Some part of me must have found this writing very, very—with a tremendous urge to hide under the covers and do nothing—dangerous: at one point, as I sat down at the computer, I had the eerie sensation that I needed to fasten my seatbelt. If "our body is an external mirroring of our internal state" (Promislow, 1998, p. 93), my state of mind seemed incredibly weak and frightened:

Remember that under stress we manifest all sorts of physiological changes that impact the brain/body and ease of movement.... Stuck stress-circuits put us on auto pilot with conditioned ways of responding that are ingrained and well myelinated, albeit less than desirable. (Promislow, 1988, p. 101)

Learning isn't a controversial subject, but abuse is. "Don't tell" is a message learned very thoroughly: Who wants to hear those things? Who would believe? Yet the telling is important. In Canada, 42 percent of females have experienced violence at the hands of a partner (Maclean's, October 13, 2003, p. 14).

There was no way for me to explain either the difficulty or the importance of my learning for my literacy work without explaining that I've also experienced violence. That meant writing about my own emotional and physical reactions to this learning. And I got sick, fried my computer, and generally needed a great boost in courage as well as an end goal in sight to accomplish it

Learning about Learning: An Excerpt from My Journal

Last night at church we were to learn how to make a rag rug. I had spent a couple of mornings ripping sheets into 1 ½" strips, sewing them together to form one continuous strip, then winding the whole thing into balls as though it was wool.

Found out how impatient I can become! My arms got sore, and I kept tearing off the short end instead of the long end. I had real trouble doing a mundane task that required me to pay attention to what I was doing. It was boring, it was tedious, my chatterbox brain wouldn't shut up, I became really frustrated...