The Anxiety Inscriptions

In this post, Lain Mathers reflects on zir experiences managing anxiety and graduate study.  Lain Mathers is a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Illinois Chicago and the Assistant Editor here at Write Where It Hurts.

It is mid-February as I begin writing this post. I am sitting in my apartment at my computer, my hands floating apprehensively above the keyboard. This is an odd sensation considering the fact that usually I type so intensely that the tiny plastic squares pop off of my laptop and onto the floor. I can feel the words I want to write just out of reach, curled up in the darker corners of my brain. I start to feel my chest tightening. “No, no not right now, please not right now,” I plead with my brain. We have a constant dialogue going, but as of late it’s taken on a significantly more dominant role in those dialogues. I’ve come to know this feeling. It’s like watching a tornado bellowing toward me while being fastened to the ground. As the tornado gets closer and closer, I eventually give in to the fact that I will be swept up in the debris of my own internal natural disaster.

At this point, generally, when I can feel a panic attack coming on, I resign to it. Over the past few months, I’ve learned just how neurological and out of my control those events are, and that trying to resist them (and largely failing to do so) leaves me feeling significantly more exhausted, disappointed, and angry than if I just allow myself to lean into them, tear apart a cardboard box or two, and then sit quietly on my couch and listen to Rilo Kiley, Neko Case, or The Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the calm after the storm.

See, I’ve known that I exhibit symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (or Generalized Anxiety Condition, as I prefer to call it, since I am working against the internalized and institutionalized stigma that the ways my brain operates means there is something inherently broken about me) for a while. I’ve had nervous ticks like compulsively picking at my skin since as early as I can remember. I can be thrown into a state of total disarray over a two-lined text message that I’m afraid someone other than the intended recipient will get a hold of. I’ve found large crowds overwhelming for a long time, and regularly get up two to three times throughout the night to make sure I’ve locked my doors (so that no one can get into my apartment) and unplugged all the kitchen appliances / blown out all the candles (so that a fire doesn’t start when I’m asleep). On my walks to school, I try to replay my morning routine to make sure I locked the doors and unplugged the appliances, and if I can’t remember I will often text message my roommate (if he is home) to make sure I did. If he is not home, it is not uncommon for me to turn around and walk back home to check (even if I am only a few blocks away from school). I have to get to the airport or train station at least three hours before my trips out of town because I am constantly terrified that some catastrophic event will happen that prevents me from getting where I’m supposed to be, and I am known to check the pockets in my jacket up to 15 times before leaving my house, sometimes one right after the other, to make sure I haven’t accidentally lost my wallet, keys, or cigarettes.

All of these are symptoms I’ve learned to manage over the years. For example, I just plan my travel accordingly; I allow an extra 30-45 minutes before I go to bed to check the locks and plugs. I say out loud to myself that I locked my door as I leave my house in the morning so when I run over my morning routine repeatedly on my way to school, my own verbal affirmation to myself will be part of that narrative. And, historically, when I would get the occasional panic attack (every couple of weeks or months), I would allow myself to just experience them and make sure to try to get as much sleep as possible and drink lots of water.

Writing has also been a huge part of my anxiety management. For the past 14 years, I have been writing regularly in a journal. Presently, I am in my 94th book, and have no plans of stopping any time soon. Since I was old enough to hold a pen writing has been the place where I can document the conversations I am constantly having with my brain about all of the things I need to be worrying about or else something terrible will happen. Putting them down on paper both makes them feel real and also like something I don’t have to carry around in my head anymore (it can get quite crowded in there). Writing is the place I go during panic attacks when nothing makes sense and I can’t even really form complete sentences, yet something about the feeling of pen on paper keeps me anchored to this world. Writing is, without a doubt, my most significant and important survival strategy when it comes to my mental health.

So what do I do when I can’t write through the anxiety? For those of us that find a deep comfort in writing, the inability to do it is incredibly destabilizing and painful. Recently, I had to confront this question in a wholly unsettling manner.

For people who live with chronic mental health conditions and/or trauma, we know that triggers can pop up and derail our routines for hours, days, weeks, even months. We also know that triggers can come in the most unexpected contexts and magnitudes. So, just because one is perhaps prepared to handle a situation that has previously triggered them doesn’t mean they’ll be able to negotiate a totally new trigger with as much familiarity.

So, when my understanding of my life was recently upset by conditions entirely outside of my control, and unlike any trigger I’ve previously experienced, I began having panic attacks on a daily basis. Not only did they start occurring more frequently, but also at unexpected times compared to when they’ve previously boiled to the surface. By this point, though, I had convinced myself that writing was all I needed to settle the rush of chemicals in my brain. “Just write it out, Lain, you’ve done this hundreds of times before.” Yet when I sat down to put the chaotic words on paper nothing flowed. I was in a state of mental and emotional quicksand, sinking faster than I could get my words to secure me to this world.

This was even more unsettling because writing is not something I just do for personal pleasure or comfort anymore, it is part of my livelihood. I began to tell myself elaborate stories about how I will never be able to write again and my career as a sociologist is doomed to failure. I walked nervously around my apartment, screamed into pillows, ripped apart cardboard boxes, and smoked countless cigarettes to try and dilute the quicksand feeling but nothing worked. It was in this moment that my brain and I began to have a serious conversation and one unlike any talk we’ve had before.

“Maybe you should talk to someone, Lain. Maybe you really need that.”

“No, brain, I can manage this. You’re just really fucking with me right now. It’ll pass.”

“Will it?”

“It has to.”

“How do you know? Maybe you’re just like this forever. Maybe I’ll never stop.”

“Maybe I should talk to someone.”

“Should you, though? How do you know it will help anything?”

“I don’t.”

Before making an appointment with a therapist, I held my journal and a pen in my hand, so desperately hopeful that I would have some kind of breakthrough by just acknowledging that my mental condition is real, that this experience is out of my control (despite how much control I like to believe I have over it). Nothing. So, I made the appointment and had a flurry of panic shortly after doing so.

Over the past few months, I’ve started more openly acknowledging that I not only live with generalized anxiety everyday, but also that it profoundly influences my life in ways I never expected it would. I am continually learning that maintaining anxiety management strategies, such as writing, is one important component in a large equation of other management mechanisms, such as (for me) therapy, medication, painting, supportive friends and loved ones, and plenty of alone time. I am still learning to overcome the stigma associated with chronic mental health conditions (especially one like anxiety, that many people don’t believe to be real), and the path to figuring all of this out certainly defies the American ideal of a linear progress narrative.

Yet, here I am, in late March, sitting at a café finishing this essay that you are presently reading to the sound of Rilo Kiley’s song, “A Better Son or Daughter” and occasionally picking up the “I” and the “O” keys off the floor. The routine of bending over every seven or so minutes to fetch the tiny, plastic, lettered squares off the ground is a welcome reminder that I am still here, anxiety and all.

Recovering from Graduate School: Rewriting the Trauma Narrative

Eric Anthony Grollman (@grollman) is a Black queer feminist sociologist and intellectual activist; they are an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Richmond. They are the founder and editor of the blog, Conditionally Accepted, which recently became a regular career advice column on Inside Higher Ed.  In this post, Dr. Grollman reflects on negotiating and making sense of trauma related to graduate education. 

“What’s the deal with this PTDS book,” my parents asked when they last visited me. Common understandings of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – the mental scars that soldiers, survivors of sexual violence and childhood abuse carry – certainly don’t call to mind any aspect of my life. My parents even sat through my talk on intellectual activism at the 2015 Conference of Ford Fellows, in which I attempted to identify the structural and cultural factors of graduate school that inevitably led me to be traumatized by my graduate training. But, maybe they assumed I was using the term “trauma” to be provocative or dramatic. With some embarrassment, I had to explain that I was, indeed traumatized by grad school, experiencing the symptoms of complex trauma, which is not (yet) officially classified in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual (the major psychiatric guide for mental disorders in the US).

When my therapist pointed out the trauma – really only repeating back to me comments I had made just moments before about being traumatized – I also resisted. Seriously, who gets traumatized by educational training? I wasn’t physically attacked, I was not raped or sexually assaulted, and I did not endure torture or extreme warfare. Coursework, a qualifying exam, a master’s thesis, a dissertation, and some teaching experience – these, on the surface, are about equipping me with the skills necessary to become an independent scholar, the skills necessary to obtain a PhD and, ideally, a tenure-track job. To help me to begin to see the trauma, my therapist encouraged me to write a trauma narrative.

So, I took some time to write down every challenging, offensive, and potentially traumatizing event or condition that I could draw from my memory. In the midst of writing about one memory, I would have to make a note to write about another that came to mind. “Oh, how could I forget about that!” I thought several times in this process. In the end, I had nearly filled a 70-page spiral notebook with such memories. When I flipped through the notebook, I asked myself, “who wouldn’t be traumatized by all of this?” Guilty of being an academic geek, I took the time to identify some common themes: 1) repeated exposure to and witnessing of microaggressions, stereotypes, and discrimination; 2) devaluing of my research interests, in particular, work on my own communities (i.e., people of color, LGBTQ people, and, especially, LGBTQ people of color); 3) the undermining of my career choices, namely eventually becoming a professor at a liberal arts college; and, 4) an explicit attempt to “beat the activist” out of me through the graduate training.

I have continued to work through my therapist to begin to recover from the trauma. The initial and, it seems, hardest step has been to name the trauma. It has taken some time to stop denying that grad school could be so bad, that I was somehow too weak to survive traumatizing circumstances, or that it is my fault for not leaving at the first sign of trauma. I, like most others, would never expect trauma to be one of the outcomes of graduate training. So, blaming myself or denying the trauma doesn’t help.

Once my therapist and I opened that door, I began to grow impatient. Now what? I wanted some sort of homework to do outside of therapy sessions, though I learned that was not my therapist’s approach. So, I looked into buying workbooks that I could do on my own. Unsurprisingly, most that are out there focus on what my therapist calls “big T Trauma”: sexual violence; war; child abuse; being robbed; having your house burn down; and, natural disasters. My own struggle with complex trauma – “little t trauma” – is the result of prolonged trauma that is interpersonal in nature, and likely occurred at a key developmental period (early adulthood, in my case). Since it is not included in the DSM, there are few workbooks that even mention it, let alone offer resources to help recover from it. But, I eventually found one that does: The PTSD Workbook (second edition), by Mary Beth Williams and Soili Poijula.

I’m not as far as I’d like to be into the workbook, but I find that digging into traumatizing experiences is not something I care to do daily. But, so far it has been helpful to address it head on. Recently, I completed one of the exercises in which they instruct readers to “[t]hink of another person who has gone through a similar event. Knowing now what most helped you survive, what would you say to that other person?” I don’t think that I followed the instructions, but I ended up reflecting on something much more powerful. I ended up rewriting my trauma narrative, albeit an abbreviated version.

Rewriting the Trauma Narrative

Let me give some context. In the process of naming the trauma, I have closed my memory around all that was taken away from me in the process of completing my PhD and obtaining my current tenure-track position. I entered my PhD program in sociology as an activist with a desire to study racism in queer communities using qualitative methods. I figured sociology would be more likely to open doors to gender studies, sexuality studies, and even student affairs than the other ways around. A desired joint PhD with gender studies was discouraged. A desired graduate minor in either sexuality research or gender studies was discouraged. An intended dissertation in trans health was discouraged. I also learned to self-police my interests; for example, I selected a qualifying exam in social psychology rather than gender, sexualities, or race/gender/class/sexualities. I left graduate school with a PhD, trauma, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, a cute boyfriend, expertise in medical sociology using quantitative methods, and an acute awareness that I must hide any activist work or community service. The 28-year-old me was hardly an older and wiser reflection of the 22-year-old me.

That is, in my efforts to identify just how traumatizing graduate school was, I have focused almost exclusively on the negatives – what I have lost, what I compromised, what dreams have been dashed for the sake of job security. This has been a necessary step for me to stop denying how bad grad school was and blaming myself for the trauma. But, the unintended consequences of this focus is that I have lost sight of the ways in which I did survive and thrive, pursued my dreams and values, among other positive highlights of those six years. A while ago, I tried to write a positive-focused complement to the trauma narrative, and only came up with missing the excellent restaurants in Bloomington, IN and the friends that I made there. I also met my now-fiancé there, who moved to Richmond, VA with me. And, my excellent training – despite the compromises I made – opened a number of doors in terms of jobs and professional networks. So, hey – at least I don’t regret my time there. But, that effort felt like settling for an otherwise traumatic experience.

So, back to the prompt from The PTSD Workbook. I began my answer to the question about what I would advise to others, presumably to prevent being traumatized, with: “In the thick of [grad school], I attempted to maintain activities, relationships, and projects that were not valued by my program, but that fed my spirit nonetheless.” From there, I listed example after example of the things in which I was involved during my time in graduate school. Contrary to the sentiment that I left graduate school anything but a sexuality scholar, I identified plenty of examples of the ways in which I clearly demonstrate active involvement in this subfield. I published two articles on sexualities that were co-authored with people outside of my university; in fact, my advisors only became aware of these papers upon noticing them on my CV. I also started one on trans health late in grad school, which was finally published in September 2015. As the founder of the short-lived Campus Coalition for Sexual Literacy – an initiative through the Center for Research and Education on Gender and Sexuality as UCSF – I organized a few events to promote sexual literacy on campus, including a conference on transdisciplinary approaches to sexuality research. I attended a few conferences and workshops in the field of sexualities. And, I also was involved in service on campus and in the community that promoted community-building for LGBTQ people, as well as healthy relationships in the queer community. I could go on…

In essence, I rewrote my trauma narrative. In this narrative, I didn’t sell out, I didn’t allow others to dictate my career, and I wasn’t powerless. Rather, this was a narrative about pushing back against mainstream expectations in sociology to build my career as a scholar-activist whose work focuses primarily on sexualities. This narrative allows me to recall ways in which I defined my career for myself, with necessary compromises along the way. Would the trauma have been worse if it weren’t for feeding my soul with sexualities work and activism? Or, was the trauma the result of defying mainstream expectations in sociology by pursuing such work? I’m not certain at this point, and cannot actually say what could have been. But, I’m in a better position to say what actually was. Yes, I was traumatized; but I was no passive victim.

I hope through speaking openly about the trauma, about the efforts to “beat the activist” out of me, and the training that attempted to steer me away from studying my own communities to make it easier for current and future marginalized grad students to weather the challenging circumstances of grad school.

 

Our Peers, Ourselves: Introspective Tips for Insightful Reviews

This week’s post is the final in a four part series where Xan and J share experience and tips managing academic publication and reviewing.  In this post, Xan provides tips for being a good reviewer.

Hello readers! Xan here again for our second of two posts on peer review. Last week I shared my thoughts on how peer review often goes wrong, as well as some general discussion on how it can go entirely right. This week, I’m following up with specific strategies to help you write awesome peer reviews that will support your fellow scholars in doing great work while also building your reputation as a professional.

Becoming a great peer reviewer is first and foremost about finding meaningful ways to connect with and support your fellow scholars when you can’t show your face or tell them your name. To do this effectively requires remembering one thing first and foremost, which brings me to my first suggestion to help you become the best reviewer you can be.

  1. Remember that today’s peer reviewers are tomorrow’s authors…and vice versa.

We all dream of receiving kind, thoughtful reviews that help us get to the top of our game as writers and thinkers. We can also probably point to at least a few examples from our careers where reviewers did exactly that, regardless of what the journal editor’s final decision was. Those reviews are the real game-changers, yet they are unnecessarily rare. It’s easier to write a thoughtful and constructive review—especially in cases where you have serious concerns about the methods or findings in a paper—if you remember that the authors truly are your peers. It’s easier still if you stop to think that tomorrow the tables may turn, and the same people might be reviewing one of your own papers. Model your reviews after the kind of feedback you yourself wish to receive!

  1. Read every word of the manuscript with care and consideration.

In academia as well as the applied world, we are often required to read and digest huge amounts of text in small amounts of time. This is a great skill to have, but there are some specific ways to apply it that will help you get the most out of a first manuscript reading so that you can write a really dynamite review. Ordinarily I am the supreme overlord of reading electronically, but I never do this for a peer review. Why? Reading in hard copy helps me to savor every word of the manuscript as if I were reading a favorite poem, and to think about all the ways in which I could possibly interpret each phrase.  This is crucial to writing excellent peer reviews, not only because it gives you a phenomenally solid grasp of the manuscript content, but also because it makes giving authors the benefit of the doubt much easier. How many times have you received a review in which you were asked to do something that you’d already done quite explicitly in your first draft—or worse, attacked for not doing that thing? Don’t be that reviewer. Instead, be the reviewer whose comments are accurate and precise. Editors and authors alike will appreciate your efforts!

  1. Take good notes and save them until a final decision on the manuscript has been provided.

To help you make those accurate and precise comments that will get you to the top of your reviewing game, take concise but thorough notes in line with the text that you can then use to write a point-by-point review. I suggest coding these notes with symbols that tell you where in the review to incorporate each piece of feedback.   Your specific system will vary depending on the precise structure you prefer for your reviews, but most editors will suggest that you offer some distinction between major issues with the manuscript and minor points for improvement.

  1. Consider that something being new or different doesn’t automatically make it wrong.

To be clear, major issues are things like conclusions that aren’t supported by the data, unclear relationships between the literature cited in the “front matter” and the content of the later sections, or weaknesses in the research methods that fundamentally call the findings into question. Some things that are *not* major issues include: need for English-language editing services, typographical or grammatical errors, unconventional choices of pronouns or identity labels, etc. Reviews often become a hotbed for microaggressions towards people who differ from ourselves in one or more ways. It’s much easier to keep the focus on the content when you take careful, detailed notes about why you think something is an issue and what you’d suggest the authors do about it. In cases where there really is a serious issue with the research, it’s also much easier to back up your concerns when you have a detailed record of your thinking.

  1. When you feel tempted to pass judgment on something, ask a question instead.

In my experience as a reviewer, for every paper with such severe flaws as to suggest problematic motives on the part of the authors, there have been numerous others with shortcomings owing more to clarity of expression or thoroughness of explanation than to conflicts of interest. When reviewing a paper that raises “red flags” in your mind, think about how you would want a fellow scholar to respond if they had similar concerns about your own work. Would you want them to eviscerate you on the spot for the possibility of your work not being honest, or would you want them to ask thoughtful questions and encourage you to share the facts before passing judgment? Give your authors enough rope to hang themselves. In most cases, you’ll find that said rope quickly becomes a lifeline that can rescue a sinking argument. And if you still have questions after the final version of a paper appears in print, why not write a thoughtful letter to the editor in response, and net yourself an additional publication while promoting constructive scholarly dialogue?

  1. If you make a suggestion, substantiate it with specific strategies and helpful resources.

I don’t know about all of you, but I love those reviews where someone suggests a change and then offers a citation or two to help me make it. That’s a great way to get yourself noticed as a constructive reviewer, and to make a great impact on the final published research. Humans are remarkably like other creatures in that if we can see a path of least resistance, we are likely to take it and do so gladly. Offer your authors a clear path to greatness and encourage them to follow it! To frame your comments, think about the most helpful and encouraging feedback you received from your mentors in school, whether at the undergraduate or graduate level, and try to emulate that. Point out the precise reasons for which a specific item needs improvement, articulate a concrete strategy for making those improvements, and affirm that the end product will be stronger for the authors’ efforts in implementing your feedback.

  1. Know that being a great reviewer means both speaking thoughtfully and listening attentively.

As reviewers and as writers, we are stronger together than we are individually, especially when we take the time to look out for one another as we do for ourselves. This means not only sharing our own ideas, but also taking the time to consider the insights and perspectives of others whose experiences and contexts may differ substantially from our own. So I’ll put my money where my writing is and turn the floor over to our readers. What tips do all of you have for writing spectacular peer reviews? What lessons have you learned during your time as a peer reviewer that you’d like to pass along to others?

We encourage all of you to share your experiences in the comments—let’s make this one of those supposedly rare Internet postings where it actually *is* a good idea to read the comments—and spread that wisdom around to your colleagues. Writing Where It Hurts about your experiences with peer review makes it easier for all of us to review where it helps!

Doc Eat Doc World? Thinking Differently About Peer Review

This week’s post is the third in a four part series where Xan and J share experience and tips managing academic publication and reviewing.  In this post, Xan discusses the elements of being a good reviewer and some ways to capitalize on reviewing opportunities in terms of careers and networks.

Hello readers, Xan here! Over the last couple weeks, we got some great tips from J on how to publish a whole bunch – see here and here. This week, I’m offering some insights on sitting at that other side of the publishing table: being a reviewer! I’ll follow up this first post next week with my own top tips for writing awesome peer reviews, and building your reputation as a scholar in the process.

Writing peer reviews is a great way to support your fellow scholars and have a hand in getting good research published. There’s a lot of good research floating around out there in peer review, so this is a very important task! Serving as a peer reviewer also provides you with the opportunity to strengthen manuscripts that are merely okay with suggestions that help the authors make them truly great.

It also certainly doesn’t hurt that writing peer reviews for a diverse array of journals looks great on your CV. If you’re Writing Where It Hurts on the regular by doing scholarship and outreach on controversial topics, or if you occupy a marginalized social location within academia, or if you just want that promotion so badly you can taste it, writing awesome peer reviews can help you get there! Being a peer reviewer helps you to shine not only by diversifying your record of professional service, but also by increasing your own chances of publishing in the journals of your choice.

As J pointed out earlier this fall, publishing a lot is very much about building strong relationships with editors at your target journals. Offering your services as a peer reviewer and writing thoughtful, constructive reviews is a wonderful way to accomplish this. There are certainly others, of course, but being a dependable and affirming peer reviewer is one of the best.

Editors absolutely do take notice of the content and quality of reviews you submit. And if you’re writing good ones, odds are you’ll receive more than a few emails from editors expressing gratitude for your excellent work, and urging you to submit your own work to that journal. Here at Write Where It Hurts, we get a lot of these emails, and we’d like to spread that good fortune around to as many people as possible.

Making an editor’s day with a really excellent manuscript review hardly requires a doctoral degree—indeed, it’s something all of you readers can do even if you are still in graduate school. Writing good reviews isn’t about the particular credentials you hold, but rather the critical thinking skills and spirit of curiosity you brought with you upon matriculation.

Of course, if you’re in graduate school right now, you’re probably also hearing a fair few horror stories about the peer review process. We all have them, and if you’re looking to publish a lot, your best bet is to treat them like literal horror stories—i.e., macabre entertainment. A certain neuroscientist whom I admire greatly once regaled me with tales of how a peer reviewer told her that her manuscript “should really be two papers, neither of which should be published”. She went on to publish the paper in another top journal.

J has given you plenty of excellent ideas for turning garbage into gold when receiving spiteful or just plain incoherent peer reviews. I’ll give you my own detailed perspectives later on how to write a truly golden review, even in those cases where you may think that a paper is absolute garbage. I have had this thought precisely once in the course of many years as a peer reviewer, and approached reviewing it from the perspective of coaching the research team in salvaging the paper if at all possible. The review earned me lengthy accolades from the journal’s editor, who in turn strongly encouraged the authors to incorporate my feedback for future submissions.

So I speak from experience in saying that the secret to writing good peer reviews is first and foremost to remember that we are all in this together. Although our perspectives as scholars may differ dramatically at times, we are ultimately part of a shared community of learners and teachers. We do our best work as members of this community when we remember that we do not stand in it alone, and that anonymity does not equate to null consequences for our own behavior. Even anonymity itself is a fantasy, of course. While the authors may never know who wrote that petty and vitriolic review, the editors certainly do, and they will remember.

Perhaps the more important question here, though, is why anyone would *want* to hit their fellow scholars below the belt in the first place. It’s a question I can’t answer with a high amount confidence because the correct response likely varies by individual, but I can certainly make some educated guesses. The hateful peer reviewer is academia’s equivalent of the Internet troll, a person whose only socially acceptable outlet for rage, which likely owes to a fair amount of perceived marginalization in their own life, is ranting into the abyss.

I suspect every person reading this article has experienced marginalization on at least one occasion in their life, and in turn entered a sort of “sneaky hate spiral” in which they eventually lose their composure and all semblance of social graces over a seemingly innocuous exchange. I’ve been there myself, and look back with a mixture of regret and empathy at those times where I’ve chewed out a customer service representative or scathingly silenced a grocery bagger for asking one too many questions about my personal life.

But likewise, I’ve tried to use those moments as an opportunity to understand what makes us find so much satisfaction in cutting down someone who has no power over us in the first place—and to use them as a means of connecting meaningfully with them and others afterwards. Beyond the world of academia, this has led me not only to apologize on the spot if I’ve snapped at someone, but also to explain what led me to do so. Without fail, the other person has responded with appreciation and compassion.

So what if we could do the same as peer reviewers—or better yet, simply jump ahead to the territory of sharing and connectedness? In my experience, we can and sometimes do…and it’s easier than we might think. Tune in next week for some tips on bridging the gap between criticism and critique by exploring our own thoughts as we examine those of others.

Adventures in Publishing Volume 1

This post is the first in a four part series wherein J and Xan outline some tips and lessons concerning publishing and reviewing they have picked up over the years.  In the first two posts, J outlines 5 lessons learned about publishing journal articles over the 4 years since submitting zir first manuscript to a journal.  Next week, J will outline 5 more lessons from these experiences, and then the following two weeks Xan will offer tips and lessons about being a good reviewer for journals and the ways this may help one’s overall publishing and other career-related experience.  

Every year, I attend conferences and come into contact with graduate students seeking to find answers to a multitude of questions concerning publishing and other aspects of academic careers. As I often do in such cases, I wanted to use this post (the first of two on the subject) to share some lessons I have learned about publishing in academic journals over the years just in case it may be helpful to emerging scholars navigating these activities. I do not mean to claim my experience is in any way exhaustive or some kind of ideal approach, but I realize (if for no other reason than the number of graduate students that seek me out each year) that such information may be useful to many people.  I further admit that many people may disagree with my own approach and the lessons I have learned so far, and I think that is quite fine – my goal here is to offer what I have learned and experienced in hopes of helping others, and I would suggest others simply do the same if they see things differently.

To this end, I offer the following lessons I have learned in the 4 years since I submitted my first manuscript to an academic journal. Considering that I have since published 19 journal articles, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the journal article process, and so I hope to share some insights from behind the scenes while recognizing that many other people likely approach things both the same way I do and much differently in practice. In this post, I offer 5 lessons learned, and in the next post (Volume 2 forthcoming) I will offer 5 more.

Lesson 1: Publishing journal articles is something one learns by doing.

If you walk through any conference or graduate program I have come across so far, you are likely to be able to find lots of advice about how one should go about publishing, but best I can tell most of such advice is not all that useful in practice. I say this as someone who was lucky enough to have mentors that answered any question and provided examples along the way.  What I learned, however, is that the process itself is simply one that takes practice. I cannot tell you how I know when a paper is ready to go out for review or which reviewers to agree with or disagree with because these are ongoing processes of interpretation I have simply picked up with practice over time. I can tell you that such practice is very important, and thus I encourage you to spend at least as much time submitting your work as you do asking others how you should go about submitting work.

Lesson 2: The people who publish the most generally are those who submit the most.

It may be comforting to believe in meritocracy or other ideal scenarios where the cream rises to the top no matter what in academic work and beyond, but realistically everyone I know (self included) that other people say “wow they publish a lot” or “how are you so productive” has a ton of rejections to go with those publications and always has something in the pipeline (if not ten somethings, hell I have 20 at various stages of review as I type this and I know of two colleagues that have more than that in the pipeline right now). To get published, you have to write and you have to submit. I was granted this advice by a scholar I met while in graduate school who, to quote a senior scholar at the time, “published a ton,” and their advice was simply – “if you want to publish a lot, you have to submit a lot, get rejected a lot, and keep submitting – it’s a numbers game like any other, the more chances you get the more times you’ll score a publication.” I can thus tell you that no matter how much (or how little) you workshop, present, or otherwise agonize over your papers, in the end what will matter is how many of them go out for review and how willing you are to keep submitting them (with adjustments along the way) following rejections. Like any other game, you have to play to have a chance.

Lesson 3: Publishing journal articles is about rejection.

Everyone I know that actually enjoys the publication process (as opposed to worrying about it, fearing it, and / or stressing about it) expects every paper they submit to get rejected – period, no exceptions. I say this as someone who has already had 2 papers get conditionally accepted on first submission and as someone who has published a lot – I assume each thing I submit will get rejected and I look forward to getting the rejection, disagreeing with the reviewers, and one day celebrating when I can say (no matter how accurate or inaccurate) “see they were wrong” when another journal wants the piece. I do not expect to get accepted, and thus each time this happens feels like a damn holiday and miracle. The rejections hurt (they suck), but like any other pain, it stings less if you are expecting it from the start instead of hoping for something that you do not get. I thus treat submissions like a game – I throw the pass or accept the dare or spin the bottle assuming it won’t go well so I can dance and sing when it occasionally works out great. I also never developed a “thick skin” as some professors suggest – rather I curse, scream, cry or whatever I feel about every rejection and use that emotion (or pain) as motivation to keep going (i.e., I’ll show them!!!) with the paper in question. I would thus say think of it like this you have nothing to lose since they’re going to reject you anyway so why not give it a shot.

Lesson 4: Publishing journal articles is about patience.

When submitting an article to this or that journal, there is no way to know how long it will take to get a decision. Almost every journal says they do things in x or y time period, but in reality these are averages at best or ideal guesses at worst from what I can tell. The shortest turn around from submission to decision I have experienced so far was 1 month, and the longest was 13 months. I have also experienced everything in between these two extremes. When you submit something, my advice is to forget about it the best you can and work on something else. Watching the pot will not likely do you any good at all, and may increase any anxiety you experience in relation to publishing or submitting in general from what I’ve seen.

Lesson 5: Publishing journal articles is about editor shopping.    

I know the standard marketing slogan, sermon or whatever you want to call it that damn near everyone repeats constantly – “the best papers get published here,” “this journal will get you good reviews,” “your paper is a perfect fit for this journal,” and “if you get good reviews you’ll get published” to name just a few. This is all “wishful thinking” best I can tell because the reality is – as many of my mentors and colleagues have expressed and I have experienced – that all you’re doing when you submit a paper is waiting to see if a given editor wants that paper. Some examples may help de-mystify this statement for those of you who might still cling desperately to beliefs about merit and objectivity in publishing:

  1. I think of the time an Editor rejected a paper of mine because they wrote “they did not believe in qualitative methods,” which kind of automatically meant the merit of any qualitative work would not matter because they did not believe in the work in the first place. This was after the paper had gotten all positive reviews during both rounds (yes I said both, initial and R&R rounds) of review.
  2. I think of the time an Editor rejected a paper of mine because they wrote I had “published too much” in that journal recently, which simply ignored the 3 glowing positive reviews the piece got (i.e., merits) in favor of journal politics and desires.
  3. I think of the (too many to count to date) times I have received rejections at various journals only to realize I got 3, 4, and even 5 glowing positive reviews with statements like “This is the most innovative piece I’ve seen in x field” or “This could be a major contribution to the discipline.” In such cases, editor taste trumps the merit documented by reviewers. In fact, a colleague and I have a running joke that if someone calls our work “innovative” or “original” we know we’re going to get rejected (unless we go to a small niche journal or a brand new journal where they appear to be more open to NEW ideas in my experience) because the last thing any editor at a well known journal seems to want is something innovative or original.
  4. I think of the many times (at least a dozen or so) where reviewers have slaughtered a piece (i.e., they hated it – I even had one write they hated it) by giving it the worst reviews I could imagine only to get a glowing R&R from an editor who apparently liked the piece. Once again (though more positive for the writer) the editor’s taste trumped the merit established (or denied in such cases) by the reviewers.

Sadly, I could give plenty more examples of these experiences, but the end point remains the same – publishing is about finding the editor that wants the piece and merit doesn’t matter unless the editor says it has merit. You have to keep in mind that editors are people with their own biases, assumptions, perspectives, tastes, agendas, etc, and they can (and do) ignore the reviewers (positive or negative) regularly. You can love this or hate this, but in either case, this is the process so you will need to learn to accept it. If your paper is great according to your colleagues and / or the reviewers, but an editor doesn’t want it, it will not get published at that journal. If your paper is horrible according to your colleagues and / or reviewers, but an editor does want it, you will get published at that journal. In the end, the process is about editor shopping because in the end editors decide what has merit and what does not. As a result, you can spend years trying to get your writing group, advisor, friend, magical creature, pen pal or whoever to like it, but in the end unless they are the editor of the journal you choose it won’t matter all that much.

I hope these 5 lessons are useful to readers, and I encourage debate and discussion of them here on the blog since I know from experience people view publishing processes differently. In the next post, I will offer 5 more lessons learned that build on these 5 so until then I wish you well in your own adventures in publishing.

What does teaching feel like?

In this post, J. Sumerau asks us to consider and reflect upon what teaching feels like and how such feelings may vary and / or be illustrative in relation to different people, approaches, and social locations.

This week I experience one of my favorite times of the year – the beginning of classes for a new academic year. As I walk to and through campus, all the signs are there that a new year has begun. Some of the students are excited, others are nervous, and still more seem just plain lost as they look around for some kind of guidance. Some of the faculty are bouncing around with glee, others appear annoyed beyond belief, and still more are arguing about parking. I always experience a mixture of fear and exhilaration personally, which I figured I’d write about for a bit since it makes me wonder about variations in how teaching feels for different people.

In terms of fear, I find myself locking up – physically, emotionally, and even mentally – this time of year with anxiety about the fact that I must talk to and deal with people constantly from this point forward after a summer usually spent mostly in isolation – or as some friends say “hiding in my cave.” While my students rarely believe it until they see me outside of school, I’m not very social and interpersonal interactions are often very difficult for me to navigate so when I’m able to I simply avoid interacting with people (I prefer to watch them from a distance so to speak as I roam around cities alone listening to random conversations and / or whatever records I’m interested in at the moment). There may be nothing more awkward in my daily or normal routines than the thought of speaking to a room full of people and / or making small talk in a given hallway, and yet these are two of the most common elements of my occupational experience.

Companions who understand this about me sometimes express surprise that I love teaching as a way to make a living and spend my time. The answer lies in the other side of the coin – constantly doing something terrifying is in many ways exhilarating and never boring for me. My life – especially the parts that require human interaction and communication not accomplished via typing – feels like a constant adventure, a kind of boxing match between my fear of people and my desire not to be ruled by fear. While I have friends who spend days and hours deciding exactly what to say and do in classes, I almost never have any clue which of twenty or more outlined directions any given class might go. If I try to be more specific than that – as I learned by trying to do so in graduate school – I lock up, have a panic attack, and can’t speak. For whatever reason, deciding exactly what to say ahead of time creates more anxiety because I then worry about going off script or forgetting something important so – in much the same way I approach presentations at conferences – I instead come up with a bunch of different possible scenarios and then read my audience for cues as to what might be fun and useful (i.e., the same way I navigate interpersonal interactions outside the classroom).

If there is anything I have learned over the years, it is that there may be an unlimited amount of ways to teach well, experience classrooms, and manage the self and the class in educational endeavors. From the colleague I know that designs a specific game for each concept to the colleague I know that maps out every possible student response so ze has an example and / or resource ready at hand at all times, people prepare and experience classrooms in a wide variety of ways. From the colleague that giggles whenever anyone says “course prep” because ze does not do any of that “boring stuff” and instead uses improv experience to run classrooms based on topics ze already knows well to the colleague who spends the entire summer preparing detailed and sophisticated lectures with graphs and charts because the structure eases their own anxiety about talking in public, the spectrum of possible approaches suggests – and I admit I’ve benefited from personally thanks to countless conversations with others on the matter – a wealth of information to be found sharing teaching approaches, experiences, and styles with one another.

These simple observations about the experience of and approaches to teaching lead me to wonder how others experience these dynamics. While rarely mentioned or written about (that I have seen) aside from social media posts here and there and online groups where teachers share frustrations and celebrations during the year, the way it feels to teach is likely a fascinating topic and would likely reveal a lot about the ways educators navigate the world and their lives within it. As I continue enjoying the fear and exhilaration of my own latest week one, I thus ask us all to reflect on what it feels like to teach and what lessons we could learn about teaching and ourselves from such reflection.

Teaching Where It Hurts

In this post, Xan Nowakowski and J. Sumerau reflect on their experiences personalizing sociology in the classroom (see their recently published Teaching Sociology article on this topic here) in hopes of facilitating dialogue and debate about the benefits and limitations of incorporating professor biographies into sociological curricula.

As people who write about, teach, study, and engage in advocacy related to chronic health conditions, social inequalities, sexual and gender experiences and identities, and managing trauma, we have become intimately aware of the potential personal experience and stories can have for facilitating learning and motivating concrete action among our students, colleagues, and communities. At the same time, we know all too well that structural factors regularly limit who can say what in classrooms in much the same way they do beyond the academy, and that academic traditions have long privileged rational or remote notions of instruction over emotional and personalized approaches. As we did in our recently published Teaching Sociology article, we would like to encourage our colleagues to consider these options and structural patterns in hopes of spurring dialogue about the potential of using our own experiences within inequitable structures to help students and colleagues see the pain created by social inequalities on a more personal level.

As we did with the establishment of ongoing conference sessions, an upcoming book project, and the creation of this site, our focus here lies in the potential of writing (or researching, teaching and advocating) where it hurts. When Xan shares stories of almost dying or struggles with doctors and other medical professionals unfamiliar with what to do to treat their chronic physical health conditions, for example, students come face to face with the results of our flawed healthcare system in the midst of their own lives and worldviews. Likewise, when J. shares stories of being physically assaulted for daring to go on a date with a cute boy or watching a lover die amidst both caring and supportive and judgmental and hateful medical professionals, students witness the concrete tears, pain, and sorrow that come from experiences within interlocking systems of inequality embedded throughout our society. In these and many other cases, we utilize our own pain to pull social inequality out of the abstract and into the actual lived experiences of the students and colleagues who interact with us.

As we advocate in our recent article and practice in our own classes and on this site, we seek to personalize social inequalities for our students. Rather than things they read or hear about in class that happen somewhere “out there” unseen to them, we use our own experience and narratives shared by other people occupying marginalized positions or experiencing traumatic events to translate “out there” into personal realities with actual faces, personalities, voices, and bodies in the eyes of students and colleagues. In fact, both students and colleagues regularly experience their own organic emotional reactions to social patterns in the process, and tend to very quickly make the link that if it could happen to “their professor” then it could happen to “them” or “their loved ones” as well. Not surprisingly, such realizations very quickly transform societal patterns of inequality into anything but abstract concepts. As a result, our willingness to talk about the pain or teach where it hurts often translates into incredibly passionate and engaged rooms full of students especially willing to discuss and consider concrete steps they can take toward more positive social relations.

As we note in our recent article, we developed these approaches – individually and collectively – over time by building the entirety of our class offerings around discussion, consent, and application of scholarly materials to personal experience. In terms of discussion, for example, our courses are organized – from the first to the last day – around personal or collected emotional narratives that we share with students in relation to each course reading and topic. In so doing, we ritualize personal narratives within the class so students become accustomed to this form of interaction and dialogue throughout the course. Likewise, our courses are built upon an emphasis on consent wherein students are never required to disclose their own personal experiences or use ours in their work, but they are allowed to do both of these things on any assignment or in any class meeting where such things are relevant to the given assignment or class topic or assigned material. We thus remove grading from the equation by giving students ample resources to do just as well in the class no matter their experience and / or interpretation of the personal content we or other students share. Finally, we strategically link every scholarly piece or activity in a given class to specific personalized examples so students are able to always see the real world (or applied) aspects of the materials we cover in their own lives, in our lives, and / or in the lives of other people. Our experiences – as well as some initial negative experiences others have had when first attempting styles like our own without these ingredients – tell us these (and maybe other) efforts to create classrooms where students get used to and feel safe with vulnerability may be essential ingredients in personalizing instruction.

With all this information in mind, we invite dialogue, commentary and discussion on the possibility of personalizing scholarly work through teaching and other methods. Whether one seeks to join this conversation on this site or in relation to our call in Teaching Sociology or in any other space, we invite and appreciate other educator’s perspectives on these matters. To this end, ask yourself what ways you do or could personalize sociology? What might be the benefits or limitations of doing so? What institutional and structural steps might we need to take to serve and protect those who share their pain in the service of education and advocacy by and for their students and other colleagues? While we will not pretend to have some “right” or “absolute” answers to these questions, our experiences to date within and beyond classrooms tell us these questions might be incredibly important and useful in many ways.

When it won’t go away – on managing chronic conditions in the academy

An important part of the initiation of Write Where It Hurts came from Xan Nowakowski and J. Sumerau’s experiences collaboratively managing chronic conditions in relation to their professional and personal relationships.  Building on Xan’s previous post in this area, in this post J. Sumerau reflects on aspects of managing chronic mental and physical health conditions in hopes of facilitating dialogue about these issues within and beyond the academy.

Although often invisible to the naked eye in social and professional interaction, estimates suggest as much as half the American population live with chronic mental and / or physical health conditions, and must manage such conditions throughout their daily lives. In this post, I reflect on some of my own experiences as one of these people in hopes of facilitating dialogue on this subject.

In so doing, I am seeking to build on the bravery of other scholars who have already addressed experiences with chronic conditions in many ways. Whether we look to recent blog posts (often anonymous) by people exploring, for example, aspects of bipolar conditions, experiences along the autism spectrum, managing dissociative identity disorders, or persistent anxiety, we can already see the silence around chronic conditions beginning to dissipate. I thus seek to contribute to these voices in hopes of continuing to, as DeWelde and Stepnick title their important volume exposing gender inequality in the academy, “disrupting the culture of silence” around chronic conditions in the academy.

To this end, I want to start by noting that on the surface – or from the outside so to speak – I generally appear to be a rather productive scholar. In fact, I regularly encounter people (well meaning, kind and complimentary people, best I can tell) who say things to the effect of “how do you get so much done” or “I wish I was as productive as you” when they realize that I only began graduate study 7 years ago but already have over 30 academic publications. I appreciate the kindness and compliments these people offer me, and I am proud of my work personally and professionally because doing this work is the closest I ever get to feeling like I might fit in somewhere.

I do not, however, note these experiences to boast in any way. Rather, I note these experiences because people might never think of me when they hear about scholars managing extremely painful and difficult chronic conditions. I have regularly heard people at conferences and in other settings assert negative stereotypes about people with enduring mental and physical conditions, which suggest these people are rare (false) and / or that these people are obviously or automatically different or deviant (false) and / or that visibly managing conditions or otherwise these people are somehow less capable than their normatively bodied or mental colleagues (false again). Like many of the scholars I am aware of managing such conditions, my constant struggle to exist is invisible to the casual glance, and still others face similar struggles managing more visible conditions. In both cases, every scholar I have come in contact with who is managing one or more chronic health conditions is at least as competent as any other scholar I have seen and often actually perform well above the average in their fields (Charles Darwin likely being the most famous example).

The mismatch between stereotypes and actual scholars managing chronic conditions is likely familiar to anyone versed in inequalities scholarship. Similar to people stigmatized via normative or dominant notions of race, class, gender, sexualities, and age to name a few, people whose minds and bodies work differently are typically framed as deficient or deviant. We are called diseased instead of simply different, our experiences are called disorders instead of variations, and our abilities are called lesser instead of diverse. In all such cases, we are assaulted for not fitting artificial norms about how human bodies and minds “should work” so that others who benefit from these norms do not have to reevaluate their own mind and body assumptions. As has traditionally been the case, many of us have realized that these patterns will only change if we begin announcing ourselves to the rest of the world and challenging mental and physical ablest assumptions embedded within academic and other social arenas.

To this end, I would like to share some things about my experience managing chronic conditions that I hope people will think about when they assume bodies or minds should be or work in a certain way. While strangers, colleagues, and acquaintances may look me up, meet me at a conference, see me speak, or otherwise come into contact with me, their view will generally be different from the people closest to me. While such people (based on their reactions to date) will likely see my “productivity” or “talent” first and foremost, those closest to me see how little I sleep because my brain won’t stop working, how many hours and days (and even at times weeks) I spend curled up in a ball in the dark because I feel like the world is trying to kill me, how confusing normal or common speaking patterns are to me and how much energy it takes me to have a five minute conversation with another person, scars scattered around my body from the regular times where it feels like my skin is too tight, and the constant headaches I live with and medicate.

The people closest to me also know that I always keep pills and ice packs nearby because I’m always in at least some physical pain due to issues with my legs. They also know that I regularly hear and see things that other people do not, and get used to me randomly having conversations with people and things they cannot see when we’re together. They also understand what its like to get a call from me when I’ve forgotten who I am, when I don’t know where I am, when I’ve gotten lost on the way to work again, when I think they’re dead but I want to check, when I think I’m dead but want to check, or when I can’t figure out how to put on clothes or feed myself. They also have the patience to look after me when, for example, I wander off following something that they can’t see, disappear mentally in the middle of a conversation without realizing it, or ask them if they’re real because I suddenly don’t know. They also understand when I throw out all my spoons because I’m convinced they’re out to hurt me, when I go whole semesters without working on our projects because my brain just won’t work, when something as simple as going to the grocery store terrifies me or tires me out emotionally, or when I just can’t interact at all for a while and need to be completely alone in silence or with music.

The people closest to me also are not surprised when I don’t buy shoes with laces because they already know that while I can memorize books I can’t tie shoelaces. They are not surprised (and often kindly try to protect me) when the thought of anyone being behind me terrifies me, when human contact makes me literally sick to my stomach (a wonderful example was a friend at a conference who once made controversial statements each time someone went to shake my hand so they would be distracted and I wouldn’t have to explain why I was not going to touch them), or when I have trouble even breathing in a large group of people (even people I like and care about) because I feel like the presence of others is suffocating me. They can even explain to other people why I spend so much time outside since sometimes walls feel like cages, why its much better to contact me online where I don’t have to talk to or see anyone, or how I might shift from the most hyper person they’ve ever met to the most comatose person they’ve ever met within a few minutes.

As you can probably tell, the people closest to me are wonderful people who make a very difficult world more comfortable for me in numerous ways. I find myself appreciating them more than words can say every moment I’m conscious, and without their efforts every aspect of my life other than writing would be much more difficult because I work in a profession where who you know, networking, and other social interaction skills are often just as and / or far more important to careers than how productive you are. This was a hard lesson for me when I arrived in the academy because I can write 10 or more solid articles in a semester but I will never know what to say at a mixer or conference surrounded by frightening strangers. This is all the more important because the conditions that facilitate the above examples are not likely to ever go away, and thus an academy based on the ability to “make small talk with the right people” automatically disadvantages me no matter how good a researcher I am or become.

I am able and willing to share these aspects of my experience, however, because in many ways I have been lucky enough to receive incredible emotional and instrumental support throughout my time in the academy. The people closest to me and especially my life partner, for example, are very understanding and protective of me, and many of them have the resources to protect me even if my disclosure leads other to stigmatize me in some regard. Likewise, I am incredibly productive because, as Matt Damon’s character says in Good Will Hunting, when it comes to research and writing – I can just play. I might not be able to do most of the things normatively bodied and minded people do so easily every day, but I write on as high a level and as fast as anyone I have ever met. The same things that make most of social life so hard for me provide me with abilities that are perfectly suited to the scholarship part of an academic career (i.e., I can read a book in an hour and memorize it, cite findings from years past off the top of my head, take apart anything I read or see or hear and turn it into patterns and themes without even meaning or actively trying to, etc.).  Further, from my earliest days in graduate school to my present academic position, I have had mentors in my programs, in other programs, in Sociologists for Women in Society, and in Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction who were and still are kind enough to accept and help me in countless ways as I try to survive the necessity of being social in the construction of an academic career.

It is also with these resources in mind that I remain well aware that many people managing chronic conditions everyday cannot safely speak out about their experiences, marginalization, and /or aspects of ablest bodily and mental assumptions and norms that impact their academic careers. I also know all too well that in many cases chronic conditions do limit productivity in terms of normative metrics like publishing in much the same way they limit me socially, and the only way to shift these burdens is for those of us who can to start speaking out and advocating for a more realistic understanding of the multiple aspects of scholarly experiences and lives and the natural variation in the ways human bodies and minds operate.

I thus share my experiences in hopes of facilitating dialogue concerning the management of chronic conditions in the academy (and elsewhere), steps we could take to provide resources for such management within academic settings and programs, and concrete ways we could begin to shatter the stigma and silence surrounding this prominent and widespread experience. For many people, mental and physical conditions will not go away, but if we work together, we could get rid of the ways current academic norms, simplistic and conformist assumptions about bodies and minds, and silence surrounding mental and physical health within and beyond the academy punish people for their pain. In so doing, we might instead create a culture where people experiencing the wide variety of empirically common bodily and mental types and forms are celebrated, affirmed, and accepted as full beings capable of providing diverse perspectives on a complex bio-social world.

To Be Seen, Not Heard at the Boys’ Table: Sexism in Academia

The following guest post is by a doctoral candidate in sociology at a public research university in the United States. In this post, ze reflects on experiences with sexism at academic conferences.

 

The systemic problem of gender inequality is often a driving force behind individuals’ decision to specialize in sociology and, more specifically, in the areas of sex and gender. Doe-eyed graduate students, such as myself, believe academia is where merit and opportunity are derived from hard work and meaningful contributions to science. A place were females, males, cisgender, and transgender individuals, regardless of race, ethnicity, sexualities or social class, are accepted by their peers and discrimination is checked at the door. Academics, certainly those in sociology, would never discriminate against minorities and those who are different. Right? Wrong! So wrong, unfortunately. As a first year PhD student in sociology, and also a female, I have already experienced evidence that the boy’s club is still alive and kicking in academia.

For instance, I have been counseled multiple times that it is in my best interest this early in my career to abbreviate my feminine-sounding name on scholarly publications. The second and probably more disheartening sexist experience took place during an annual sociology conference; ironically, the theme of the conference was gender. I feel compelled to share my experience as well as the experience of my co-author (who is also a doctoral student in sociology) during our paper session at this particular conference in the hopes that others can read this and know that they are not alone. Our experiences as minorities deserve to be shared in hopes that they will act as a wakeup call to our more privileged peers.

Nobody Wants to Hear a Female Talk Longer than 6 Minutes

Although I had previously presented at this particular conference when I was a master’s student years ago, this was my co-author’s first time presenting at a sociological conference. We were both excited and bit nervous to present our paper among more seasoned academics. However, our enthusiasm was quickly stifled by the patronizing demeanor of the moderator during our session.

Our session was scheduled to begin at 11:00 am and end at 12:15 pm. This was a fairly small paper session with five presenters and only five audience members, so the moderator decided to start the session at 10:58 am. The moderator asked the five audience members as well as the presenters if any of us anticipated having questions at the end of the session. When one member said yes, the moderator decided that the presenters would have 12-13 minutes to present their work in order to leave sufficient time at the end for questions.

The first presenter was a female professor of sociology, who, mind you, traveled several hours by plane to present her research. About halfway through her PowerPoint presentation the moderator abruptly cut in to tell her that she needed to bring her talk to a close. Flabbergasted, she quickly attempted to finish her presentation while insisting that she was not given the 12-13 minutes promised. Dismayed by this, the first female presenter headed to the back on the conference room and began timing each presentation.

The next person to present was a male who was also giving a PowerPoint presentation. This presenter was politely and unobtrusively shown a written three-minute, hand-written warning by the moderator. The male presenter was then not only permitted to talk for those three minutes, but beyond that time as well, enabling him to complete his presentation in full.

Next up, my co-author and I, both females, were scheduled to present. Unfortunately, I forgot to start the timer on my phone, but the first female presenter had her timer going. Besides, I was confident that my co-author and I would not go over our 12-13 minute time limit. However, we were only about five minutes into our presentation when the moderator interrupted me, mid-sentence to tell us that we needed to conclude. He did not offer a three-minute warning as he had for the previous presenter, instead I was brusquely cut off from speaking. I fumbled to collect my thoughts and wrap up our presentation. The female who was timing us also feverishly waved her hands and stated that we were only given five minutes to talk, but it did not matter. Our time was up – all the practicing and nervous anticipation for five damn minutes!

The next presenter, a male, had time to complete his presentation in its entirety without interruption or suggestion from the moderator that he needed to “wrap it up.” And yes, his presentation took all 13 minutes. The moderator presented his paper last and adhered to the 12-13 minute time limit he set at the beginning of the session. When the moderator concluded, the time was 11:48 am. As the session began at 10:58 am with five presenters, it is obvious that not every presenter received an equal amount of time to convey their research, averaging around 10 minutes each. It was also quite apparent that the two presentations given by females were the two (and only two) that were cut short of the promised 12-13 minutes.

But it does not stop there. The remaining 25 minutes were devoted to putting each presenter, one-by-one, in what the moderator called “the hot seat,” inviting audience members to question each presenter. During the other female presenter’s “hot seat” time, the moderator challenged her in a condescending tone rather than engaging her professionally. He provoked an argument with her rather than a discussion and disrespectfully dismissed her responses to his questions. Finally, this awful, degrading paper session came to an end a few minutes early. The moderator quickly offered a general apology for cutting the session short and insisted that it was important for the audience to be permitted to have ample time to ask questions.

However, the moderator’s hollow apology was not directed at anyone in particular. As graduate students, we spent a great deal of time practicing and preparing our presentation to ensure we did not exceed the anticipated 10-15 minute time slot. Besides the frustration of only being allowed to speak for six minutes, the fact that this clearly only happened to the females and not the males at a sociology conference focused on gender seemed especially terrible.

It is in these very moments where I feel like throwing in the proverbial pink towel and walking away from academia. But, I am stronger than that. I have to remind myself that I earned my spot at that conference table and I will not allow sexist, close-minded individuals to make females (or anyone, for that matter) feel any less deserving. So, fellow minority grad students, let us beware: while we study the systems of inequality outside the walls of academia, the frontline of social injustice may still lie within.

Caught in a Dream: Discovering an Integrated Self After Dissociation

This post will be the first of two focusing on ties between sociology and popular music. In this first entry I use the music of one of my favorite artists (Alice Cooper – all the block quotations below come from Alice Cooper’s songs and may be found here) to explore and narrate my experiences of dissociative identity.

I discuss how I developed this condition, how I lived with it for years without knowing that anything was amiss, and how I eventually discovered I had it because I began to reintegrate on my own. In the process, I talk about the development of my career as a medical sociologist and how I conflated functionality in the workplace with overall mental well-being. I also discuss how I have used music to understand my experiences, and as a tool for moving past what I now regard as a very dark time in my life.

Next week on the SSSI Music Blog, I will be sharing a guest post with some interactionist analysis of Alice’s music! This second post will focus on identity work and the presentation of self, using Goffman’s concept of masks to explore how Alice negotiates his personal and professional identities through song.

Thought I was living, but you can’t never tell. What I thought was heaven turned out to be hell… When you see me with a smile on my face, then you’ll know I’m a mental case. I’m caught in a dream, so what? I don’t know what I’m going through. I’m right in between, so I’ll…I’ll just play along with you.

When I was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, everything I thought I knew about myself crumbled, leaving me to sort through the dust for pieces of someone who might once more be whole. I never expected this, never suspected a thing for the 12-plus years I lived with this condition. From the time I was very young, I had felt a strong and cohesive sense of identity. My parents named me “Alexandra”, and I still use this name in formal writing. But my two year-old self quickly chirped “I’m Xan” at anyone who used my given name verbally. I felt very strongly that this was what I should be called, and my parents recognized and affirmed this desire. To this day, everyone who knows me in person or on social media calls me “Xan”.

Well, I told her that I came from Detroit City, and I played guitar in a long-haired rock and roll band. She asked me why the singer’s name was Alice. I said “Listen baby, you really wouldn’t understand.”

Identity work would later become tricky business for me. I am a donor conceived person, the biological product of one of my mother’s eggs and the sperm of an unknown donor. In my mother’s words, my father “adopted me before I was born”. He is the only real father I will ever have, but even as a young child I somehow knew that we did not share any genetic material. I had a sense of something being missing, someone else being relevant. I asked my parents repeatedly about this, but they had no vocabulary to discuss it, and fear tied their tongues in knots. Neither wanted to risk upsetting the bonds between us, even though they had always planned to tell me the truth of how I came into the world. We were so close, even though that closeness sometimes came with pain as parent-child relationships tend to do. But I had never felt any pain like this.

“I got a baby’s brain and an old man’s heart. Took eighteen years to get this far. Don’t always know what I’m talking about. Feels like I’m living in the middle of doubt, ‘cause I’m eighteen. I get confused every day. Eighteen, I just don’t know what to say. Eighteen, I gotta get away…”

When it finally did come tumbling forth, the revelation of this fact—the hardest story my mother ever had to tell—was the very thing that split me in two. Suddenly the question I had asked my parents periodically throughout my entire childhood and adolescence suddenly had a different answer now that I was 18, an adult in my own right. I knew that my mother was crying silently into her wine glass and that the landscape stretching before us—an immense olive grove in Delphi, Greece—seemed to swallow my words before they made any sound. I cried too, not because I had really learned anything new about how I must have gotten here, but because I had lost the ability to trust either of my parents. At 18 I knew enough to know that rebuilding that trust would be a long process, if I managed to succeed with it at all.

“And I know trouble is brewing out there, but I can hardly care. They fight all night about his private secretary—lipstick stain, blonde hair. What are you gonna do? I tell you what I’m gonna do. Why don’t you get away? I’m gonna leave today…”

In the years that followed, I would leave portions of myself behind without even knowing I had abandoned them. I suppose my definition of the situation had changed to one of survival, the world fading to a dull gray in places where it had once been bright. It was in this state that I made some other choices with my life that I probably would not have made had I not already been dissociating. As I write this, I hold a lot inside, the realization cutting through me anew that my first spouse never knew all of me, because I was already broken apart when we met. We both suffered because of it, I think. And as much as those things hurt, I have been fortunate to have his support in the years that brought my first steps toward healing, and the final horrible moment where everything crashed back together. He had also supported me during a time when my family seemed to be coming apart at the seams. I look back on those days with sorrow and empathy where once I felt only numbness, the absence of something that had once been.

“She’s an overnight sensation in the mirror on her wall. She gets a standing ovation at every shower curtain call. And she becomes a pop star in the safety of her car. And then she falls to pieces at the karaoke bar. And she’s perfect, until the lights go on. And then it all goes wrong, ‘cause now she’s not so perfect.”

Seemingly overnight, I lost interest in activities that had once delighted me. I did not realize this at the time, of course. It was only years later that I would look back and realize how little I had sung aloud, played instruments, or otherwise participated in music with others. I would buy budget CDs—a hobby of mine—and go to concerts occasionally. But I never sung in front of others, except occasionally with my first spouse in moments where I felt a strange and desperate desire to reveal something deeper about myself. Maybe those were attempts at recovering a person who was gone, identity work by force and sheer grit. As my desire to produce music faded into a black space masked by amnesia, I developed an almost obsessive fixation with my studies and developing my career, which itself would take many twists and turns as my physical health spiraled downward. I would sing only in the quiet moments at night when my spouse was falling asleep, perhaps because then I could convince myself that my words went unheard and that part of myself would never surface. We did not talk about it, and in retrospect I feel glad that he did not know just how much of me had been lost.

“I sent you a postcard, thought it would be funny. Would have sent a souvenir, but they took all my money. It’s pretty warm down here, but it ain’t sunny… And I’m having a hell of a time, my dear. Wish you were here…”

My former husband could see the pain in me, and often did a wonderful job of giving me space to talk about it in those early years. I still believe it was because of him that I was eventually able to talk a bit with my family about how much it had hurt to be lied to. But after one conversation in which I forgave both of them, I shut down in even worse ways. It was as if that act of forgiveness had cleaved me fully in two, a sort of transference of blame onto myself for the hurt that I had internalized. There were no more songs after that day, not even when my spouse slept. I pulled away from everything, save for the work that I had come to regard as my entire life’s mission and meaning. This was of course complicated by the fact that I was beginning to die properly from a chronic disease that had haunted me my whole life, culminating in a four-day stay in intensive care when I was 23.

“This quiet place, it ain’t so new to me. Its haunted atmosphere has heard so many screams. My home away from home, my twilight zone, my strangest dream… My confidant, I have confessed my life. The Quiet Room knows more about me than my wife.”

The night I was told that I would likely die may have started me on some kind of path toward healing, as the resolution of those inchoate feelings with the affirmation that my health actually was in crisis gave me a renewed sense of purpose in life. But it also started me on a path towards a different kind of separation. I stayed with my spouse for another two and a half years after that night, but emotionally I was drifting away into a dark, narrow space where no one could reach me. I stopped feeling the most basic of emotions. Everything was white noise. I had one facial expression—a sort of half-pout that always made it look as if my face were in transition to a different state, but I never made it there. I was frozen. The pared-down self I had embraced bloomed within its planter, branching out into new crevices of study and inquiry. I grew tall within an invisible cage that seemed to expand as my professional life did. But even though I did not remember the parts of myself that had been cut away, others experienced them.

“Mind gets scrambled like eggs, gets bruised and erased. When you live in a brainstorm, noise seems logically right, ringing in the night. Hard hearted Alice is what we want to be. Hard hearted Alice is what you want to see.”

I probably said and did things in my first marriage that I do not remember—expressed anger, pain, sorrow that my lucid self kept inside. All I remember is feeling numb, and wanting to sleep for a very long time. I sang no songs and played no instruments in those years, but I took a lot of comfort in my music collection. I had discovered Alice Cooper’s music when I was 15 years old, and that discovery led me to many of the happiest things in my present life. It gave me the opportunity to meet the person who, other than my life partner and parents, I still consider to be my best friend. He was the one person I really shared music with in any depth during those lost years, and indeed one of the only people I allowed myself to talk to in detail about my feelings concerning my donor conception and its aftermath. I had become an adult with him in some ways, so many of my first experiences of intimacy being tied to him and so many of the most glorious moments of that time being spent with him. I was 18 and did not need to know what I wanted. I could enjoy moments more on their own terms, an ability I would later lose.

“Little do they know, when I’m alone in bed at night, I become the king of the silver screen. I stare at the ceiling there; I know where I belong.”

I am not sure if I can fully explain why Alice’s music captivated me so much and so quickly. I know that the way in which I discovered him—watching Behind the Music on VH1—exposed me to his life story and the struggles he had endured in coping with alcoholism. But what struck me most of all, even at 15 with my own worst days still well ahead of me, was how he seemed to have figured out how to be two totally different people and still be one integrated person. I was going through a rift in my own life where I had to decide on a direction. In one corner were the performing arts that I had spent so much time and energy on, and loved so well but was questioning as a career choice. In the other were the research and writing for which I had always shown so much promise, and on which I could see actually building some semblance of a stable life. It fascinated me that Alice had simultaneously developed this grandiose persona who defined his professional life, and yet people knew him professionally in other ways too—a philanthropist, a golfer, a music educator, a producer, an actor, and eventually a restaurateur. And his personal life somehow supported and yet remained wholly separate from these things, a place from which he beat back darkness by sheer grit as he recovered from alcoholism and embraced a future with his partner and children.

“If I ain’t cool, my daddy gonna send me to military school. If I ain’t nice, my girlie gonna freeze me with cold shoulder ice. If I’m real late, my teacher gonna use me for alligator bait. So I better be good, I better be good.”

At the time, I simply chose a path and figured I would do the other things as a hobby. But when I began to dissociate three years later, the part of me I had left behind in professional focus seemed to die entirely, becoming lost to me. In the beginning, I remember thinking that being just the one person—the researcher, the academic, the writer, the serious scholar—would make me more pleasing to my parents. After all, how could anyone deny that I was their child if I were just like them, an apple dropped from a nearby tree? Neither of my parents liked to put on makeup and travel to far-off places within themselves, though I would later learn that my mother had actually been quite involved in performing arts herself at a young age. She is also a musician who almost never plays. The apple did indeed fall close to the tree, but perhaps not quite in the ways I intended. I was caught between the desire to be just like my parents and to cut myself off from them completely, and it seemed that professional development held the key to achieving both of these things simultaneously. Perhaps ironically, it was this choice—to become an academic researcher, but to do so in my own image and to chart a different path than my neurobiologist parents had—that led to my own intimate and professional partnership with a fellow PhD.

“The world needs guts; the world needs power. Show me some blood; show me some cuts; show me some scars. The world needs guts; the world needs us.”

Somewhere along the way, I grew legs and decided to heal, to leave the tree behind for greener pastures. I also chose to stay right where I was, by that point a successful academic in my own right. The choice to heal was not random, and I suspect that the single strongest factor in that choice was my relationship with my life partner and the healing I saw hir doing when we first met. Apparently ze recognized signs of DID in me from the earliest days of our relationship, and perhaps more amazing to me in retrospect is the fact that I trusted them enough to open up about my own suspicions that I might have more than just PTSD myself. I did not remember these moments, of course—I had no physical evidence of them and they vanished in the storm before the calm that signaled my reintegration. In the meantime, I had managed to acquire almost every Alice Cooper album ever recorded, and listened to them with almost obsessive regularity despite rarely listening to other things more than once in a blue moon because I simply had amassed so many albums. I loved being surrounded by my music—it served as sign equipment to suggest that things were all right, that I was home and that I was well. These signifiers were living, breathing proof to me that I had not lost everything, even as I failed to remember that once I had made music instead of simply listening to it. I would later learn just how deep those black patches in my memory went, and how many had formed.

“My tape recorder, it must be lying, ‘cause this I just can’t believe. I hear a voice that’s cryin’, that’s not me. The wheel goes ‘round; I hear a sound. It’s coming out all wrong…and I swear to you, I never wrote that song. I been living in my own shell so long, the only place I ever feel at home. And oh, that music. I hate those lyrics. It stayed inside me so long…and I swear to you, I never wrote that song.”

I managed to be very functional while living with DID—a successful career, several intimate relationships and close friendships, and a great many positive experiences that seem no less sweet for their birth in darkness. I also now know that many of the more negative experiences I had during this time fed into and reinforced my dissociation, creating a vicious cycle that trapped me for years. So I never suspected a thing until I met my partner, who reminded me a bit too much of myself for comfort. They brought out something in me that I couldn’t quite describe, an endless sense of fascination and wonder much like what I had felt for Alice and his music the moment I first listened to him speak. Here was a person who was not just two, but many different people, all at the same time! It made me question everything I thought I knew about identity and selfhood. They seemed to cross every boundary the world had and a fair few of mine as well. And perhaps as a result, the wall between the self I lived with every day and the one that had broken off to shadow me quietly began to crumble in places. I felt my body starting to light up with music again, bits of songs bursting out when I thought nobody could hear.

“Sometimes when you’re asleep and I’m just staring at the ceiling, I want to reach out and touch you, but you just go on dreaming. If I could take you to heaven, that would make my day complete, but you and me ain’t movie stars. What we are is what we are…and I tell you babe, well that’s enough for me.”

Of course, someone could hear, and would later tell me so during the terrible moments where memories overwhelmed me. If you know me outside of Write Where It Hurts, you already know that the person in the person in the story is the person who edits this blog with me, my partner and future spouse and unquestionably the love of my life. J could go everywhere when nobody else could—not my parents, not my closest friend, certainly not my first spouse. I never gave any of them the chance. Studying for my PhD seemed easy compared to the things I began to learn about myself in J’s presence. I would later learn that I met a lot of these discoveries with anger and rejection, sometimes in waking life and sometimes during sleep. Either way, I never remembered a thing; the abandoned parts of myself trailed me like shadows, vanishing when I actually tried to look for them. But falling in love—probably the only time I have ever really done that, and understood what it means to be “in love” with a person—was also easy. I chose not to freeze out the desire to be close to this person, and instead to open myself to them. What I was not prepared for was what would emerge when I did.

“Welcome to my breakdown. I hope I didn’t scare you. That’s just the way we are when we come down. We sweat and laugh and scream here, ‘cause life is just a dream here. You know inside you feel right at home, here. Yeah, welcome to my nightmare.”

Over the next few years, I would learn a lot. Some of that would lead to a PhD in medical sociology. But with the PhD out of the way, I was left to deal with the rest without school to distract me on top of the full-time research job I had continued to hold. I was a new faculty member, with students of my own and “Doctor” ringing in my ears. I began to feel strange. Memories were scratching at the surface of a dark lake, making me question my eidetic nature. I remember things in exquisite detail, even if they seem fairly insignificant to others. A useful skill in school, but murder on anyone dealing with trauma. Years of agonizing chronic pain and the unfortunate fallout from those experiences in other areas of my life had left me with post-traumatic stress disorder—that much I already knew, and had accepted. I had a partner who understood those things firsthand, so I figured I would do all right. My partner was also empathetic beyond all reckoning, something I would later reflect on when trying to put all of this together with lyrics from Alice’s massive recording catalog. Having read a lot of interviews with him over the years, I was always struck by the degree to which his relationship with his life partner and how they continued to shape each other seemed to parallel my own experiences with J.

“I wonder if anyone missed me. Or have I been gone so long they thought that I’d died? How many said, “I wonder what happened to Alice?” How many shrugged or laughed? How many cried?”

What I had not realized was that my brain had shielded me from the worst of the memories, turning them into empty spaces that got covered over by the richness of all my other recollections. How could I have blank spots when I had so many vivid images and sounds, such perfect recall? J watched me unravel, knew there was nothing for it but to let it happen for me just as it had for hir long ago. Even writing these words brings tears to my eyes. I have not done as well with forgiving myself for the pain my own healing process caused my partner as I have with forgiving J for the similar experiences they went through years prior. I am not even very adept at remembering that the catalyst for my reintegration was formally proposing marriage to J, knowing full well what the answer would be. I cannot even think about that night without finding endless flaws in what I did and what I said, a night J sees as perfect because of what it meant for our future. Perhaps in time I will feel that same kindness toward myself—it does get easier. I have heard Alice talk about this in his interviews and writings, and I have to let myself believe it. If he could have a happy ending of sorts after so much struggle, and find such inspiration in reconciling pieces of himself that always seemed to be at odds before his recovery, perhaps I can too. I certainly listen to a lot of Alice these days, with a new appreciation for the magnitude of his work both on and off the stage.

“Hello! Hooray! Let the show begin; I’ve been ready. Hello! Hooray! Let the lights grow dim; I’ve been ready. Ready as this audience that’s coming here to dream. Loving every second, every moment, every scream. I’ve been waiting so long to sing my song. I’ve been waiting so long for this thing to come. Yeah, I’ve been thinking so long I was the only one…”

J also takes me to see Alice perform whenever he is nearby. Living in Florida, this happens a lot. It is perhaps fitting that the first time I ever got to see Alice perform came at the height of my breakdown, that horrible month in which I spontaneously began to reintegrate and promptly freaked out because suddenly another person was inside of me. I had no idea how to deal with this other person who was absent one moment and present the next. I raged at myself and lashed out at J. During those days I was essentially a heat-seeking missile for whatever actions and words would hurt J most of all, push hir as hard as I could, seeking the rejection I had gotten on such a fundamental level that had split me apart in the first place. Alone in Delphi, the treasured memories of knowing who I was a million miles away in distance and spirit. Alone in a hospital room, life leaving my body as I tried to hang on. Alone in my pain, huddled on the kitchen floor with thoughts of suicide. Alone in the black patches my mind created, alone with my music, alone with the research that never quite seemed to fill that hole inside.

“I walk the streets alone; on feeble bones I ride. My sins are etched in stone; I got no place to hide. Well, I was unshakeable in what I did believe. I feel so breakable, but have I been deceived?”

At the end of a week of tears and questions I did not feel remotely ready to answer, the Alice concert was a galvanizing experience, a lifeline thrown down the dark well I was in. The night felt that way both because of the music and because of whom I was sharing it with. Even in those moments where I had tried so ardently to push my partner away, they were there, loving me and affirming me. I could be two people inside one person, and loved for both and the sum of their parts in equal measure. If it worked for Alice, why not for me as well? The night gave me hope. It put me on a path back into myself, gave me the motivation I needed to get integrated and stay integrated. I began seeing a psychologist. This helped so much that I only needed a few sessions to start doing the work of integration on my own, outside of a clinical setting. And while it cut deeply to discover how far the gaps in my memory went, and the horror of what had vanished inside of them, I do feel that it ultimately helped me to hear from an informed professional that I had dissociative identity. The scary moments and behavior I experienced in the summer of 2014 were, in his words, an “integrating episode” that signaled the beginning of a new journey.

“Well, people love to talk when I can hardly walk. To them I’m probably just the News at Eleven. It’s the edge of night, as the world turns. Misunderstood, it’s just the wrong medication. I wish, I wish upon a star. I wish it hadn’t gone this far. Been up so long it looks like down to me…”

Slowly at first, I started talking about my experiences and the memories that were coming back, even when doing so caused excruciating pain. I suppose that like Alice, I have never shied away from a bit of blood, or from a difficult challenge that at first leaves one feeling more alone than they ever had bfore. I allowed myself to trust both J and my parents in ways that I had not before. And finally, I told my parents my own terrible truth: I have DID.   It started the night you told me the truth. I’ve blamed myself for everything for 12 years. I tried to make myself into the person I thought you wanted when you made the choice to have a child that way. I can’t do that anymore. I need to get well and I need you to love me when I do. I need to hear it again, what you always told me when I was a child—that you would always love me, no matter what. I need to hear that and I need to let myself believe it. They told me, of course. They felt relieved too. They had spent the last 12 years questioning their choices, worrying that they had caused me irreparable harm—for my entire life with a chronic autoimmune disease that clearly has genetic origins, and likewise with the pain of knowing even before they told me that I was not like other people.

“I guess I’m a loner and I don’t fit in. I ain’t too comfortable in my skin. And I don’t play well with the others… I’m stuck somewhere between high school and old school. I can’t decide between my rules and your rules…”

One of the worst things for me as an integrated person is knowing that I will never see the other person who made it possible for me to be alive. They will always be a blank space in my mind, a lack-of-memory, an empty set. I have some genetic information that I got from doing basic saliva testing. But that is all I will ever have, other than my parents’ musings that the donor was probably a medical student. I do wish I could see a picture. The curiosity killed me for years, ate me up inside. When I did tell my parents I felt that way once I began to reintegrate, they smiled and said Of course you do. It’s natural to feel curious. We wish we could give you that information, sweetheart. We wish that with all our hearts. It made things easier, knowing that my parents felt that same kind of cognitive dissonance between their perceived roles as parents and the reality of our situation. Again I thought about Alice, and the love his own parents always showed him even as his life diverged from theirs in very striking ways. People do not need to look alike on the outside to share deep roots on the inside, and this is what I now tell anyone who remarks on how different my father and I appear on the outside. My dad takes a more succinct approach: Irrelevant. You’re obviously my daughter.

“You were screaming for the villain up there, and I was much obliged. The old road sure screwed me good this time. It’s hard to see where the vicious circle ends. I’m stuck here on the inside looking out. That’s no big disgrace. Where’s my makeup, where’s my face? On the inside…”

When I became fully integrated and felt confident that I could stay that way, I knew it without question. I celebrated by agreeing to let J buy me an engagement present at long last, something music-themed like the one I had chosen for hir long ago. The specific present I picked was really more of a present for the person who had broken off than the one who had always been at the center of things, which is probably why I chose it. I play my Gaspar 3R, an electric guitar modeled on the Fender Stratocaster, almost every night. It calms me and makes me feel happy to be whole. It lives in my music room, along with the little Yamaha Junior folk guitar J bought for me when I decided I wanted an acoustic as well. I never had a single lesson, just taught myself. I have been playing for only eight months, but can fool professional musicians into thinking I have played for several years at least. Guitar came to me naturally—something I was born to do and never had to think about too much. I get that from my mother, I think. She has gone on a journey of her own these past few years, charting boundaries on her own career and nurturing a passion for medical education—so much that she has left the world of basic science. Last winter I heard her play guitar for the first time in more than two decades. No Alice songs, but she has her own watershed artists who can sing her life story with a few well-chosen words.

“Well, I live at the 7-Eleven. Well, I’m trying to play this guitar. Well, I’m learning Stairway to Heaven…’cause heaven’s where you are.”

One of the first songs I taught myself to play on the Gaspar was Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen”. I play it so much that I have begun to experience a bit of auditory dissonance when I hear the original version from Love It to Death or the many wonderful live versions of the song, but I think I love them even more now that I can also play my own rendition. People recognize the music instantly when I play it. There are some things that time and experience do not wash away, even for people without eidetic memories. No matter how many times I listen to Alice’s records or see him perform live, I never lose that sense of magic I felt when I was 15 and just discovering his work. Indeed, that magic has grown stronger over the years as it has helped me to feel whole again. And part of that process has been accepting that feeling broken and confused at times, like being 18 and just not knowing what I want, does not mean I am not whole in my present form.

“I was scared to death, afraid to close my eyes and find that I was gone. Like every other one who left before the dawn, I vanished in the air. Am I still there? Wake me gently, if you can. Wake me gently; just touch my hand. Wake me gently, pull my sleeve…’cause where I’m at is where I want to leave.”

I am two people. I am the ambitious academic who regularly ventures into uncharted territory, who breaks silences and explores taboo topics and shows their scars. I am the professor whose students say, You changed my life. When you told us your story, you gave me the courage to tell mine too. These days I do not think of sharing as a courageous act so much as an important mission, something to be done at any cost. What requires more courage, often, is sharing those other parts of myself that vanished into the dark spaces of my dissociation. Not the music itself, perhaps, but the process of creating it. Yet I am that person just as much as the other. I am the singer who can belt out a soul song in front of a room full of strangers without batting an eye. I am the guitarist who cringes when a couple of strings are even a quarter-step off. I paint my eyes at night to sing or dance, and wash them in the morning to study and teach. I am also one person who does all of these things and is loved—by my partner, by my parents, and by many more friends than just that one whom I never completely shut out. I have learned how to be whole, with or without greasepaint and costumes. I have reaped the benefits of making music not only cognitively, but physically as well; guitar is the best therapy I have ever found for my Raynaud’s syndrome as well as the anxiety I often feel. And I am learning, day by day, how to forgive myself those years I spent in dissociation. Life is a process of becoming…and if Alice has taught me one thing, it is that there are always chances to rearrange one’s act a bit before showtime.

“Don’t get me wrong; don’t get me right. I’m not like you are. When I get home from work at night, I’m blacker and bluer. So I escape; I get out when I can. I escape any time I can. It’s all escape; I’m crying in my beer. But where am I running to? There’s no place to go. Just put on my makeup, and get me to the show…yeah, escape. Yeah, what are you waiting for? My doctor said “Just come around, and you’ll be taken care of.” And while he ran my problems down, I stole his mascara. That’s how I escape.”

Xan Nowakowski