After Ifemelu has the traumatizing experience with the tennis coach in Ardmore, she’s left feeling wretched and alone. She experiences all of the symptoms used to describe depression, but she refuses to let the word depression define the state she’s in. It seems that mental health issues are, to her, a reality experienced only by Americans who are too self-obsessed to consider anything but their own lives and feelings. By comparing Ginika’s and Aunty Uju’s responses to depression, I can see that one’s perception of mental health and the importance of the emotional and psychological well-being of individuals is completely socially constructed.

One thing that has interested me throughout Americanah is how Ifemelu notices the nuances within American culture that I forget. Such as how so often Americans are uncomfortable talking about or addressing someone's race. I mentioned in class how during one of my volunteer experiences at Bryn Mawr a student said the phrase "I don't see color". It made uncomfortable and in some ways made me think she was different, forgetting that in America and in my schooling I was taught that it was better to not use terms such as "black" or "people of color" because it was depicted as offensive. I wonder how much this has hindered our knowledge of other races? It also makes me question how , what is sometimes deemed as, "political correctness" has actually aided in the ignorance of other cultures.

Around 12:15pm, I walked into the rain and found myself reciting the phrase “love myself, love the process, love myself, love the process…” over and over; delighted that the repetition never failed to carry resonance each time I spoke it. As I walked, I was barely conscious that my feet had a mind and direction of their own. My attention was much more readily consumed in the act of reveling. I couldn’t help but look around and wonder if anyone could notice it; if it was possible for how radically different I felt inwardly to be written on the surface of my body.

 And then suddenly I found myself standing under the library staircase, the most immediate refuge from the rain, writing this:

We've just discussed this essay, Freedom from Education, in my prison education group. I thought that this passage was very evocative of the piece we read by Jack Halberstam on 'queer time":
"The education regime's way of seeing the world relies on a view of time as separate from space and as linear and developmental, on a two-dimensional scale. Students who subscribe to this view see themselves as individuals hurtling into a future with posssible trajectories of either going 'up' as a valued graduate toward economic productivity or 'down' as a 'dropout' toward criminality..."

I made my descision to meet under the tree on the hill over the athletic fields because it is my favorite outdoor place on campus.  Since I like to do a lot of thinking in, under, or near trees, I felt that this would be a good interactive thinking space to have our class discussion.