Dealing with Dramedies: A Full-Time Writer, Film Lover and Patient's Journey (With Other Success Stories)

By Elianor M.A.

With wild nights and wacky misadventures, turning eighteen is supposed to be "sick."

That is, unless you literally get sick.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781636761022

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Dealing with Dramedies

Dealing with Dramedies

A Full-Time Writer, Film Lover and Patient’s Journey (With Other Success Stories)

Elianor M.A.

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2020 Elianor M.A.

All rights reserved.

Dealing with Dramedies

A Full-Time Writer, Film Lover and Patient’s Journey (With Other Success Stories)

ISBN

978-1-63676-544-0 Paperback

978-1-63676-101-5 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63676-102-2 Ebook

To Ana and Sophie,

My angels, my light,

When you’re old enough to read, I hope you find my words as compelling as the lyrics to Baby Shark.

Table of Contents

Part I. Dealing

Foreword

Author’s Note

Chapter 1. The Definition of Drama

Chapter 2. The Semesters: Fall 2018

Chapter 3. Spring 2019

Chapter 4. Summer 2019

Chapter 5. Fall 2019

Chapter 6. Spring 2020

Chapter 7. Summer 2020

Part II. Dramedies

Chapter 8. The So What? of Dramedies

Chapter 9. The Intersection Between Storytelling and Science

Chapter 10. The Superheroes and Superhuman

Chapter 11. The Paradigm of Women in Film

Chapter 12. The Rise of the Antiheroine

Chapter 13. The Daunting Dangers of the Internet

Takeaways

Chapter 14. The NAM Factsheet

Chapter 15. The Survival Tool Kit

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Part I

Dealing

Illness is a part of every human being’s experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.

—Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill

Foreword

Resilient people are not necessarily braver than anyone else.

What makes them special is their ability to see past adversity, to not get sucked into the drama of victimhood and bemoan why me? Rather, resilient people—and most significantly, resilient feminists—find power and creativity in coping.

Elianor M.A. has found feminist power in transforming the drama of her illness into a dramedy: drama + comedy. She has also discovered the transformative power of words.

The late Black feminist theorist Barbara Christian once wrote, I write to save my life.

Elianor is writing to preserve her life—her memories, her creativity, her hope in the midst of battling illness, her awakening as a feminist and a writer.

And we have been given the gift of being her audience and bearing witness to her becoming herself even more so.

By Dr. Irma McClaurin, Black feminist anthropologist, award-winning writer, editor of Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis and Poetics, and founder of the Black Feminist Archive.

Author’s Note

My life is a cosmic joke. It’s unstructured, ill-paced, and sometimes misworded. It gets too thrilling for me when I feel like a self-professed homebird, and it slows down when I need to fly away.

I’m mostly to blame for that controlled chaos. I feel too much inside, and I say too little out loud. I find it impossible to reveal myself entirely to the world because I don’t think I can reveal what I don’t know. I capture the tender moments in my life through words, so I wonder if that makes me incapable of living stories in the present tense. I come up with the right words to say at the wrong time, and I think a love too weak for art isn’t love worth having. I attribute these observations to my best work resulting from my worst moments, and I have a strong belief that life is a work of fiction for that very reason. Reality is a series of experiences wherein we invent ourselves and seek to understand others, and so is fiction. There’s art in life, and life in art. We just have to be willing to appreciate it.

I never found my life worth documenting, and I never considered writing as a viable career. I used to finish books, binge shows, and host movie marathons through the looking glass of leisure. Yet I never made the connection from reading and watching that there are actual people who do this, or that I was qualified to be one of them. Writing has been my confessional, but what if it could translate into more?

As a ruthless cynic, I spew a litany of self-deprecating comments whenever I think about my dysfunctional family, childhood letdowns, and teenage angst as nothing more than shared universal experiences. Few people have a utopian home life, plenty get bullied in their formative years, most experience feeling left out, and everyone tries too hard to be a triple threat. In the arts, most artists can sing, act, and write, if not more. In the sciences, most scientists can calculate, lead, and innovate. That’s why I used to think my life was generic and unworthy, too typical to be immortalized in prose. Everyone’s had a rough time, so what separates me from the shared human experience of suffering?

Starting as a writer of fiction, my characters would say what I’ve wanted to say, do what I wish I could’ve done, and feel what I’ve wanted to feel. But I so lost sight of my own narrative coming up with a version of myself that the more hardships I faced, the more my focus strayed from my truth, and the more I sank into denial. Writing fiction shielded me from personal criticism, and reading others’ work offered me solace from reality. As a writer, I face criticism of the characters on the page, not of me. And as a reader, I am preoccupied with someone else’s problems rather than my own. Escapist entertainment has been my forte, to the extent that it became my lifeline.

I relied on distraction until I had to transition into dealing. Instead of acknowledging the pain I was increasingly experiencing, I ignored it for as long as my stamina allowed. But the longer I ignored my pain, the worse it felt when it caught up to me. That turning point was my eighteenth year, when saying no to hangouts and carrying a pill case in my purse became my new normal. My morning started with headaches, my nights ended with enervation, and the hours in between were spent with one foot in the hospital and the other in class.

I had dreamed about turning eighteen, the year when I could, as an adult, take charge of my flailing narrative and make up the rules as I go. After endless anticipation, my eighteenth year marked the beginning of my never-ending nightmare. Yet that never-ending nightmare was the only way I could get rid of the most damaging person I knew: myself.

Before I turned eighteen, I gave myself hell for making mistakes. I tortured myself over imperfect performances, academic or artistic, and that’s because I knew my best had to be the best. I was blinded by my inflated ego throughout my life, an ego that failed to eclipse my secret self-hatred. My self-destructive behavior was bound to manifest itself biologically eventually. Everything would never be the same.

What happened to me in my first year as an adult and college student was poetic, a lasting irony I try not to think about often. I had left my safety net in Lebanon and headed back to the United States to study at one of the nation’s top universities, the University of Rochester, only to become a regular patient at its affiliated hospital within months.

My ongoing battle between me, myself, and I transcended the prosaic and poetic. It became literal. There’s no better disorder to suit my character and test its volatility than an autoimmune disorder—a disorder that literally translates into my body’s rejecting itself. The universe misinterpreted my wish to be special. I did hit the jackpot, but it was that of the rare disease lottery instead of a million-dollar cash prize. I happen to be one of the youngest people to be diagnosed with a very rare autoimmune disorder called necrotizing autoimmune myopathy (NAM).

This story isn’t a one-and-done battle about miraculously surviving devastation, or a story about sudden spiritual awakening after having my last rights read to me. This is a story about dealing with drama and embracing its comedy. It’s about coming to terms with my dramedy.

I’m not pain-free. I’ve made peace with my pain.

That peace mostly came from writing it out, with stage directions and actor cues through screenwriting, a passion I would’ve never discovered had I not fallen ill. But that peace also stems from finding unconventional ways to celebrate the lows as much as I do the highs. And now I’m writing it all out in my memoir, from my own perspective—one that made me trade my insecurities for biting humor—and a questionable habit of dancing to the music playing underneath the side effects lists during TV commercials.

Throughout the excruciating and exhilarating moments, I felt so alone in my head. Having some friends and family who offered me love and support to the best of their knowledge did not matter. I’m thankful for them and every person who’s helped me without knowing it. However, these people couldn’t understand what it’s like to be in my shoes. Genuine empathy in extreme cases like mine is near impossible, so I wished for someone who knew what it’s like to have everything go wrong, all at once, yet still manage to go on.

I like to think of my approach to life as strike, thrive, and strive. Strike back when you’ve been struck, thrive despite it, and strive for more. I want to be that person for you—the person who not only understands your drama, but also helps you see its comedy.

Chapter 1

The Definition of Drama

Competitiveness lives within me on a cellular level. Born and raised in Lebanon, I was bred to excel. The dogma was, if I mastered school, I could master life.

When I succeeded in academics or extracurricular activities, my family compared me to my mother, listing her life story as a prototype for mine. When I failed, they said I was like my father, using my surname as a derogatory term to taunt me, which led me to detach myself from it. I couldn’t have my failures and my successes be my own; instead, they were reduced to opinions of what they ought to be. All I wanted was to be myself, or at the very least, figure out who that is.

I can see why my success engendered a comparison to my mother. With gumption and grace, she graduated high school at the age of seventeen and university at the age of twenty with honors, and she got her master’s degree at twenty-five and her PhD at twenty-eight with high distinction. My maternal grandfather was an engineer and the general manager of General Electric (GE) in the Middle East. He led an inspirational life. Even though I couldn’t witness it, my mother played me home videos of him every Christmas to keep his memory alive. My grandmother got into law school. Being part of this lineage, academic achievement was essential. My mom used to fall in and out of sleep while playing games with me as a toddler and writing her master’s thesis. She then became a tenured professor and TV host while managing to drop me off at school, ask me about my day, make my meals, and watch Modern Family and Scandal with me. She had an all-or-nothing gravitas, both intimidating and inspiring—a trait she passed on to me.

My father was the opposite. Gauche and self-centered, he leeched onto everything my mother had to offer: love, money, security, citizenship. And when he tried to drag her down further, she still rose above it all. I think my mother’s exceptional because she made exceptional choices. I don’t think my father is a bad person, but he’s made bad choices.

If someone can do it, you can do it better, was my mother’s quintessential piece of advice. Whether or not she intended I embark on a circular journey to reach perfection, I was driven by aspiration rather than meaning.

I didn’t have an excuse not to follow in her footsteps and prove I could handle anything that’s thrown at me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to avoid a lot of what’s going to bother me in life, and I couldn’t just wake up one morning and delete every person who got on my nerves. Unable to dodge inimical events, I dealt with what I was given to the best of my knowledge. When life gave me lemons, I was raised to spin gold out of their rinds and show it off as a bracelet.

Ironically, the movie motif running through this book has always run in my life. Back then, the word script made me shudder when it crossed my mind. I felt my childhood was scripted. My mother told me what to say and who to say it to, what to do and how to do it. Her protectiveness often dipped into a need to exercise control. She was the writer and director of my story, my dad was the antagonist, and the conflict changed depending on the day.

In elementary school, my mom created practice exams for me to take. I was a scrawny kid with the eclectic fashion sense of a Care Bear studying at a local Starbucks. On my breaks, I’d listen to the Jonas Brothers, gorge on blueberry muffins, and flip through my Lisa Frank sticker packs. My mother would sit across from me, either working on her own assignments or coming up with math problems and French vocabulary quizzes from scratch. She saw how well I performed at school even though I used to travel with her to conferences and miss a lot of classes. She believed in my potential, and she ensured I maximized it from the start.

Maximizing my potential meant there was no room for me to miss a mark. The first bad grade I ever received was an average score on a fourth-grade grammar quiz. I was so upset that I still remember the mistake that lost me all those marks a decade later. I thought that the sentence: A handful of fruits are in the basket was correct. From that very moment, I never forgot any mistake I made on a graded evaluation. I was obsessed with never repeating my slip-ups, but I didn’t learn to grow from them. The rosebud of my growing competence was stunted by the pesticides of my self-criticism. When I did miss a mark, I felt my unsatisfactory evaluation wasn’t about my knowledge of a subject, but meant I was unsatisfactory as a human being—the linchpin of my intrusive thoughts.

Throughout middle school, I was an artsy, headstrong gal packaged in a relatively tall and bony frame with a lunch box slinging from my shoulder. I disliked Rubik’s Cubes and puzzle games, but I liked watercolor painting sets and shower concerts. I was extroverted around other kids once I got to know them, but I was an introvert who found her imagination far more entertaining than anything they had to say. I was on a desperate quest to be the best, so I was unsurprisingly unpopular amongst my happy-go-lucky peers. Technically, I did have some friends, but I could count them on one hand.

The whole fish out of water saying would be quite fitting at this point in the story, except I was more like a fish thrown in cough syrup. I wasn’t a believer in the school’s religious agenda, resisting going to confession and spacing out during sermons. I wasn’t one of the cool kids either. In fact, I was so uncool that I had to guilt-trip them into inviting me to parties, even though I didn’t enjoy their company. I was just aching to fit in.

I decided to focus on activities since my social status was flopping on the deck and drawing its last breath (yes, this is the last of the fish metaphors). I dropped out of gymnastics to pursue piano professionally, and I was lucky to have a teacher, Mrs. Barakat, who believed in my musical abilities even when I doubted them. I had thrown my practice books on the floor too many times to count, my fingers rheumatic from hours of effort.

I nearly quit in the seventh grade, but Mrs. Barakat would tell me: "Your