In her patients, Slater sees “pain pain pain the patient brings [her] back to… [their] arms [her] arms the wound is one” (Slater 14). Slater’s use of dramatic tone and rhetoric in describing her history of mental health issues creates a sense of dramatic importance and emphasis on the mental health issues themselves. Through this self-identification, Slater shows how her past experiences with mental illness shaped her own perception of the world around her. Throughout the piece, Slater continually references her past experiences, both with her mother and with mental health, and uses a tone that conveys her fear and fragility in the position she currently inhabits. If Slater were not so stubbornly convinced that she was cured, the institution would likely be a trigger for her mental illness that she could not overcome. Slater has to constantly repeat that “[she is] not that girl any longer… [she] found some sort of way into recovery” (Slater 10) as she goes about her business, constantly fearing that she will regress or that she is not fully cured. It is Slater’s past that most completely defines her, and while she can believe that she has overcome it, the hysteria that she invokes whenever she hints that her past could still be lurking around the corner reveals that she is still living with the burden of her history every
In her patients, Slater sees “pain pain pain the patient brings [her] back to… [their] arms [her] arms the wound is one” (Slater 14). Slater’s use of dramatic tone and rhetoric in describing her history of mental health issues creates a sense of dramatic importance and emphasis on the mental health issues themselves. Through this self-identification, Slater shows how her past experiences with mental illness shaped her own perception of the world around her. Throughout the piece, Slater continually references her past experiences, both with her mother and with mental health, and uses a tone that conveys her fear and fragility in the position she currently inhabits. If Slater were not so stubbornly convinced that she was cured, the institution would likely be a trigger for her mental illness that she could not overcome. Slater has to constantly repeat that “[she is] not that girl any longer… [she] found some sort of way into recovery” (Slater 10) as she goes about her business, constantly fearing that she will regress or that she is not fully cured. It is Slater’s past that most completely defines her, and while she can believe that she has overcome it, the hysteria that she invokes whenever she hints that her past could still be lurking around the corner reveals that she is still living with the burden of her history every