Category Archives: Reflection

Queer Bowls: On Mothering as Failure, Healing and Survival.

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Simone Kolysh is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. They are also an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College and Lehman College, teaching in Women’s Studies and Sociology. Their work addresses intersections of gender, sexuality and race.  In this post, the second in our Queer Kinship Series, Simone reflects on experiences as a Queer parent. 

 

My mother, having caught me walking slowly by her couch, says ‘Can I ask you something?’ and I know that no good will come of it.

I hear ‘Why do you put a dress on him when he doesn’t know he shouldn’t wear it?’

I’m tired.

Rubbing my eyelids, I say, ‘Because he asks for it…because he’s happy in it.’

I leave.

Why does she even bother, I think, knowing full well that we won’t change each other’s minds? It is my three children, two marriages, and several gender and sexual developments in the ‘wrong direction’ too late for her to still attempt these conversations.

This time, the ‘he’ in question is my 2-year-old. He, and I use that pronoun tentatively, does not know gender for now or that most of the world will not understand that he should wear dresses just because. This child about whom my mother worries is not the one I want to talk about lately. I wish she’d talk to me about his sibling, the kid that’s 7 years old, the one using ‘she’ and ‘they’ pronouns as of last month. She wears dresses a lot more and says she’ll be a girl if my next child is not or that, you know, she is a girl but it’s complicated. I know that feeling. Gender is complicated for me too, as an agender lesbian person. Or, rather, it is very simple but the rest of the world makes it difficult.

She’s the daughter I was always scared to raise and a somewhat unexpected one at that, because while no one really thought this child would follow a straight path, pun intended, I did not know it would be now that she would say she’s trans. I whisper ‘I’m not ready’ and ‘But if anyone can raise her, it’ll be you’ back and forth in my head. My mother should ask me about what is going on but she won’t because she thinks of her as an already lost cause, the way she thinks of me. To her, there is still hope for my 2-year-old and maybe, if she starts her attacks on my parenting early enough, the way she did with my oldest, now 10, perhaps my youngest will grow up to be a boy.

So when I think of queer kinship, I think of my mother as its antithesis. My life will be forever marked by the enormous failure that is her lack of mothering. The space between her as a woman and me as a person is vast and monstrous-looking because of many traumas and I will always mourn the kind of acceptance and support that a mother should give her child. As part of the mourning process, I, like many others, have ripped out my roots and shred them swiftly and without regret. Yet, her actual physical being remains in my house and in my life and I just know that even when she dies, the many things she’s done and said will always haunt me until I die and perhaps bleed into my own parenting in ways unknown.

Sometimes, I wonder if my own fervent commitment to mothering my children and other people in my life is an act of rebellion against such haunting. I did not enter motherhood to rebel, quite the opposite, but I recommit to it time and again because, to me, it is now a clear political act. After all, mothers are treated like replaceable trinkets that are not worth much while others pay lip service to their important social location. In reality, many of us are sentenced to parenthood and find ourselves utterly full of despair and without support. Amazingly, we persevere and rarely abandon our young or each other. We thrive and make it work, despite many hardships and experiences of oppression. Further, the kind of mothering queer and trans folks are intimately involved in is a genuinely healing process without which there would be a lot more broken people.

Which is why my second thought regarding queer kinship goes to the Japanese art called Kintsugi, in which broken bowls are repaired with gold and other precious metals, so as to mark the history of the broken object instead of hiding that it’s been broken. Many of us that are queer and trans carry around deep mother wounds, even as if we see our own mothers broken before us. Many of us are now parents ourselves, trying to preserve our children and minimize their own shattering. All of us are queer bowls that have been repaired, sometimes carefully and sometimes without anyone noticing, by the numerous experiences, friendships and relationships we’ve had with others that are ‘deviants like us.’

What are the ways in which we are connected? In some ways, the making and sustaining of a queer kinship network defies a clear articulation. Sometimes, they are my friends from way back when; sometimes they are my students. Other times, they are strangers in the traditional sense but they are writing and living and surviving and providing all of us with models of being, of building families and of queer survival. In turn, they look to me for inspiration, for the kind of adult and parent they’d like to be, for ways to talk about sex, gender, and sexuality with kids or anyone else. Each of us thinks the other is brave and strong but each of us feels uncertain and precarious. We are the next generation or activists, scholars and elders. Our children, just like us, are growing up in an alternate dimension, a dimension that imagines a different future, while the general sense of reality is still a mainstay of a white hetero-patriarchy.

I find the constant fight to make a different future happen in my house and inside myself to be exhausting in profound ways but my final thought about queer kinship is that it is worth fighting for, because we cannot live a different life, a life without authenticity, and we must try to stick around so that others can do the same. Nevertheless, we must also speak to the wounds we bear on a daily basis because they build on our childhood wounds. As much as we mother each other, we cannot escape the fact that we have been failed by those who were supposed to do that work instead. When I think of my mother, I do not understand her bowl. She has not healed through me. Instead, she took the jagged pieces of her broken self and cut me constantly without hesitation, as if my tears and my pain are good enough results. When I think of my bowl, its earliest cracks have been the biggest and the gold with which they are now filled is very queer, the kind of queer people say is radical, as if that word has any definition. As for my trans daughter’s bowl, her childhood cracks will never be as bad as mine because the gold that is my queer kinship network is the kind of gold that alchemists chased through the ages, rare and powerful. That is the gold that will now coarse through her veins untamed and for that I will be eternally grateful to the many people that, by their existence alone, have made it easier for me to be this strong a mother, to be this strong a queer warrior.

Dreams

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In this post, J. Sumerau reflects on the possibility of focusing on and talking about dreams in contexts where we are more often encouraged to focus on what we should do rather than what we wish for.

A couple months ago, I posted a piece here about the emphasis on obligations, or the dreaded should, I have noticed so many fellow academics wrestling with over the years.  In the piece, I noted the possibility of shifting our focus from what we should be doing to what we have actually done that might deserve some credit from us or others.

Based on messages and discussions with people, as well as my own reflections, I could likely add more to the piece I published at this point, but that is not what I want to do today.  Instead, I want to talk a little bit about dreams and the importance of them – the wants instead of the shoulds – for self care and fulfillment.

 

Did you have a dream when you were younger or last night?

 

Does your current life, career, or circumstance match this dream or have you on a path to reaching it?

 

I think these are important questions that I never hear people talk about within or even beyond the academy. Social psychologists have even noted that having dreams is a very important aspect of selfhood, whether or not such dreams ever come true in one’s life. They provide motivation, joy, pain, and other emotional experiences that facilitate growth and development in a wide variety of ways. Of course, this makes me wonder why I don’t often hear people talking about their dreams. More often, I hear people talking about what they are doing, should be doing, have to do, or haven’t gotten done yet. I fully admit, as I noted in the previous piece, that academic culture especially seems to encourage – if not require – these questions much more so than any talk about desire, hopes, or dreams for the world or one’s self. At the same time, I think we – myself included at times – miss something when we forget to also think about whatever we might wish for, deeply desire, and hope for in our best imagined versions of our world and life.

I can’t pretend to evaluate the dreams of another, but I do think dreams are very important whatever shape they take. I’m reminded of friends and colleagues I admire who dreamed of being academics, teachers, scholars, researchers, and university administrators their whole lives. At the same time, I think about the fact that this was not the case for me, and that I kind of stumbled into an academic life as a way to facilitate and fund my actual dreams of being a writer and activist. In both cases, my colleagues and I had dreams that we ultimately got to touch in our own lives for various reasons and thanks to a lot of things beyond our control going well. Thinking about these things leads me to wonder what other people dream about, what do other people want most in the imagined case where it somehow works out, and what discussions about these questions might reveal about ourselves, about others, and about our lives.

I’m also reminded of just as many friends and colleagues I admire who dreamed of things that never came true, or continue to dream of things they are still chasing.  In both of these cases and similar to the above, the dreams themselves speak to the people, what they value, what they desire, and what matters to them most once upon a time, in the present, or in some imagined future.  Thinking about this leads me to wonder what other dreams people have given up, what dreams changed over time as people learned more about themselves and the world, and how past and current dreams or other desires speak to one’s current life or efforts.

As I said, I can’t offer any real answers to these questions, but I thought it might be nice to at least broach the conversation. I thus invite people to think about, write about even on this site if you wish, and consider what your dreams might be, and what such reflection might tell you about yourself and others.  I’ll close this post with a simple question.

What do you get to do that feeds you enough to make the things you have to do worthwhile and what do you have to do to facilitate your ability to do the things you really want to do?

Happy Birthday Write Where It Hurts

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This week the Write Where It Hurts blog is one year old. With this in mind, we thought it might be useful to look back over the past year, express our appreciation to the many people who have contributed to the growth and development of the blog and its associated social media sites, and glance toward the coming year.

On June 6, 2015, we launched Write Where It Hurts online and on social media sites with the hope of providing resources for and generating conversation about the personal and emotional aspects of teaching, research, service, activism, and other elements of scholarly and creative life and experience. With this goal in mind, we spent the year utilizing our social media presence to disseminate information and resources, and posting 42 blogs covering a wide variety of topics from a wide variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and traditions. Our hope was and remains to, as one regular reader noted at a recent conference, create a space for open dialogue as well as resources for people managing the personal and emotional aspects of academic and activist life.

Whether looking at numbers or conversations, the past year exceeded any expectations we had at the onset of this project. We have received word of cases where posts from the blog have been useful resources for teaching in classrooms, educating potential allies in activist groups, and sharing experiences in interpersonal settings. At the same time, the blog has garnered much more traffic and attention than we expected it to (especially in the first year), and we have had far more people seek us out at conferences and online for further discussion than we thought would happen. At the same, response to our social media sites has been far more active than we initially expected, and has led to interesting and useful collaborations. All of these and other observations throughout the year suggest this type of space is useful for many people, and encourage us to continue developing it for broader use.

We have also benefitted tremendously in the past year from the talent and bravery of our guest authors. We have truly been privileged to work with incredibly talented and insightful guest writers, and in each case, we – as well as the blog – have benefitted immensely from their perspectives, experiences, and analyses. It is with this in mind that we reiterate our ongoing calls for guest contributors, and encourage anyone looking for a space to Write Where It Hurts to reach out to us with your ideas, compositions, and other thoughts as there may well be space for you on the blog and there may well be others who would benefit from your offerings.

As we move forward, we simply wish to thank you all for an incredible first year in the academic blogging world. Thank you to all the readers, sharers, tweeters, guest writers, and others who made this year possible. Thank you as well to all the people in person and / or online who shared with us the ways the blog posts and / or social media sites were useful to you personally and / or professionally. Thank you all for making Write Where It Hurts first birthday feel like a celebration. We will continue to work on the blog and on social media, and we look forward to all the conversations to come.

Xan, J, & Lain

Writing: Alone.

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Craig Wood is a public school teacher as well as a PhD candidate with an interest in reflective practice methodologies. In this post, Craig’s reflections on lived experience and his conversations with fellow post-graduate colleagues become data and are expressed as a fictional representation. Where are you located in this story?

Promising himself just a short break, Frankie stepped out on to the terrace of his hotel suite. He was still 2500 words from finishing his Masters thesis and he could sense the demons of apprehension closing in on him.

Frankie sipped from his water bottle, drew a breath, and closed his eyes. The cacophony of noise from the Vegas strip below was somewhat dampened by nearly thirty stories of distance.

– Shrill screams from the Big Apple Coaster as it roared and clanked by the Statue of Liberty – The crisp sound of someone elegantly breaking the surface water of one of the hotel’s five pools

… laughter …

– Chinking glasses and cutlery falling on crockery

… voices …

– From the car park below, the bone jarring rattle of a hot-rod turning into West Tropicana Avenue and vibrating through the still air into the distance.

Then, the theme from Happy Days, Frankie’s ringtone for his manager, Sid. Frankie thought to reject the call but

– Hey Frankie! It’s Sid. Ya there yet?

– Yeah Sid.

– Where are ya?

– I’m on the terrace.

– Da terrace! Wadda ya mean ya on da terrace? Ya not spendin’ all damn day in dat hotel are ya?

– I just need to get away from everyone, Sid. Lock myself up. And write.

– Frankie it’s Vegas! I gottya da best damn room, Frankie. Hey! Tell me I’m da bes’ damn manger, Frankie. Look down dat strip and tell me whadda ya see?

– Vegas, Sid.

– Tha’s right, Frankie. Vegas. Three nigh’s time: You. Me. An da best damn ticke’s in town. Pacquiao V Bradley3. I’m da best ain’t I Frankie? Tell me I’m da bes’ manger.

– Yeah.

– I’m da bes’?

– Yeah.

– Good boy, Frankie. Now don’ go bustin’ yaself up on dat book o’ yours. You’re back in Vegas, Frankie. It’s your town. They luv ya!

– Yeah.

– I’ll call ya tomorro’, Frankie.

– Yeah.

Frankie tried to at least say the words ‘Thanks, Sid’, and not just thanks for the room, or thanks for being the best damn manager. Frankie yearned to be able to find the words to tell Sid how important he was in Frankie’s life. Not that any of that mattered, Sid had already hung up. It wasn’t that Frankie was unintelligent. Since retiring from boxing he had balanced a public profile with his private pursuit of a Master of Science degree in Sports Management. Nor did he mean to be curt with Sid, Frankie loved Sid. It’s just that Frankie didn’t want to be around people; that’s a feeling he had had for some time.

Frankie looked out from the terrace. The sun’s rays of dusk were slowly rescinding from the Eiffel Tower, Caesar’s Palace, Treasure Island, and the rest; giving way to the flickering, shimmering neon energy of a Vegas night awakening. Beyond the desert the now deep dark blues of shadow blanketed the mountains that were holding up a horizon of pink and orange pastels. Looking at the emerald lights that were wrapping themselves around the terrace, Frankie briefly thought about giving himself just two rounds of bourbon in some bar, but, determined to stay focused, he sipped from his water bottle, stepped back into his room, shut the door and drew the curtains.

He was alone.

Letting the full drop of plush velvet separate him from the passions playing out beyond his terrace.

Alone.

Frankie flipped open his laptop and scrolled to the top of the document. Everything to everyone: Stories of balancing the demands of elite athletic performance with celebrity. By Frankie Rosetti.

He hovered over the title and changed the font size. Again.

Then the font type.

Then removed the underline…

… and made the title bold.

Then, clicking on his name, changed the text to Francis Rosetti.

An incoming email popped up on the screen. It was from Rex, Frankie’s supervisor.

Hi Frankie, I’ve just read your ethics chapter. Of course you are using pseudonyms for your informants, but I still need to be convinced about using your data to create an entire fiction.

Frankie reread the email seven times.

He could feel his eyes getting wet.

Clasping his hands over his cheeks he read the email twice more as waves of despair enveloped him.

Alone.

Frankie knew … in one of his three suitcases he had brought … he knew he had packed them … interview transcripts that were his data … as well as hand written minutes from all of the meetings he had with his supervisor … and he clearly recalled discussing how he intended to ethically manage his data in the dissemination of his research … it was that meeting, when, after interviewing twelve high profile athletes and meticulously transcribing the interviews, Rex had criticised Frankie for arranging the data alphabetically by sport: Baseball, Basketball, Football, Hockey, Soccer.

“Where are the NASCAR drivers?” Rex had grilled Frankie, “and why are there no Olympic sports? These are omissions that are clearly gaps in your data. Where’s your own boxer colleagues? It’s all a bit basic, don’t you think”

Frankie clearly recalled leaving that meeting feeling demeaned. Like he was some kind of fraud who did not belong in graduate school. It was Sid who had offered a solution.

– Wadda ya so work’dup about, Frankie? You know I can take care o’ dis Rex if he’s bothrin’ ya. Waddas he know ‘bout sports?

Lissen, waddas it madder what sport anyone plays? Ain’t dis all about turning yasself inside out tryin’ to please everyone?

Sid had been right. Perfect even – not about the idea of taking care of Rex – but about the other stuff. So, with a new lease of energy, Frankie had rearranged his data in less than 48 hours. He had gone beyond ‘basic’ delineations based on specific sports and identified patterns in his data that he called: Personal tension; Franchise/team tension; Relationship tension; Fan tension; and Success tension. Then, with specific sports no longer an identifying label on the data, Frankie began the process of further de-identifying the data. The more he played with the data, the more readable it became. Even Sid commented.

– Dat interview stuff ya wrote, ain’t no one gonna read dat. But dis, well dis is like one of dem books ‘bout a person’s life.

Frankie found the minutes he was looking for. In a meeting with Rex where they were speaking about ethics and de-identification, another member of faculty suggested Frankie read Michael Angrosino’s Opportunity House. Frankie had done so. In fact he loved the idea so much that he had run a search to see who else had cited Angrosino. Google Scholar had returned over 2000 hits. A whole world had opened up: Laurel Richardson, Lisa Tillmann-Healy, Carolyn Ellis, Tony Adams. And then Frankie had found an entire book series dedicated to Social Fiction.

Rolling his chair back to his suitcases and opening the second one, Frankie looked over his collection of books by Norman Denzin, Michael Angrosino, Patricia Leavy, Art Bochner, and at least ten other social researchers. He clasped his hands out in front of him, then rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck.

Alone. But with a new sense of energy.

Frankie scrolled down to his chapter on managing data and began typing.

“Unacceptable progress” towards degree

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The following anonymous guest post is by a doctoral candidate at a public research university in the United States.  In this post, he reflects on making unacceptable progress toward his PhD and feelings surrounding such experience.

I do not think I’d be here today if it were not for my sardonic sense of humor – I would have succumbed long ago to the stress and hypocrisy of the daily lunacy we call life. For the longest time, I was able to laugh away these most unfortunate aspects of human existence, at least while I was “on top” that is. However, I am no longer anywhere near “the top” in any socially relative aspect of my life… and ‘tis the season for funding. This essay is composed of my personal experiences concerning the perverted business of academia, how I am the embodiment of “unacceptable progress” towards my PhD in sociology, and why I’m still here. To be blunt- and to get the more complicated “why” question addressed at the very least – I honestly would not be an active student at this moment if it were not for mindfulness practices. For the first time in my life I am (kind of) comfortable with uncertainty and “letting go”.

Each year, my department conducts the uttermost warped evaluation process of graduate students enrolled in both the masters and doctoral program. In an almost cult-like gathering veiled in mystery, a handful of professors determine the most crucial part of a graduate student’s existence – Funding. Adjectives aside, this “annual review” is a rather reasonable procedure and makes perfect sense in the context of a soul-crushing bureaucracy. But here is the sick part of the whole thing – while paperwork for the annual review is due mid-December and funding decisions are essentially made in January (current graduate students are ranked in order in a top secret list), students are not informed of their fate until early March (via physical mail to add insult to injury). During that 3 month period, every other thought a graduate student has revolves around funding concerns for the upcoming year. This creates a demented cycle of mental and emotional harm which intensifies each day as March approaches. Speaking out against this process is not a perceptible option as there have been repercussions in the past.

For the past 4 years, around this time of year, I would eagerly check my mail each day in hopes of receiving a letter of funding. Each day it was absent caused me to worry incessantly, but this year is different. I am not expecting a letter. I am hoping, sure, but I am not counting on it. In previous years I was the golden boy of the department, an overachiever making acceptable progress towards my degree. Yet after a scuffle with a sadistic professor, a failed comprehensive exam, and 3 outstanding independent studies, I received a notice of unacceptable progress towards my degree completion this past month. I had stumbled this past year for sure. I was not mentally well from June to November following a series of deaths and illnesses in my family combined with a period of no insurance coverage (which meant no doctors visits or medication). Yet now that I am on my feet so to speak, the last thing I need is to dwell on my past failures. This seems to be the plight of civilized humans, to obsess over what could have been and what will become of the future.

“Are you sure you are not just in denial,” asked a good friend of mine when I told him that I am content with my unacceptable progress. This is a good question but I believe the answer to it is ultimately no. I am not denying that I am now officially certified as a lousy student, but rather embracing the fact that there is nothing I can do to change that at this exact moment. If a depressing string of thoughts about my academic fiascoes occurs late at night after a rather productive day, then why should I let it affect me? Instead, I now acknowledge these thoughts and the feelings they temporarily instill in me, and then I situate myself back in the present moment. I am so far managing this semester rather well – even though this essay is in part based on a paper which was late – and worrying about the past and future can only negatively impact me. Letting go of these thoughts of failure or impending suffering via mindfulness practices has been tremendously helpful in my day-to-day life, and therefore by default has also been helpful in the long run.

Perhaps the single largest stressor in my life is uncertainty. But in a paradoxical moment of clarity, I am now certain of one thing – that I will always be uncertain. I have never known the concept of “job security” and doubt I ever will, but that is part of the fun in life. I do not want to live a rationally ordered existence where one works to live. I rather enjoy spontaneity and wrinkles in life’s “plans”, and the ideal of omniscience tastes kind of bland. To be human is to feel, and perhaps this is part of the reason why negative experiences feel so bad – pain, misery, suffering, depression, etc. We do not want to have those feelings so we take measures to avoid situations where they may occur. But when the uncomforting notion of uncertainty is embraced as a constant and we let go of the desire for a predestined life, uncertainty becomes less distressing. I do not know where I will be or how I will secure life’s necessities come next fall and there is nothing I can do about that fact. Will worrying help improve my life situation? No, but I cannot help but to worry. In being mindful of worrying over uncertainty, I acknowledge the feeling and bring myself back to the present moment. Additionally, this is an empowering process (I am in control of my life right now) whereas worrying is a depowering process (I have no control over my fate). In an odd way, we gain power by surrendering power. We want control over our “fate” but this desire can overwhelm us with worry, guilt, and ultimately stress. Though a philosophical metacognitive argument, I believe that by letting go and enjoying the moment, we reclaim power over ourselves.

What I have been describing so far may seem self-defeating, judgmental, and critical in a negative manner. When I say that I am “the embodiment of unacceptable progress”, I am appealing to my own critically demented sense of humor. I tend to be a satirist and like to push negative aspects of my life into the realm of the absurd. Laughing is the kindest, most rewarding condition I can bring about myself. If I imagine that the professors who secretly make funding decisions do so in some kind of a dark ritual involving robes and goat blood – and this thought makes me laugh at the (very real) ridiculousness of the process – then I am better off for it. I know of nothing more loving than that.

I cried the entire day when I assembled my annual review this past December. After over 12 agonizing hours of reflecting upon and writing down my achievements and shortcomings (mostly shortcomings), I had a narrative of merely 1045 words to sum up the most painful year I have experienced so far in my life. I have not – and will not – receive any feedback on that most personal narrative either as that goes against protocol. So what good did that distressing day of forced reflection do to my then-present psyche? None whatsoever as the next few days in particular were spent more or less in a state of emotional and physical recovery. If I was aware of this then, I never would have engaged in that activity of needless suffering. I would have submitted a blank sheet of paper (if anything) to the annual review committee. The end result is me not getting funded, yet the approach I took was one of intense judging and self-loathing.

I have become accepting, even welcoming, of uncertainty as it relates to my future. This enhanced awareness has allowed me to reframe some situations in a more holistic light and eschew others altogether. I have no clue where I will be next semester and I am perfectly okay with this. I have even put some semi-serious applications into rather prestigious job openings – I did not get “hung up” on getting it right, but rather had fun writing the cover letters and such. Who knows what will happen. Maybe my passion for teaching will come across more clearly and I’ll get a call back.

Shit happens and it will forevermore. As a life-long overachiever, I have always strived to evade shit but was lost to the fact that I was centering my life on and around shit itself. Through my deliberate and rigorous avoidance of shit, my life had become shit. Shit happened and it will happen again, but right now as I write this paper, there is no shit in my life. It’s all good here. Even the cat boxes are clean. And that’s how I feel about my life right now as an “unacceptable progress” student. I may not complete my PhD by the time I am 30 years of age (a little over 3 years from now), but I feel “clean” by accepting this.

Recovering from Graduate School: Rewriting the Trauma Narrative

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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.

 

“Hope” Springs Forth: New Article Out in Sociology of Health and Illness!

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In this post, Xan Nowakowski reflects on a recent publication in Sociology of Health and Illness concerning the personal, political, and structural experience of managing chronic conditions in everyday life.

Hello readers! If you’ve been following WWIH for a while, or just know any of us editors outside of the blog, you may have heard a bit about my new article in Sociology of Health and Illness. It’s a critical analysis of my experiences with a prescription drug that has excellent benefits and a lot of potential side effects, and the many sociological lessons learned from trying to find the right balance between the two.

A lot of the illness management literature deconstructs major changes in health status, and the impacts of these events on identity formation and performance. This literature doesn’t yet contain as diverse an array of information and analysis on the day-to-day nuances of living with chronic conditions. I’m hoping to inspire other scholars to delve more into that area, and to do so with a richly intersectional perspective on relationships between health and social life.

To have this article published in Sociology of Health and Illness is a dream come true, and the product of about two years’ worth of work. So I’m thrilled to report that “Hope Is a Four-Letter Word: Riding the Emotional Rollercoaster of Illness Management” is now available online, along with an accompanying video abstract introducing the piece. The print version of the article will appear later this year. In the meantime, if you want to read the article and are having trouble getting access to the online version, just drop me an email.

I also encourage everyone to share the link to the online version with others who may be interested in this topic. I quite deliberately constructed this article as a narrative with theoretical commentary, not a research methods piece. It’s accessible for a wide variety of audiences, not just academics. I wrote the paper with patients, families, clinicians, advocates, and caregivers all well in mind. WWIH readers will recognize a lot of our key themes here: intersectionality of multiple social positions and roles, gender performances and violations of norms, racial and ethnic inequality, symbolic interactionism as a tool for understanding health experience, and of course a hefty dose of storytelling!

An essential contribution of this piece is detailed insight into the interplay between personality and social structure in the experience of chronic illness and the management thereof. By using my own voice to explore the complexities of different theories of social inequality, I hope to help build new ground for dialogue about what chronic illness feels like day-to-day that can inspire improvements in both community support and clinical care. I also hope to open doors for other scholars who occupy one or more marginalized social locations to share and critically analyze their own stories of illness management in everyday life.

Radical Reprioritizing: Tenure, Self-Care, and My Future as an Intellectual Activist

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 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 balancing life and the tenure track as an activist scholar.

I am currently wrapping up my third year as a tenure-track professor at the University of Richmond – an elite, small liberal arts college in Richmond, VA. This semester is the first time I am teaching courses I have taught at least once before; and I’m teaching the “two” of my 3-2 yearly course load. Finally, I have a little breathing room to really advance my research.

But, the service demands, and my own campus, community, and professional involvement have increased with each passing year. As far as I know, I am the only out Black queer faculty member on my campus – one of few LGBTQ faculty in general, and one of few faculty of color in general. My classes tend to have a heavy queer, (Black) feminist, and antiracist focus. And, I make an effort to be visible on campus, hopefully letting my fellow “unicorns” on campus know they are not alone. Students’ need for me to be a teacher, mentor, and role model seems particularly great at our small, slightly diverse university.

And, then there is my intellectual activism, especially my blog, Conditionally Accepted, which I hope will expand into a bigger initiative for change in the academy. There are the symposia, conference panels, and workshops at which I have spoken about discrimination, exclusion, and health problems in academia. Though less consistently, there is work I have done to make academic research and knowledge accessible to the community. Trying to earn tenure to stay in academia, while also working to change academia, sometimes I feel as though I have two jobs – and those two jobs are typically at odds with one another, unfortunately, to the detriment to my health.

I am undeniably spread thin. Due to fear of unclear and biased tenure expectations, I do my best to exceed what I suspect that I need on the research front. (Don’t we all aim for that “slam-dunk” tenure case? And, at what cost?). I sometimes push even harder on the research front to “compensate” for my advocacy – again, owing to fear of how others’ perceive my approach to being a scholar. Despite the fears that my blogging would cost me my job, I’ve kept at it since I started my position in August 2013; I’m now the editor of an Inside Higher Ed career advice column that is read nationwide (at least among academics). I’m frequently invited to speak on campus, attend various events, facilitate discussions, and so forth. I’m flattered. But, I’m also frustrated that the campus hasn’t employed more faculty like me to share the labor. For, that’s what all of this is – work. Work that is incredibly important, and affirming, and enjoyable. But, I’m only one person!

I’m only one person. A person who has suffered from Generalized Anxiety Disorder since 2010. An academic who was traumatized by graduate school, and is now seeing a therapist to begin the recovery process. And, now I suffer from Irritable Bowel Syndrome, probably from the anxiety and trauma. And, I finally got over myself and started taking Lexapro. Health-wise, I’m a mess, or at least a work-in-progress. Why push myself so hard at work? If these were physical health problems, I would not hesitate to rest, resist demands of work, pace myself, and seek proper treatment.

Radical Reprioritizing

Recently, my perspective has changed. I have shifted toward taking the long-view. I want to be in the academy for a loooooong, long time. I’m coming for the structures and culture that allows for the exploitation of, yet lack of support for, minority scholars. I want to educate thousands of students about the social problems of the world, and what they can do to solve them. Maybe I’ll serve as a dean or provost one day; hell, maybe I’ll defy the odds and become a university president. Or, forget thinking inside of the box; maybe I’ll start my own academic justice organization, working with multiple universities rather than within just one.

With that in mind, I have realized it is time to radically reprioritize. I have identified the two most important goals for my future as an academic and intellectual activist: 1) get healthy; and, 2) earn tenure.

Self-care is my number one goal. That means making a serious effort to do the things that will promote my mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. I hate exercise, but it’s good for me. I can never seem to find the time to meditate, but I have to let my brain recharge just as I let my body recharge nightly. I’ll continue to limit work to 8am-5pm on weekdays (with no work on weekends, of course), with a mandatory lunch break for leisure reading, seeing friends on campus, or walking. I will continue to see my therapist, take my anti-anxiety medication, and use workbooks and private journaling to recover from the trauma and anxiety. I realize that I will be useless to everyone if I am sick and suffering or have a limited capacity for anything other survival. And, to be grim, I can’t help anyone if I die young. I deserve to be healthy and happy!

Earning tenure means lifetime job security at my current institution – an incredible privilege these days, even in the academy. It means more freedom to take chances in the classroom, in my research, and even in my advocacy. Tenure means power and access to make meaningful change on campus, in my discipline, and in the academy in general. It will also come with the responsibility to be in service to other academics, serving on various committees, mentoring junior faculty, and becoming involved in faculty governance. I find six years on the tenure-track tends to encourage junior scholars to play it safe, prioritize their own career and status over change and service, and promotes worry and mental illness. But, it is, at worst, a necessary evil to make real change.

Together, these goals help me to determine whether I can accept or take on a new invitation, initiative, or opportunity. For example, when I received a last-minute invitation to facilitate an on-campus discussion about racism scheduled for late in the evening, I quickly declined. Staying late and providing the necessary emotional energy would not have enhanced my health, and I am well aware it would do little to strengthen my case for tenure. But, I did finally agree to attend enVision – a social justice weekend retreat hosted by my campus’s Office of Common Ground; I found it incredibly affirming to interact with students outside of the traditional classroom context on these issues. Blogging doesn’t help me for tenure, per se, but it is a necessary outlet for me to vent about injustices that I and others have experienced, to build community, and advocate for change. Unfortunately, I realize there are still some things that will help for tenure that aren’t so enjoyable or health-enhancing – like networking at conferences, occasionally publishing in high-impact journals, etc. As I said, it’s a necessary evil; I can chalk it up to job security as a matter of health and my livelihood.

But, admittedly, there is also a third focus: my post-tenure future. I have heard the horror stories of post-tenure depression. Junior scholars who keep their mouths shut and their heads down find that they are lost when they raise their heads upon receiving tenure. I am beginning to work toward the career I want for myself as an Associate (and eventual Full?) Professor. Maybe my research will catch up with my passion and advocacy; that is, I could turn blogging into actual research on injustices in academia. Or, maybe my joke that Conditionally Accepted will serve as the launching pad for my academic talk show, Academic T with Denise, will actually become a reality. (I could live with just a podcast like On Being, though.) There is life after tenure; so, I’m doing what I need to to have both of those (life and tenure), but also doing the groundwork for my goals for intellectual activism post-tenure.

I am fortunate to have friends, family, and colleagues who support me in these endeavors. I realize that this is not afforded to everyone. But, I also recognize that these concerns – job security, health, and needing to make a difference – are particularly heightened for me as a Black queer person. That is, maybe I’d be stressed, but not mentally ill and medicated, if I were a white cishet man. Maybe I’d be a touch nervous about tenure, but not concerned that my work would be trivialized as “me-search” – even if I studied the lives of other privileged people. Maybe, maybe, maybe – but that is my reality (for now). I need to stick around along enough to ensure that this is not the reality of future unicorn scholars.

 

On not Writing

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Erika Gisela Abad has a Ph.D. in American Studies, and works at Center for Puerto Rican Studies investigating intersectionality, cultural experience, and oral history among Puerto Rican communities and families.  In this post, Erika reflects on how her research in Puerto Rican Chicago sparks tension and memory in dialogues and debates with her mother.  

I struggle with not writing. Sitting with my mom after a long day’s work watching ridiculous TV shows on streaming media. I do this in the midst of professional uncertainty when my conscious tells me it is important to, well, send out applications. A woman struggling with the invisibility of her work, of her motherhood, closing the computer allows me to make her visible in the mundanity of the everyday to which we’ve arrived.

A mixed class Latina the second to finish college, the first PhD, I got this degree because making a living as a writer a mentor once told me, was going to be difficult. In the place many predicted the MFA would land me, I sit with my mom because of the reasons I write:

To heal, to release anger, to get to truths neither speaking nor working reveal. Drafting and talking through to forgive what moments trauma doesn’t want to let go. As I once wrote a mentor, it’s about getting to the table and trying to write what the other person coming to the table could or would look like. It’s about practicing with characters and metaphors how to listen through the trauma, whether the trauma be colonial, patriarchal or material – whether the trauma be that which has been named or that which must be kept invisible. Sometimes the struggle to survive demands struggles be kept silent. Human suffering, as inevitable as it is, often gets lost in the pursuit of fantasy as well as forgetting. Coming to the table is also about assessing whether the wheel turning revolution can be rebuilt or if the pieces of memory missing – memory missing because of what can’t yet be named – requires so many of us to rebuild it.

And sitting with my mom is about waiting, waiting for memory to reappear. And her memories awaken in the memories of others I record as an oral historian. Memories of parking lots turned into playgrounds, memories of late buses to colleges she never imagined. Memories of drinking Dr. Pepper for the first time, her comfort food, the comfort of being able to know more, taste more than poverty and patriarchy permitted to a young woman growing up where Puerto Ricans were trying to make place. These memories give her life beyond the college she never finished for no other reason than being by herself. Her stories lifting up from computer screens in a voice still weary of helping and reaching, come to life beyond the place of making meaning of leaving that requires returning, overwhelmed by isolation.

And I sit with that, when our skin color differences do not write away the sameness of racism we experience. A paleness that encourages forgetting that my brownness writes on the page, for the stage in ways that have her admit—not to me—that the fight continues. Responses to racism are coded in the traumas we share. Retorts and resistance colored by the adverse childhood experiences that divide us. Sitting is all she wants at the end of the day, at the end of days running, at the end of years climbing to find stable ground in which to root, in which to lift me, among her other children higher. My hands race and wring, legs twitch because work, all the kinds, exige movement.

And I struggle to not write in those moments: moments where the cogs in my head turn too fast for her to keep up; when the questions she asks receive huffs and stomps out looking for roads bigger than the rooms we occupy. In those moments where the grumbles she makes about the car driver who works when she doesn’t, because the car that is freedom to her and is more work to me in ways that put her back on the bus, on the train to move because her fixed time challenges the time that, for me, remains in constant question. The need for work fuels us in speeds and codes the other doesn’t understand.

It takes seconds to remember a woman speaking of a girl ashamed and strained by the laundry she carries on the bus. And I see my mom there, then, aching and taking days off to not have to, again cross the street with bags and baskets. She bought to own to never again walk or rent or borrow. She works to have the luxury, luxuries she couldn’t have back then, then when Puerto Ricans were beginning to make meaning, Puerto Ricans who form the history I collect. Her life fills up in the margins of those stories, of those whose mark on Puerto Rican Chicago get printed in newspapers, shine in their awards, appear on screens to see. Those Puerto Ricans now, in between arguments and questions, spark her to remember her story. Histories she lived differently, differently for reasons the more I learn from others, the more she reveals.

So I stretch and listen and sit still, waiting, waiting till she’s asleep to pull out the books, to open the pc, to take out the pen and paper to write. Because writing is still needed to heal, to move, to forgive, to let go, to uncover, to remember. But not writing—not writing in those moments I steal from reason, from economy—allows me to say thank you, thank you the only way a struggling writer knows how. By counting the wrinkles in her face, the sighs in her stories, knowing that, in between them, remain moments and movements to keep me writing.

When it hurts not to write

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In this post, J reflects on their writing processes, and asks readers to reflect on these aspects in their own lives and the way writing or feeling unable to write at a given moment feel and take shape in our own lives.

How do you go about writing?  What is your process?  What do you do when you cannot write for any given reason?  Do you look forward to writing or is it something you have to make yourself do?  Do you operate via a structured schedule, with set time limits and goals, and other rules to keep you on track?  By contrast, do you operate in a more fluid manner writing when the feeling comes or an idea presents itself or some combination of these and other factors?  Do you need to be indoors, outdoors, anywhere specific to write?  Do you keep little handwritten notes or recordings on your phone or maybe a journal littered with in progress ideas and analyses?  These are simply a few of the multitude of options and variations I have come across among other writers over the years.  In this post, I want to share my own experience to encourage others to reflect on how you go about the process of writing and what writing is like for you.

In my case, writing is simultaneously a major part of how I make a living and a huge chunk of my personal life.  Very few things that I have encountered in this world can match how wonderful it feels to write.  I write creatively, academically, publicly, privately, empirically, theoretically, collaboratively, and solo, and attempt to write as much as possible because it is a prime site of fun, pleasure, and enjoyment for me throughout my life.  Despite these lovely aspects of writing in my world, it is also deeply painful for me when I cannot write – I feel lost, like a part of me is missing – and no matter the reason, anytime I cannot write my moods, emotions, and even self concept (i.e., my own estimation of who I am, what I’m worth, etc) suffer greatly.  Put simply, for me writing is a delicate ongoing balance between pleasure (when I can do it I am filled with joy) and pain (when I cannot do it I feel terrible).  I can’t pretend this is the same or different for other writers, but this is what it feels like for me.

All of the above is complicated by the fact that I (best I can tell) have no control over whether or not I can write at a given time.  Likely tied to other elements of the way my brain operates, I go through shifts or fluctuations wherein sometimes writing is the easiest, most natural, and smooth experience in the world, and at other times I just cannot do it no matter what I try or what deadlines or projects I have at my disposal at the time.  In the former case, I’m basically in paradise writing every day and rather communicative in other ways.  In the latter case, however, my entire mood shifts downward, I become very quiet and isolated, and I feel broken or lost.  This ongoing experience means that I write in cycles – or bursts as a close friend of mine termed the process a while back – wherein the difference in me, in what I produce, in how I feel, in how I communicate, and in how I spend my time is noticeable to those closet to me (in fact, many times these wonderful people get very worried about me during “not writing” times because of how down, distraught, and isolated I become and I’m quite lucky to have people who care so much in those moments and reach out to check on me).

This cycle in many ways dictates or shapes the rest of my life.  From August 2014 until the end of January 2015, for example, I could not write, and as is generally the case during such a “not writing” period I was very isolated, depressed (both emotionally and in terms of clinical symptoms) most of the time, and people I collaborate with had to basically wait until the part of me that writes – as one friend put it – “came back to life.”  On the other hand, from February 2015 until the end of November 2015 I experienced a nonstop burst wherein I wrote every day, filled up the inboxes of colleagues, collaborators and friends, and felt happy, satisfied and able to be social (as much as I ever am).  At present, I’m somewhere between the two extremes, which is honestly a new place for me.  I can write a little bit, but its harder than when I’m “on” one of my bursts, but I also have days where I just stare at the screen and want to (or do) cry and scream.  I don’t know if this is a new addition to the cycles or a one time thing, but I feel like I’m located in between the two versions of me I’ve become comfortable with.

This newfound in between “writing” and “not writing” led me to wonder what writing is like for other people.  While this is something I have talked with many people about, I thought it might be useful to ask on a broader scale what the writing processes looks like for others, and also to offer my own experience for anyone who has yet to learn that there is not just one way to go about writing (a curious lesson I come across that some undergrad and graduate students have picked up from some unknown sources).  After years of seeking advice, figuring out my own methods, and working with people who have very different methods (for example both Xan and Lain here at Write Where It Hurts have different writing processes and experiences than I do), I’ve become fairly certain that there are a wide variety of ways people go about the process of writing.  As a result, I want to encourage others to think about these processes, what works and doesn’t work for a given person, and how we can utilize such insights to both Write Where It Hurts and manage the ways it may hurt when we have trouble writing.