” which showed me the potential of Steve Aoki. But the memory that stands out most clearly about the day I got this album was getting a case of Hell or High Watermelon beer. I think since I got it from Record and Tape Traders, it was the day I found the TARDIS socks for Ally and sent them to her later that week. As you probably gathered from the cluster of footnotes, this was deemed my least favorite “official” LP album, and that ranking has held up in the last six years. It does to Living Things what Reanimation did to Hybrid Theory, but for whatever reason, I can’t bring myself to enjoy it more.
Part Twelve: The Hunting Party
#Cause you don’t know what you’ve got/it’s your battle to be fought/until it’s gone# [THP Track 7: “Until It’s Gone]
Ah, here we go. LP seems to follow patterns in the creation of their albums. Cause roughly a year after Recharged, there came The Hunting Party. After A Thousand Suns came and went, it seemed like LP was on a creative lull. But then we got LT, Recharged, and THP in three straight years. This came out in 2014, and it’s hard to believe that five years have passed already. To this day, I still think that my favorite part was all of the guest appearances on their album, especially from collaborators they hadn’t featured before then, like Daron Malakian and Tom Morello.
Part Thirteen: Welcome
#First time I did it, yeah I’ll admit it/I kinda hit it and quit it and left y’all hanging# [“Welcome”]
In all honesty, this should be a footnote for The Rising Tied. It came out 10 years later, as a way for Mike to tip a wink and a nod at all his fans that were still waiting for a full-fledged sequel. Fate had other plans, though. I can still remember helping to clean Tidewater while this song blared through my headphones. This probably became one of my most played songs of 2015.
Part Fourteen: One More Light
#Who cares if one more light goes out? Well I do# [OML Track 9: “One More Light”]
We’re almost to the finish line. I was super excited for One More Light because it broke a drought of no new music until 2017[9]. The song One More Light became more poignant after his passing. I hope it still makes him proud.
Part Fifteen: Afterword
So where do we go from here? Honestly, not even the remaining members of the band know. They’re not actively looking to replace Chester, and as a group, they’re still officially on hiatus. I didn’t even touch on any of the DVD or special edition releases that I’ve barely heard. I guess in a sense they’re honorable mentions, but without having listened to them, I can’t form any honest opinions or associations for them.[10]
[/mrhahn]
[1] It seems fitting that I mention that shirt I got as a twelve-year-old because that’s when I started picking up on writing as a hobby. It was a way to release my imagination and translate what I had in mind into a story, even if those early stories were embarrassingly bad. These footnotes will serve to flesh out those asides since they’ll more than likely distract from the main narrative I’m trying to spin here.
[2] Although Revenge remains iconic! Even to this day, I still long for an N64 and another copy.
[3] Chester struggled with MI too, even though hardly anyone knew it. It’s what ultimately got the best of him.
[4] My fascination with Genius Lyrics is really helping me to analyze and better understand the meanings of the words.
[5] It didn’t help that he bore an uncanny resemblance to me…
[6] 2009, how time flies!
[7] Not sure how to spell this dang word.
[8] I regarded it as my least favorite LP album until Recharged came out. More on that later.
[9] It wasn’t until that I built the playlist that inspired this essay that I learned that there were some other singles issued between The Hunting Party and One More Light. These tracks include “We Made It” with Busta Rhymes, which actually fell between Meteora and Minutes to Midnight; “Not Alone”, which was between A Thousand Suns and Living Things; and “Darker Than Blood” with Steve Aoki that was between The Hunting Party and One More Light.
[10] One was called “Frat Party at the Pankake Festival” and the other one was “Road to Revolution”, I think?
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Kevin Litman-Navarro, Wittgenstein on Whether Speech Is Violence, JSTOR Daily (August 30, 2017)
When is speech violence? Sometimes. It depends. That’s a complicated question.
When is speech violence? In a New York Times op-ed published on July 14, 2017, the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett argued that long-term stress can inflict serious damage on a body. One cause of long-term stress? A pattern of encountering hateful speech, “a culture of constant, casual brutality.” Deciding which speech belongs in this category is difficult; Barrett’s proposed metric is that speech is violence when it ceases to be merely offensive and becomes abusive. But this litmus test, like all taxonomical devices, represents a hazy and contentious spectrum.
Four days later, the social psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff responded to Barrett’s story in the Atlantic. According to Haidt and Lukianoff, this idea, that speech is sometimes violence, might be “the most dangerous” notion on college campuses today. It’s simply a logical fallacy, a conflation of physical harm and violence.
The disagreement Haidt and Lukianoff have with Barrett is definitional. They treat the meaning of “violence” as a target that Barrett misses, accepting her empirical claims, but rejecting her larger conception of violent acts. Although they fail to provide their own definition of violence (possibly because choosing any one definition is problematic), they likely have in mind something along these lines: “Behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something,” the definition you get when you Google “definition of violence.” According to this narrow definition, Haidt and Lukianoff are right to criticize Barrett’s argument. Speech that causes harm isn’t the same as violence. Any behavior that doesn’t involve “physical force,” like speaking, is necessarily disqualified.
But Haidt and Lukianoff have committed a fallacy, too: treating a word as something with an immutable meaning. They have conflated the meaning of the word with its dictionary definition.
What, then, is the meaning of a word? If you were one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy students, this question would have occupied the preponderance of your term, as it did Wittgenstein’s academic life. To aid in his search, Wittgenstein invented the language-game, a tool for examining and comparing the innumerable instances of language.
Wittgenstein’s language-game, briefly summarized, is the idea that we can view conversations as context-sensitive exchanges with malleable rules that help determine the meanings of words. These rules are established through social convention. We agree upon certain constraints about how words may be used and bring them to our language-games. For instance, if I point my finger at something and say “that,” you know I’m referring to that thing.
Having a common reference point like a dictionary helps facilitate communication, but when the dictionary is treated as the ultimate source of linguistic authority, we become too focused on satisfying definitions instead of interpreting the content of speech. Thinking in terms of language-games widens our considerations, and can help elucidate nuanced ideas and situations.
In a way, each language-game is spoken in a micro-dialect, one that is affected not just by region, but location, relationships, identity, history, power. When I’m having lunch with my parents, I’m participating in a different language-game than when I’m at a bar with my friends or serving coffee to strangers. Likewise, when we are determining whether some kinds of speech can be understood as violence, it’s important to examine the larger context. When Milo Yiannopoulos says “feminism is cancer,” for instance, it may be heard differently by Haidt and Lukianoff than by Lisa Feldman Barrett. As white men, Haidt and Lukianoff likely don’t have a reference point to understand what it feels like for a woman to hear these words. They won’t cut the same way.
For people who occupy positions of power in society, there may not be a single word they would ever consider violence. But that doesn’t mean other people can’t legitimately experience some speech as violence. And when people say they do experience language as violence, it’s not because they’ve confused speech with physical assault; it’s because the language-game in which the speech-act takes place is different.
For the following sentences, decide if I’m using the word “violence” correctly:
Slapping someone in the face is an act of violence.
Smashing a pie in someone’s face is an act of violence.
Spanking a child is an act of violence.
Screaming hateful words at a stranger is an act of violence.
Pushing someone to the ground is an act of violence.
Breaking down a door is an act of violence.
Cheating on a partner is an act of violence.
Attending a white supremacist rally is an act of violence.
People will likely disagree as to which of these sentences contains a proper usage of “violence.” That’s because, as Wittgenstein tells us, “usage has no sharp boundary.” Oftentimes, the only way to determine the meaning of a word is to examine how it is used. This insight, developed by Wittgenstein in his exploration of language-games, is often described as the “meaning is use” doctrine.
In his essay, “Wittgenstein’s Dictionary,” the educator John Willinsky highlights the differences between the “meaning is use” doctrine and a dictionary-first theory of meaning. “The dictionary’s careful fixing of words to definitions, like butterflies pinned under glass, can suggest that this is how language works. The definitions can seem to ensure and fix the meaning of words, just as the gold standard can back a country’s currency. What Wittgenstein found in the circulation of ordinary language, however, was a free-floating currency of meaning. The value of each word arises out of the exchange. The lexicographer abstracts a meaning from that exchange, which is then set within the conventions of the dictionary definition.”
In trying to determine whether speech can be properly understood as violence, Haidt and Lukianoff have either overlooked or willfully ignored a fundamental property of language. It’s slippery and messy and more liquid than solid, a gelatinous mass that changes shape to fit our needs, like an octopus squeezing into the cracks between rocks on the seafloor. So why is it that when we teach and speak about language it’s portrayed as this rigid thing with fixed definitions and terms that we must conform to?
According to Willinsky, “The schooled representation of meaning sets language in the hands of those who hold the proper definitions.” In other words, appeals to the dictionary serve a political purpose; they preserve existing power structures, and fortify the way things are at the expense of the way things can be.
It can appear trivial to expend so much energy on worrying about how we speak, because speech seems less tangible than physical action. But definitions always matter. In the judicial system, for example, they are key in assigning blame. The “reasonable person” standard is applied in self-defense cases to determine culpability; in this context, “reasonable” means average, ordinary. As legal scholar Jody David Armour writes in Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism, this definition of reasonable “takes the merely typical and contingent and presents it as truth and morality, objectively construed,” a pretty low bar for justice. Consider how a “rational person” test or an “omniscient person” test might change the meaning of criminality.
Similarly, there was a time in the American South when blackness, that thing that determined where one could eat, drink, and sit, was codified into law as having “one drop” of black blood. And migrants fleeing violence in Central America are rarely granted asylum in the United States because of the legal definition of “refugee.” There are profound consequences from definitions, and they should not be ceded to the staff of a reference book.
Even words without legal import can hold incredible power. Speech can’t bruise skin, but it can break a spirit. Is a feeling any less real because it happens “under the hood?” Is heartbreak not real pain? Why do we describe hurtful words as a punch to the gut or a slap to the face? For so long, the free speech debate has been built upon an incoherent premise: that speech is powerful enough to solve social ills, but can’t inflict as much damage as a fist.
When is speech violence? It depends on how we define it. If we define violence as a physical act, then speech is never violence. If we choose to define violence as causing harm to a person, then speech is often violence. If we choose to define violence as intentionally causing harm, then sometimes speech is violence.
If there is to be one takeaway from the work of Wittgenstein, it’s that nothing is essential in language. He spent his entire life feeling around for the atoms of speech, only to discover that he was grasping at an illusion. Language is what we say, what we mean, and what we understand—different meanings for different people in different contexts.
#ludwig wittgenstein#language#linguistics#violence#speech acts#free speech#syntax#communication#power#influence
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Essay: Can we move beyond lip service on the art of listening in health care?
Listening in healthcare can be a very complicated matter and concerns many different aspects of healthcare encounters. Even if one spontaneously asks oneself: is it not the most common sense thing to do? I have been caught up on this topic due to previous bad experiences in healthcare where the lack of listening properly or even listening at all was completely missing – even if I was speaking to a healthcare professional in the same room. After some time I got to read the medical journal, that one of the specific non-listening physicians I had met had been writing and realized I was only being observed. I even remember very clearly hearing myself saying repeatedly: “Can you listen to what I say?” Even that did not help. It just made things worse. It is as if it is up to the healthcare provider to decide when or even if to ask the relevant questions or if they even are going to be asked at all. That way of being from the healthcare provider’s side of things was just pretending to hear. At this point of time in my life, I had had physicians whom all acted likewise – they always excluded what I was trying to communicate and they got it all wrong. Incorrect diagnosis, wrong treatment ideas, no one even tried to put my story together properly. They seemed to want to start the discussion from a set of ideas or rules on how to ask questions and what questions to ask that does not always correspond to what the patient really has to say. Their structure of things made their comprehension of why I even was attempting to get help into complete chaos. Later I came to understand what I had been subjected too and this is part of why listening in healthcare does not always work. The culture of evidence-based medicine is reductive, it simplifies and cannot handle the complexities of life that need to be interpreted and put into context. Evidence-based medicine devalues individual experience. At this early stage, I started to wonder if I no longer could express myself. I have previously been a radio broadcaster and am a verbal person and I like words so that was not the problem. Actually, being a humanities student made me react to this hierarchical structure very strongly and it made me lose faith towards the realm of healthcare and start to question their knowledge production. If they can’t listen properly what else are they getting wrong about medicine as a scientific field? Are healthcare providers not supposed to be humanists too? My idea of the humanist is about meeting the other and this kind of reasoning can be found in different philosophical schools of thought. At one point when the lack of listening was exceptionally frustrating, I was asking myself: do we have to make listening in healthcare a human right? That was when I started to go to the university library to find books on other people’s experiences of healthcare and it was very helpful to see other people had noticed the same things as I and, sad to say, had even had even worse encounters than my own. I even started reading books on the medical law to help me get a bigger picture of the idea of healthcare.
In the end, everything turned out, but I had to force my narrative structure and storyline on top of how healthcare providers usually want to be addressed. I was sensing a cultural sensitivity problem and this aspect is imperative to better listening in healthcare too. Interaction is on the linguistic level. I understood I had to find a medical professional that comes from a different culture where the speaking structure is different from the Swedish way. Medical humanities research has also explained that to get the right diagnosis the patient and healthcare provider need to be on the same page when it comes to the use of words and their interpretation and how they are applied to make sense to each other. Not just that, Iona Heath explains in an essay in the BMJ: “Clinicians need to be just this – experts in the feelings we attach to words – otherwise our efforts to communicate with our patients will oscillate between the tedious and the cruel”i. There is also another side to this aspect explained by Dr. Gavin Francis in Aeon magazine “Storyhealing”: “War metaphors in health and healing can be valid, but bringing different ideas to the mind of each patient – an appreciation of storytelling can assist physicians to choose the metaphor that will best help their patients, and also help patients articulate inner experience to their physician.”ii As a patient, one always has a story of some kind that cannot be neglected. My new encounter in healthcare was to become a part of a shift of paradigm in my life. The big difference now in this new encounter also was the attitude this person had towards information and sharing ideas with the patient and the appreciation shown towards a complete story as to how I also had come to understand myself. This medical professional happily took everything I had and replied: “Great! Otherwise, I would never have understood!”. At the time it felt like a surprise and that this person was actually listening. I could see it in the facial expression that something else was going on inside of this person. Later this doctor told me he even had one of my illnesses too. What actually happened here was the combination of the how and the why I even got ill and where a medical professional was integrated as in a more interpretive listening process. I was also due to all this going through a change from just being a passive patient into a combination of what is known to be called the healthcare consumer (knowing my patient’s rights and becoming better informed) and being the expert patient (knowing how to strategically manage myself through the healthcare system). This was something I had to learn by myself. One needs to be empowered before even being listened to properly in healthcare.
I have read a big amount of patient experience books, pathologies, medical humanities research and research by the nursing science. I do not even have to look far into social media to stumble across a Twitter account defending patient’s rights where the beholder of the account defines the account with a message that says: “I am not a slave; I will not comply to tyranny”. Not being listened to is tyranny. On Twitter, I have also come to know the phenomenon called the patient’s voice. The fact that this has appeared also shows it is close to a human’s rights issue. The concept of the patient’s voice can be interpreted as the downside of the patient’s status in healthcare. The attempt of the patients’ voice is about something else. Patient’s Voice is about change and is challenging to the healthcare structure. The patient’s voice phenomenon wants to create a better awareness on how hard thing can get for a patient and is a way of questioning what is not working. On a personal level, it can also be about just being listened to in healthcare in a one-to-one situation. The idea of doctors’ ears is not being used very much on social media to debate the lack of listening in healthcare. At least not yet.
There are a variety of hashtags on Twitter and one even explicitly concerned with listening to patients’ #listentopatients. It is as if healthcare providers have a particular form of hearing impairment. Hearing is easily something that can get mixed up with listening. Listening is a much more complex process than just hearing. The big difference between hearing and listening is that listening is part of a hermeneutic process that integrates both intellectual and emotional capacities to extract the correct meaning.
How can patients be perceived through the lens of listening instead? A listening culture or feature is about trust. Researchers have come to regard, especially three components as most important to listening: empathy, being inclusive and supportive. This is not easily handled in healthcare. Still, is it not just common sense?
Over and over again, I see the same thing being pronounced and debated about healthcare and the big problem with not being able to deliver the right care and attending or even listened to. Headline such as: “Healthcare has to be able to listen to patients” just appeared the other day in the Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladetiii. The headline concerned a report from the Swedish authority that analyses healthcare from the point of view of the population, Myndigheten för Vårdanalys, “Vården ur befolkningens perspektiv” (Healthcare from the point of view of the population). Only one third agree to that Swedish healthcare is actually working. There is an international comparison and Sweden is not the worst country in the world but the strangest thing is that Sweden, in general, is understood as a democratic country, not in the healthcare setting. The level of patient participation is 69 %. Germany is ranked as best on patient participation by 87 %. Do healthcare professionals explain things so patients understand? 78 % of the Swedish population responded positively. In Australia, 93 % of the population responded positively to having being addressed comprehensively. Only 43 % of the Swedish population says doctors even discuss treatment options and risks. Australia ranks highest at 69 % in this regard in the report. Only 23 % of Swedish patients get a care plan to help them navigate their care. In France, the population says yes to this by 53 %. This just to give some examples. The study is the results from The Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Surveyiv. Why are the cultural differences as big as they are? Does it have to do with if a country has a national health literacy strategy or not? More in-depth political, cultural and historical processes can give explanations beyond that I am sure.
What I am missing from this Myndigheten för Vårdanaly is the phenomenon the patient’s voice – the struggle people have in the healthcare process. How hard it can be to even get the correct diagnosis and integrated care needed. At some point, these repetitive stories people have need to stop. An article by Tiffany Simms,”When ‘Once Upon a Time’ gives us more than a story” gives a very good account of these problems and the problems patients encounter in terms of not being listened too. Tiffany is discussing from the listening point of view and her example concerns people with autoimmune disease and how many years it can take for the patient to even get the correct diagnosis. In the meantime, many are being really badly treated even when it just comes to communicating. It is sort of like a battlefield about what symptoms seem to be real or not or how they can be interpreted and Tiffany adds: “Even when patients are listened to, healthcare providers only care for the symptoms and leave root causes unaddressed.” Lab reports trump patient experiences. Or as Tiffany is explaining and I am sure many patients or their next-of-kin will recognize themselves in the following statement: “A doctor should be a partner in making you healthy, but for the most part I feel on my own. I feel like a doctor should say, ‘Okay let’s start with the most natural, least invasive way to help you heal, and if we need to go to a stronger regimen then we will’ instead, it’s always ‘here’s a medication with worrying side effects. Next, please”v.
If I go hunting on different social media channels or patient engagement accounts for patient advocacy, health literacy, patient participation, patient associations, individual patient bloggers, and even medical professionals – they are more or less telling the same story of what a catastrophe the lack of listening is in healthcare. Have we really looked deeper into what this lack really is about?
It is not about the lack of soft skills. I just need to look closer at what narrative medicine is about and the threat against it to understand how hard listening in healthcare is. On Wikipedia the obstacles against narrative medicine goes like this: “People who are physicians have been trained to believe, that it is a scientific objectivity that makes them most effective, in their efforts to understand and resolve the pain that others bring them, and a mental distance that protects them from becoming wounded from the difficult work. Objectivity, empathy, and global thinking are stated not to be incompatible with a degree of dissociation from the patient’s suffering that is sufficient to protect oneself.”vi It is not only that. I have looked at textbooks that are passed out for educational use on patient communication and these texts always look good. The bigger problem against listening in healthcare is what is being said and can be taught in medical education classes. I even attended a medical class once just to see for myself what is going on and what is being said and how long it takes to see and hear how healthcare professionals are taught not to respond to patients and to deliberately not pass diagnosis out even if that is what a patient seems to have. I only needed to be a fake medical student for one medical class and it all happened within ten minutes. I know this is not representative for the whole, at the time I told myself I do not need to see more because I was sure it might even get worse if I saw or heard more. The culture of oppression in healthcare is real. My observations can be confirmed with the help of the medical memoirs of the Swedish novelist and doctor P. C. Jersild. In his memoirs, he explains how it usually works, when and how doctors are taught not to listen to the patient’s story. When practitioners train medical students in the healthcare setting, they also teach them how not to listen. If a medical student tries to be attentive and lets the patient speak from beginning to finish the teaching practitioner, will make sure to correct the medical student and then make sure to show how the patient’s voice is not allowed by being interrupted as soon as possiblevii. This is just one part of the problem with listening in healthcare. Other sides of these non-listening behaviors are actually even stranger than what has just been said. Doctors are trained to think thematically and they at times do not even let the patients explain themselves. Doctors are not trained in how to make meaning out of how a patient narrates. Already just on their way to greet a patient in the waiting room, they can have decided beforehand what the patient has or that patient does not have anything at all. At least 20 % of all misdiagnosis are due to this kind of error in thinking strategies according to Dr. Jerome Groopman. Doctors do not want to interact with people with mental illness conditions. Doctors do not even want to interact with people who cannot communicate properlyviii. I remember sitting in a waiting room and a woman next to me grabbed my arm and asked what is wrong with doctors. It is as if they already have made up their mind on what one is seeking help for even before one has had the chance to explain oneself. The healthcare setting is disturbing and constructed in such a way that it actually creates harm. It is not easy to make oneself heard in this environment.
In the healthcare debate, there are very many different managerial concepts that might just help make things worse. Sometimes it almost seems like different managerial concepts for healthcare are most suited for debate and not the reality of healthcare. The debate is of course very interesting to follow, but does it really help? Are these concepts really helping to reshape the culture of healthcare? The situation is very ad hoc concerning who actually listens to the patient or not. All these different managerial concepts are tiresome. And the only thing they really have to do it to listen to the patient to get it right. Physicians often deliberately choose not to take into account what the patient actually is saying and why it counts. Even when a patient is just trying to give correct information or add on details that have been lost in the continuum of the healthcare process.
The debates I have been reading concern the following concepts:
New Public Management. The patient is currency.
Patientcenteredcare. The patient is an individual. The patient is interpreted by others.
Valuebasedcare. The patient reported outcomes measures. Doing the right thing. Patient participation.
Personcenteredcare. A holistic approach to the patient’s life and health issue/s. Patient awareness.
Healthcare providers do not discuss prognosis or what the patient can do to improve their quality of life. The providers do not even explain what steps are to come next regarding treatment plans. They do not let the patient be involved in how to help the patient also help themselves to better healthcare outcomes. Listening to patients is also about giving patients the right kind of information at the right time. The other day I read a blog entry by the most prominent Swedish e-patient Sweden even has, Sara Riggare.
Sara Riggare explains that being an informed patient is a provocation. She uses herself as an example to show how the culture of healthcare works to force her to diminish herself instead of making her more competent or even feel better. Just trying to ask well-informed questions is a provocation on the healthcare structure. Instead of being able to knowingly being a part of a patientcentreredcare situation where the physician actually listens to her questions she is forced into a physciancentered way of managing herself and it makes her play the role of being ignorant. The culture of healthcare is always very apparent for a patient and Sara Riggare has learned she has to play by the rules as of an Albert Einstein quote: “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.ix” Sara Riggare is an empowered patient who only wanted to be listened to. She just had concerns regarding medical research in regards to herself. The saying goes that listening is a key to leadership. Suzanne Gordon explains in a BMJ Opinion article: “Research shows that hierarchy, by its very nature, dramatically reduces speaking up by those lower down in the pecking order. We are hard-wired, then socialized, to be acutely sensitive to power, and to work to avoid being seen as deficient in any way by those in power.x”
A tweet concerning what patient empowerment is about also revealed how physicians misinterpret a well-informed patient and patient empowerment due to the hierarchical culture of healthcare: “Empowerment isn’t about bestowing one’s power on another. It’s education so they find their own power.” Team. Intake-Me retweeted @Intakeme
Another way of putting it more nicely concerning listening in healthcare is how Sharon Roman explains herself in the British Medical Journal: “While years of experience may make way for a knowledgeable doctor, years of listening help make a great one. I am aware that I may talk too much, but I also need to feel heard.” There is more to it than this. Often a practitioner will think he/she has seen it all before. Sharon adds on: “Listen to what I have to say without prejudice, not racing ahead to the answer you may or may not already know”. Sharon then explains patients have to be let to ask questions, even if the questions are no good, answer anyway xi.
I have been listening to stories in healthcare and listening still seems to be something that mostly happens by chance. Dr. Alicia Conill shows a typical example of that when one of her patients takes her off guard by making her listen to her patient’s story. Dr. Alicia Conill concludes on listening in healthcare that: “Listening to someone’s story costs less than expensive diagnostic testing but is key to healing and diagnosis” xii.
The biggest obstacle for a better culture of listening in healthcare is the hierarchical structure and how doctors are trained to have the status of a God. At times, it can even be worse than this because this Godlike doctor does not even talk to the other semi-Gods in the healthcare setting or care to listen to when the patient explain why they need a certain treatment. This makes the doctor the same thing as an autocrat. The someone listened to. Not the listener. This is the opposite of what a culture of listening is about. I have read a patient story about exactly that when an anesthesiologist refused to listen even if there are national guidelines on how to proceed and it was exactly how the patient was explaining why the treatment she already was on was essential to her before surgery. The problem being the anesthesiologist was trying to remove it. The medical professional’s response went like this: “I am not going to let this happen – a patient is trying to tell me how I am supposed to do my job.” The author Åsa Moberg who wrote about it called her article: Doctor’s prestige is lethal xiii.
I want to focus on the most typical concepts used and the Sara Riggare blog entry put it into place. The dichotomy patientcentric versus physciancentric. If you take a closer look and think about these definitions you should be able to see how narcissistic they both are. The idea or ideals of listening in healthcare need to be rethought and restructured in terms of communication structures. Communication is still seen as speaking “which unfortunately is still a phallogocentric enterprise” according to reasoning on the practice of interlistening by Jaishikha Nautiyal in the International Journal of Listening demonstrates that since nobody listens to this it wrecks the cultural practice of listening itself. We need to make way for the Silent Other in the part of the listening process. Communication is a lost project. “And while speech thinks that it is whole and healthy, it does not realize that the denial of listening as a lost and melancholic object only thrives in the pathologies of speech. In sickness and in health: there is no speaking and thinking without listening”. Patients are often interrupted within seconds. There is almost no room for them to voice their concerns properly. No time to stop and think and for the healthcare provider to really understand what good listening can do to enhance their own professionalism. I have seen figures saying patients in Sweden get 18 seconds to explain themselves, in France 23 seconds and apparently in England as much as 54 seconds before they are interrupted. The act of listening is both an empathic and an ethic approach toward the Other. The problem in the healthcare culture in regards to listening is that it is not seen as an active process. In traditional communication theories, listening is excluded from the participatory dimensions of sensing in communicative experiences. “There is a homological pattern to the absence of listening from the academic discipline of communication that privileges speech acts and speech making”xiv. This is also typical of the culture of the west. This way of thinking mirrors democratic processes in the western school of thought. So, is a culture of listening in terms of democracy going to come from the East? Or am I just stuck in stereotypes…
Dr. Danielle Ofri explains from her book presentation on “What patients say, what doctors hear” that doctors do not wish to let patients voice their concerns properly because they think it will take too much time. A study she comments upon explains that patients do not really need as much time as doctor’s fear. The patient really needs something between one and a half minute and four minutes to explain themselves properly. She also adds on that doctors loathe informed patients. Even if the debates say they are for. Doctors prefer to work against this development xv. The art of listening in healthcare has still a very long way to go. Some time ago Sara Riggare posted on Twitter that if she only did as her health provider said she would be worse off. Sara Riggare also added in that healthcare providers need to be more attentive to patient information needs. The fact that she is a successful patient is because she at least is listening to herself and making sure she is properly informed. No wonder people are all over the Internet, health apps and social media. The Internet always gives the impression of listening. The biggest truth of them all is that it is not a health professional who is the best listener. A fellow patient is often the one who best understands another patient’s needs. One just has to start hunting on different social media and find bloggers to realize how it all really works out. Being a listening officer on the Internet is mind blowing in this regard. Another example I can add in to make you, the reader, think a bit more is from when I a few years ago I read an article in The Language of Caring about a cancer specialist who herself was attained by cancer. She stated that it was first after being a patient herself that she truly understood what patients need to know. My question to this is: why does medical training not include this or even think it by itself? Why is medical education not teaching listening to patients? Today it is all still called communication. How much can narrative medicine really help to turn the culture of healthcare into a listening one?
What do we actually need as a remedy against the non-listening culture in healthcare? The culture of listening is about openness and awareness. Still, maybe we need a managerial concept or policy of listening in healthcare. If we do not think about it before acting upon it nothing will change. Change can start bottom up or top down. The culture of healthcare needs a serious shift towards what the culture of listening is about. I am not sure it is going to work by itself from the bottom up.
Health policy, in general, is based on evidence-based medicine and founded on utilitarianism or egalitarianism and the values of clinicians are hopefully deontological. The last commitment is, according to Iona Heath, “poorly understood and little appreciated by policy makers, whose priorities relate to population or societal levels. Yet, without this foundation in deontology, patients would find themselves unable to trust clinicians, with less efficiency at societal level”xvi.
There is a need to make way for change. A policy is needed since there also is a need to be able to evaluate. To begin, the development of patient policy to make sure legislation and organizations act according to how a listening policy that empowers patients and at the same time enhances professionalism of healthcare providers to become better listeners. The making of listening policy sculptured to align the patient experience in accordance with what modernized patient participation is. Patients need to be included in the making of listening policies. It is time to move beyond lip service on the art of listening in healthcare.
©Philippa Göranson, Lund, Sweden, March 2017
I am open to the idea if others want to share this blog content on other publication forums but I ask to be contacted first and want to know where I am agreeing to before and want a reference. A shortened version can also be discussed as long as the meaning of this text is not altered.
This essay is originally written for http://www.globallisteningcentre.org/ and published by them.
This essay has been published as an entry on Sweden's first patient association for patient safety http://www.patientperspektiv.org/ Patientperspektiv on Twitter: @PatientPersp
This essay has been published on the Dahlborg Healthcare Leadership Group. Thomas Dahlborg is Studer Group Coach & Speaker, President of DHLG & Author of the forthcoming book: From Heart to Head and back again. Thomas Dahlborg is debating on the cause of relationship-centered care and empathy in healthcare. Thomas Dahlborg on Twitter: @tdahlborg
This essay has been published on Healthcocreation forum in Spain. Healthcocreation is part of the first Patient Experience Institute in Spain iexp. One of the founders Carlos Bezos Daleske has made this happen. On Twitter: @Carlos_Bezos
References:
Dr. Alicia Connell, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storytold=100062673
Suzanne Gordon, blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2017/01/26/Suzanne-gordon-on-soliciting-input-not-just-listening
Dr. Jerome Groopman, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3XxS-p31qY
Dr. Jerome Groopman, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0AEGnQ0L5s
Dr. Gavin Francis, https://aeon.co/essays/medicine-and-literature-two-treatments-of-the-human-condition
Iona Heath, http://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i5705?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Dr. P.C. Jersild, Mina Medicinska Memoarer, Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, 2006
Åsa Moberg, https://turtagning.wordpress.com/2015/11/08/lakares-prestigelystnad-kan-fa-dodlig-utgang
Myndigheten för Vårdanalys, www.vardanalys.se/Rapporter/2016/Varden-ur-befolkningens-perspektiv-2016--jamforelser-mellan-Sverige-och-tio-andra-lander
Jaishikha Nautiyal, www.tandfoline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10904018.2016.1149773
Dr. Danielle Ofri, http://www.youtube.com/watch+v=mv0R2PXZHSQ
Sara Riggare, www.riggare.se/2017/02/18/patientcentrerad-eller-personcentrerad-vard-for-lakarcentrerade-patienter
Sharon Roman, blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2017/02/28/sharon-roman-notes-from-the-less-comfortable-chair
Tiffany Simms, https://tincture.io/when-once-upon-a-time-gives-us-more-than-a-story-f312734c2382#.5o7ttqfk0
Svenska Dagbladet, www.svd.se/sjukvarden-maste-kunna-lyssna-påa-patienterna
Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_medicine
Footnotes:
i http://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i5705?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
ii https://aeon.co/essays/medicine-and-literature-two-treatments-of-the-human-condition
iii www.svd.se/sjukvarden-maste-kunna-lyssna-påa-patienterna
iv www.vardanalys.se/Rapporter/2016/Varden-ur-befolkningens-perspektiv-2016--jamforelser-mellan-Sverige-och-tio-andra-lander
v https://tincture.io/when-once-upon-a-time-gives-us-more-than-a-story-f312734c2382#.5o7ttqfk0
vi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_medicine
vii P.C. Jersild, Mina Medicinska Memoarer, Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, 2006
viii https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3XxS-p31qY & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0AEGnQ0L5s
ix www.riggare.se/2017/02/18/patientcentrerad-eller-personcentrerad-vard-for-lakarcentrerade-patienter
x blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2017/01/26/Suzanne-gordon-on-soliciting-input-not-just-listening
xi blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2017/02/28/sharon-roman-notes-from-the-less-comfortable-chair
xii www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storytold=100062673
xiii https://turtagning.wordpress.com/2015/11/08/lakares-prestigelystnad-kan-fa-dodlig-utgang
xiv www.tandfoline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10904018.2016.1149773
xv http://www.youtube.com/watch+v=mv0R2PXZHSQ
xvi http://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i5705?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
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So far today, I have screamed at my cat, screamed at a barking dog and added that I was going to butcher its owners, smashed my bicycle and a bottle of detergent while tearing up the only bag I have to carry anything in that the latter was contained in at the time while my clothes were still at the laundromat, told my neighbour to go and fuck himself and that I was going to murder his dog and rape him with its corpse, and then walked away and repeatedly punched myself in the face for good measure.
This is not an anomaly. This is exactly the kind of person that I am. I have recently decided that the idiotic fantasies I hide behind are of no benefit and that it's time to dispense with them. To that effect, it is entirely essential that I make the following very clear: I am not a good person.
Think I am? Today suggests otherwise. My life suggests otherwise. I am a lazy, spiteful, potheaded, undisciplined thief who honestly can't handle his basic needs without consuming space and money from someone else.
Think I value my family? When I was 21 I went to jail for threatening my mother and holding a knife against her throat. I have even in my adult years struck, yelled at, or otherwise been abusive towards my effectively helpless and very much disabled sister. I spent most of my youth honestly wishing I had the courage to murder my father. More recently I effectively abandoned my family in Alaska when they needed my help after months of not even putting in the bare minimum of effort because I was too busy drinking and smoking myself stupid until I passed out every night all to “cope” with the “stress” of a job that any idiot with an average level of motivation could do.
Think I'm intelligent? It's already been established that in spite of my arrogance I can't write even though wasting years of my life developing that supposed skill. I struggle with basic math and sentence structure on a daily basis, my reading comprehension is terrible, I cheated constantly in public school, and my four-year degree is nothing more than the result of routinely copy-pasting wikipedia and sparknotes, if not flagrantly plagiarising essays and books. I can't even win a battle of wits with a literal 10 year old.
Think I'm honest? I lie constantly. I have stolen on far more occasions than I can remember. When I was 11 years old I broke into a neighbour’s house. I repeatedly construct narratives and stories that never happened in my life so I can look better in conversation when in reality all I ever do is nothing while sitting on my ass in front of a screen. Been doing that since I was a small child. What few jobs I've bothered to obtain that weren't just a product of nepotism involved lying about effectively all of my qualifications and summarily taking advantage of employers who don't know any better.
Think I'm responsible? Everything I've just said so far along with my life in general proves otherwise. I am lazy, shiftless, and can't even be bothered to try looking for work or going back to school. Absolutely none of the behaviours I've described herein have any god damned fucking excuse. I don't even TRY to better myself. I can't even bother to do dishes regularly or just take care of my own hygiene properly.
Think I'm good with animals? When I was 10 I stuffed a bunch of live ducks I was supposed to be caring for into a 5-gallon bucket for no particular reason and wandered off. They all died. I've been lying my ass off about it ever since. On other occasions I've hurt or harassed animals, including my own pets, and have been wholly indifferent to any of them dying, meat animals or not.
I am a monster.
Any of the alleged “challenges” I face in life or my mental illnesses, etc. are absolutely not an excuse. If I have a problem, all that is of issue is bothering to have enough self-respect to handle it, and without making it other people's problem. Instead, however, I just ignore even my most basic responsibilities as a human being, content to be a self-destructive, manipulative leech that occasionally moans to himself in silence about how much his life sucks. Boo hoo. Filthy people deserve filthy lives.
This is not a cry for attention, pity, or help. Any responses or discussion of this matter will be immediately deleted/ignored. I just want to make it absolutely clear to the world that I am exactly the kind of person who does not deserve to benefit from society in any way. I do not deserve “help” from anyone if I am too much of an evil person to bother to try changing myself from the absolute bastard that I have been ever since the day I was born.
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