Wongo-Minded

by Lucy S.

Wongo:       

1.   if something is stretched out beyond use, or loose.

“My socks won't stay up; they're all wongo.”

2.  Spanglish slang: when someone's appearance looks a little sloppy; often in reference to uncombed hair.

“Were you in a hurry this morning?  You look all wongo.”

I think wongo-minded is the best way I can describe the state I’ve been in since the ending of last semester. I stretched my mind to write the three 20 plus page papers in three weeks, and although I try, I feel like I can’t get my mind to how it was before then. I keep hoping that it will bounce back.

My mind felt kind of wongo at points earlier in that semester, too, as when I kept trying to write a statement of purpose to apply to PhD programs, after already spending umpteen summer hours trying to do that and getting nowhere. Or there was the presentation in one of the classes which did not go well.  

My mind (and body) felt very wongo after the first semester in my program. The workload was worst then. It was the theory class (philosophy and literary theory) that took so much out of me. I remember emailing a friend saying, “I feel like something good is going away, and it’s never coming back.” The overload of philosophy made me absorb in a short period of time a massive amount of people’s attempts to make sense of how we live. I soon felt a sense of futility sink in. The Native American literature class saved me, I think. But then there was a terrible presentation in that class, and for the next few weeks, I felt so ashamed that I couldn’t enjoy even it. At the same time, I had almost no time for relationships with my family or friends. My uncle, who'd been, really, a constant good friend for most of my life, was deteriorating. I’d call him on the way home from classes, trying to make conversation. His voice was weak and somewhat distorted, and he’d lost the desire to talk for long. The last time we talked, he said he’d had what seemed to be a flu and felt weak from throwing up. I envisioned what this meant, having been there earlier that year for two weeks. My uncle’s body had increasingly stopped responding to his attempts to move, and my aunt had to do almost everything for him. Not long after that, he died. I flew to California and then returned to try to write the three papers. It was one of the bleakest times in my life, being isolated for long periods of time, thinking about how he’d been when I saw him earlier, wondering what the sense of anything was, wanting to just be with the people I love and say the hell with these studies that couldn’t solve anything anyway.

This isn’t supposed to be the way it works. You’re not supposed to end up with a wongo mind. The idea is that they stress you a bit beyond what you think you can take, and you find that you were able to take it after all. I think the same principle is supposed to apply to grad school (or other levels of school) as applies to some forms of exercise. “No pain, no gain,” Jane Fonda once used to say. Of course, with exercise, the various experts now say that a person can do more harm than good if they apply this idea the wrong way. Good to know. 

We are always deemed unreliable in assessing these things for ourselves; someone else must tell us what’s best for us, and we had damn well better hope that they know what they’re talking about if we abide by their take on our lives (or are forced to). Those with the power to dominate other people’s lives have gotten it wrong so many times, yet the various current batches of them are always so sure that unlike the others, they really are right. 

Do you know about the doctors who used to deliver babies without washing their hands after handling dead people? The midwives told them not to, but they knew better than any old unscientific midwife, and it offended them to be told to wash. They inadvertently killed some healthy women this way, including Mary Wollstonecraft when she gave birth to her daughter (who would become Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein).  (You can read more about this here: http://www.livescience.com/3210-childbirth-natural-deadly.html  or Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book I appreciate called For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women, which is where I first discovered what had happened to Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft wrote, "Vindication of the Rights of Women." 

When I lived in Germany, my landlady, who I became friends with, told me that her mother, in whose house we were now living, had died in her early 60s because she’d been having acute pains in her stomach with nausea and a low fever. Signs of appendicitis – but her doctor kept telling her it was nothing significant. Her appendix ruptured, and she died from the toxins that poured into her body. Bitterly, my landlady said, “We call them the gods in white coats.”

She told me this after I told her about a discussion with a doctor there. I asked him what would happen if I went past my due date, because that had occurred in my other two pregnancies. With my oldest, I’d gone three weeks overdue, and even with twins, I’d gone some days over (people often deliver twins two to four weeks early).  I wanted to know that he wouldn’t be quick to induce labor with Pitocin, that he’d let my body take its own course within reason. It was good that I asked. He said he’d have me go to the clinic EACH DAY that I was overdue, and they’d take samples of amniotic fluid to be sure the placenta wasn’t getting old. (This means sticking a long needle through the abdominal and uterine walls, and then into the amniotic sac.) I’d never heard of this as a response. I said, “Okay… well, what if I don’t want that done?” He said, “Well, if you have a TV repairman tell you what’s wrong with your TV, you do what he says.” I said, “No; I might get another opinion because I’m the one who ultimately lives with the decision.” He said, “This is much more complicated than fixing a TV.” I said, “Yeah, I know.” I returned to the U.S. at 7 ½ months pregnant with my three kids because I did not want to hand over my decisions about my body and my baby to that particular god in white coat.

But I knew that things were done differently elsewhere, that his way was not the only way. I had faith in my ability to decide for myself.  And this is what I hope will help my mind bounce back soon, knowing that there are many ways of living because I have lived so many ways. My intellectual abilities feel stretched out, not taut; my mind feels sloppy. But underneath that wongo-mindedness, my mind feels wounded. I will do what it takes to heal this woundedness.

Lately, I keep thinking of two passages. The first I have as a poster made by Ricardo Levins Morales.

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

Audre Lorde

But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "Economy"

That last line is the one that echoes through my mind often now. “But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear.”