"Pathography and Enabling Myths"

I found this essay very interesting, and I think its my favorite so far.  In it Anne Hawkins talks about the different ways people come to terms with an illness, often using writing and narrative to help themselves cope with the new world they find themselves in. She points out that once someone becomes sick, they enter a different kind of world, since our society puts so much importance and normality on being healthy. Pathography is the story in which patients tell to summarize their illness, and Hawkins argues that it is a very important step in accepting the event. She also argues that these pathographies exist in both a space of story and memory saying "It is less, in that remembering and writing are selective processes--certain facts are omitted either because they are forgotten o because they do not fit the author's narrative design; and it is more, in that the act of committing experience to narrative form inevitable confers upon it  a particular sequence of events and endows it with a significance that was probably only latent in the original experience. Writing about an experience--any experience--inevitably changes it" (225).

The parallel Hawkins establishes between a medical report and the pathography is similar to what we have been talking about with logic and emotion. On one side you have the facts (logic and medical reports) and on the other you have the emotions (pathographies) that go along with those facts. I think it is interesting that more stock, for patients as well as society, remains in the facts and that it is odd or the last ditch effort to find something to latch onto that forces people to turn to the emotional side. These pathographies serve as a way of healing because they allow a person to face their issue and explain it, essentially taking it back and turning it into something that they can understand on a deeper level.

I think Hawkins has a really good handle on the relationship between the person and healing, and I think this is what would have made Brand's essay better and more relatable to our topic of writing and healing.