The Midterm in English 201A

I can't tell if he likes me or merely tolerates me. Which has been a problem I've been struggling with lately.

Yesterday, hysterical, I called my mother (who just finished with work and was driving home), freaking out about the midterm in English 201A that I was just about to sit down and take.

"You are more than one test," she offered. "I'm so proud of you, Dad is so proud of you. I will be proud of you no matter how well you do on this midterm."

In English 156 (same instructor, remember), I got a D+ on the midterm, despite re-reading all the assigned works. I sat down in class to take it, and felt overwhelmed and stupid. Nothing came up into my brain. I didn't even bother with doing the last part, which was writing an in class essay.

I found myself in English 201A writing and writing on the in-class essay with no end in sight. I was genuinely enraged by the article "House Calls..." (which was part of our course) because it claimed that Gregory House, the TV character, was a more "real" depiction of a doctor than the previous generation of shows.

As someone who spends way too much time at Stanford University Hospital, both in the ER and in the psychiatric ward, I know hospital doctors. They don't have time to be assholes. They have too many patients to deal with to insult family or friends or the patient him/herself. And the vast majority of them get into the profession because they genuinely want to help people and save lives. Strange, I know, in this cynical world, but every doctor I've talk to or read about has said the same.

But, alas, the exam only called for four paragraphs (minimum), not four pages (which is what I did write).

Even then, the English instructor might give me a poor grade on the in-class essay because I didn't exactly follow directions. I just reacted about an issue that had been building for the past six or seven weeks.

During office hours on Monday, I asked the English instructor if he had time to read something that was not a part of class. He said yes.

I handed him the first part of a fiction piece (novel or short story or who knows?) that I had written years before, probably while I was manic or otherwise in the throws of a mood episode.

He grabs his pen in his left hand, and reads--frowning slightly but not writing on the paper, not correcting, which is probably an improvement no matter what his expression held.

"I think it's the most experimental of anything I've written--or at least what I have record of," I say before I hand it over to him.

"You might want to give this to [the English professor of 201B]; he's better with creative writing," he says finally.

"But you--"

He interrupts me, says something I don't remember. Then he asks, "How long did it take you to write this? A few hours? A few days?"

"I don't remember."

He finds this amusing, and repeats himself. "A couple of hours?"

"I don't know. Probably, yeah." I have a feeling that the words just gushed out of me like they do when I'm on the edge--before the ECT treatments, and probably during a time when I wasn't medicated. I do know that it's the first draft.

"I see that this is a recurring theme for you. Many writers are like that. They find it cathartic to write about the same thing, over and over again. Would you agree?"

He's talking about my constant investigation into mental illness, but he won't say "mental illness" probably out of sensitivity for me and the issue, although I'm so immersed in it that I see it everywhere--and have no trouble speaking about it to a few other people.