Socks

Let's talk about how different facets of health intersect (I don't see the campaign today in an unproblematic light given its corporate connections, but visibility is so critical that an awareness day can't hurt). When I first bought the skein I knit these socks from, in October 2014, I darkly joked that these were going to be my "s.a.b.l.e. socks" - the acronym meaning "stash acquisition beyond life expectancy," a term crafters use for folks who have a tremendous quantity of yarn, fabric, or whatever might be their medium of choice. When I got this wool, however, I had perhaps a half dozen balls of yarn in my collection. I was brutally sick that fall, having just been diagnosed with #neuromyelitisoptica - a rare autoimmune disease that resembles severe MS. I asked my neurologist what he thought my prognosis was. He couldn't tell me, and the stats I found online for my condition were pretty grim. As my health declined in ways I couldn't have imagined, I feared I wouldn't live long enough to make more than a couple more pairs of socks - let alone write a PhD thesis. My poor hand function meant that knitting was excruciatingly slow and often painful, so I figured that a small amount of yarn would last me the rest of my natural life.
The people around me saw the physical manifestations of my condition (not hard, as I was driving a conspicuously large scooter or, on good days, shuffling about with a Mussorgsky-themed walker). But only a handful of friends made space for conversations about what I dealt with emotionally. It was not just the physical illness that felt like it was literally killing me - I also feared that my declining mental health would bring me to a breaking point. A physiotherapist told me I'd never walk again, and at first I actually accepted that as not a huge deal - I figured I could cope with that, if only I could find a way to not wake up with a sense of dread each morning, and if only my physical disability weren't so isolating. If only the friends who'd pulled away that fall became close again, if only I could trust that my thoughts were my own rather than the product of a cocktail of medications.

Partial paralysis was a physical challenge, but the emotional impact of an acquired disability and its social consequences was devastating. I sought counselling, but the resources available to me were limited - my family was supporting me in paying for physiotherapy, and a therapist would have been more than we could do at one time. The health centre at my university allows for six counselling sessions per student, and I maxed out on those much earlier in my illness; instead, when I begged for help shortly after my worst relapse, I received one short session in which the counsellor repeated how resilient I was, then referred me for group therapy - something I'd have liked, if the group were targeted for people in my situation, but it was a general anxiety group for stressed out students, and they were coping with different issues than I had. The hospital social worker encouraged me to move back to Toronto to be closer to my family, but that would mean leaving my friends, a new choir, and the cat I fostered. Plus, our home there isn't wheelchair accessible. I was too scared to tell most people that I alternated between wishing that I were dead, and being terrified that I'd die before I was ready. I was afraid that if I didn't act optimistic and inspiring that my friends would drift away.

So for a long time I associated the yarn I'd bought with the challenges I had at the time. It was well over a year before I got it out of the closet to cast on a pair of socks, because of the emotional weight that I'd bestowed on this bit of fibre. It took me another few months to finish the knitting project. I've been relapse-free for nearly a year now, and just finished them before the holidays. I'm in a far better mental health situation now. So, I guess these are now my "stable" socks.

The vertical edges of the stairs: a late-night rant about accessibility and academic buildings

On many university webpages, photographs of heritage buildings take centre stage. Old buildings speak to us, with weathered walls lining weathered halls, and hardwood floors trampled to a patina. I love seeing echoes of the past - even the gnarly bits. But here’s a gnarly piece of the present, and future: our fetishization of these lovely old buildings means that some of us cannot get inside. Indeed, the squeaky staircase with intricate railings is gorgeous. But it’s a monument to an inaccessible past, and a barrier to my future. Where you see the horizontal boards where your feet will land on your route upstairs, I see the vertical edges that could one day confine me to the ground floor, or exile me from the building.

Let’s put it starkly: if you do not build an elevator, I might not have a job. I want nothing more than to work as a historian, in a university. Researching and teaching about the past drive me. In a couple of years, I’ll likely be searching for an academic job. This is an uphill battle for anyone working on a PhD in the humanities, and we don’t all succeed. However, I have a disability, and can’t count on always being able to walk. In my field, that is a massive additional barrier to employment, by virtue of the built environment. The pool of jobs available to me will decrease with every step I cannot climb. Many universities have dozens of lovely heritage buildings: buildings where the toilets have personalities of their own, and none are wheelchair accessible; buildings with ornate staircases, and no elevator; buildings that are important, apparently, but not important enough that I have an equal right to access them. 

When you use heritage as a justification for not making buildings accessible, we are situating the value of that space solely in the past. You are also commemorating a history that prioritizes the voices and activities of those who can climb stairs, open doors, and move easily through the spaces in our community. When you tell me that you can’t bear to change a historic building, you are telling me that you value the aesthetics in commemorating privileged lives over and above taking steps towards universal access. Claims that a building simply “can’t” be made accessible are, by and large, oversimplified. It’s not that you can’t - it’s that you won’t prioritize it. Organizations instead allocate budget lines to maintaining an inaccessible status quo, claiming to have too many other important projects, to being stretched thin. But disabled people are stretched thin, preparing for plan B, plan C, plan D, plan E, arranging and rearranging our lives to compensate for other people’s reluctance to plan. 

We need allies. Ask about accessibility, even if you think it doesn’t affect you personally. If you have a job in an inaccessible building, take the responsibility to push for changes in your workplace, so that mobility isn’t an unofficial requirement for those who work with you and learn from you. Institute a policy to hold events only at accessible venues, even if those spaces are more expensive. Remember, too, that your own mobility is only temporary. Bodies change. Buildings should, too.

un-dress

As the weather gets warmer, the street harassment gets worse. Six men today made comments about my body; a seventh suggested that I smile. I pulled off my heels so I could run home faster. 

"Let's see what's under that dress, babe."
The traffic light turns from green to amber to red. Stop. Stop in your tracks; don't come closer to me. What is under this dress is half a lifetime of fear, of muscles that tense and skin that sweats in terror when you ask to undress me on the sidewalk. What is under this dress is rage that boils through my gut, bile going up my throat as my body prepares to fight because I know I cannot run. What is under this dress is a constellation of scars, so faint only I can see them. No, no, no, no, etched everywhere unwanted hands have touched. Under this dress is a hope that the words on the street won't peel off layer after layer of skin, until my skeleton is picked bare by men who want to see whether my bones themselves will bleed when they command my pelvis, my breasts, my spine that protests, to smile.

Let me be bitter

I've recently read a few things on the internet that rub me the wrong way. Somehow there seems to be a culture that moving on from something difficult necessitates gratitude - I find this jarring. I'm frustrated and short of sleep, so this won't be the most coherent post on here.

"To the person who told me I wouldn't amount to anything, thank you."
"Why I am grateful to the bullies who _______."

There are a few articles with this sort of theme floating about online (The Mighty seems to be one of the worst offenders for this). I'll respect that some people approach their experiences this way; that's their prerogative. But it almost reads as though gratitude is the default, healthiest way to heal. And it's troublesome.

It goes a step far in Carmen Aguirre's recent article [TW - she describes her experiences of being raped as a child] in the Guardian. She thanks her rapist for teaching her about compassion. Now, I don't want to censor her experiences or how she presents them - but at the same time, it frightens me that her words could be taken by a predator as justification for their actions. Any rational person would know it isn't, but rapists aren't rational people - they're entitled people, who will take anything they can get and some things they cannot.

The classmates who bullied me as a child didn't teach me that my individuality is worth more than their opinions. My friends and my family taught me that. The bullies did their best to teach me that I was worthless and would never be cool enough to be loved. I learned to persevere in getting the health care I needed by being affirmed by the professionals who got things right, not ignored or belittled from the ones who got it wrong. And most of all, the man who raped me didn't teach me to be sensitive to my body, be compassionate, or anything positive. I could have learned these things through joyful experiences, not rape. Instead, he taught me to always look over my shoulder, to investigate every bump in the night, to incessantly check whether the door was locked. He taught me to assume by default that people showing interest in my body were violent by default. That my body was a thing he could abuse at will. He taught me that I would never, never truly be safe. Nobody should have to learn these things. I will not thank anybody for showing me these things.

No girl should ever come of age by having her body violated.

Unmapping Empathea

This is a reflective piece that I wrote in the context of a course I am teaching. I promised my students that I would do the reflective assignment alongside them. 

Unmapping Empathea

I have a confession: for weeks, my mind has been attempting to rename this course “Imaginary Futures” rather than “Experimental Futures.” I suppose, then, it is unsurprising that one thing I have been pondering for the past several weeks is the extent of the limitations that so many people place on our own imaginations, and on our visions for the future. This starts even in childhood, with our dreams circumscribed by television programs and the admonishments of parents and teachers. One thing I am immensely thankful for now is that while my imagination was certainly reined in by the structures in which I grew up, I was cared for by adults who encouraged me to remain creative. Even so, I have recently realized that the alternatives I envisioned were hardly revolutionary.

When I was about eleven, my elementary school informed its students that we would be involved in consultations for a new playground. This would be built after I graduated, but since I aspired to become an architect at that age, the prospect excited me. I keenly missed a dinosaur-themed playground that had been recently demolished from a favourite park and hoped that we could build something similarly exciting at my school. We participated in the consultations in multi-age groups, and I remember a definite split between the younger and the older students. When asked what amenities they wanted the playground to have, the younger children asked for roller coasters, petting zoos, and water slides. The older children hoped for a good swing set, a better soccer field, and other similarly tame, traditional playground structure. Those of us in the older grades laughed at the younger children’s fanciful ideas. The parents and teachers involved in playground planning seemed to dismiss all of our ideas, stressing the need for safety above all. Though our new playground would be attractive and castle-themed, any apparatus from which a child might fall was removed from the blueprints. When Playscape 2000 was completed, it was a disappointment for many children. While amusement park rides were certainly beyond the space and budget constraints of the project, even the spirit behind those suggestions—that children wanted something exhilarating and unique—was barely considered. It may have been logistically challenging, but I certainly think the petting zoo idea should not have been so quickly dismissed.

I think of so many of the structures that we see as alternative, and realize that they still buy into some of the more restrictive elements of what they seek to undo. I spent summers as a teenager at a creative arts camp. One of their t-shirts, which I still have, includes the words “wouldn’t it be great if artists ruled the world…for then we would have art in the offices.” Art in the offices, indeed, is very nice. But what if we no longer worked in conventional offices? What if artists pushed the boundaries of social structures so that our sites of work overlapped with our sites of recreation in ways that are as-yet unimagined?

The restrictive parameters that I placed on my own imagination are clearest when I think of one of my childhood hobbies: designing and redesigning an imaginary utopian community, Empathea. Empathea started as a childhood dream, but it remains lodged in my mind nearly two decades later. It was born in the back seat of a rental car, somewhere near Haifa, Israel. My twin sister and I had just learned about kibbutzim—small agricultural communes in Israel—and wanted to expand the model on a larger scale. Our mother quickly explained that socialism was hardly a new concept, but we decided to play with it for the rest of our trip. Barely nine years old, we believed ourselves to be on the cutting edge of social innovation.

Over the course of the car ride, we hashed out the key tenets of our community. First and foremost, we knew it would be environmentally friendly. But what would that mean? Certainly, a place free of personal vehicles, such as the one in which we were riding. But what about roads, more generally? We decided that those might be necessary for deliveries, emergency vehicles, and, though we were hardly fond of this element, for garbage trucks. The space given to roads would be far outstripped, however, by green spaces: parks, forests, gardens, and backyards. Through our childhood, our backyard was our kingdom, and I don’t think it occurred to us to entirely abolish private land ownership. There would be ample public transit, and people would ride bicycles, or quadricycles if they had small children or lots of groceries. Mobility for the elderly or people with disabilities never crossed our minds at that point, and I suppose it never snowed in our imaginary world.

Over the coming years, we drew perhaps hundreds of maps of Empathea. At least one of them had a small shack on the outskirts of town, little more than a picnic shelter. This would be where people could go to smoke cigarettes; we saw smoking as a terrible offense but also recognized it as outside some people’s control. Looking back, I wonder if we were rather too sanctimonious, as we pondered what sort of punishment would be too harsh for people who littered. In some respects, our utopia was rather authoritarian, ruled according to the idealistic whims and values of nine-year-old twins.

As I grew up, I started to wonder how this town could ever come into being. Who would have the means and inclinations to reside here? Why did our childhood dream still assume that people would work in fairly standard professional jobs, live in houses, and produce garbage that would need to be carted away?  We never really considered at that point where the garbage would go, other than that it would not remain in town, or determined what would happen with people who could not work in a traditional job. But, most troublingly, we had taken it more or less for granted that we could find an available location to build a utopian community. This is the element that has weighed on me most heavily through my university education: as children, we didn’t understand that the land on which we lived was stolen, and so we assumed that it was easy enough to find more land. Indeed, on maps of the mountains where we rented a cottage each summer, there were plenty of undeveloped lakes and valleys. Of course, we didn’t want every lake to turn into an urban area, but I suppose we saw our own vision as an exception to any conservationist rule. I don’t like thinking of my childhood self as a potential miniature colonial power, but my imagination makes it clear that as middle-class white children, the colonial dispossession that granted us certain privileges was largely invisible.

We went back and forth as to what sort of terrain we would seek for Empathea. Rehabilitating the desert, following the narrative we had been taught about early Zionists? Building on a landscape that had been damaged by human use never crossed my radar screen, but now I wonder about the potential for an environmentalist collective community forming on lands torn apart by the tar sands or similar extractive industries. Over the past few weeks, situating Empathea in relation to the concept of rewilding has added further complexity to my questioning. Regardless of the terrain we envisioned for Empathea, we assumed that we would be building a community on a relatively blank slate, erecting new homes, transportation, and infrastructure. How would this change, however, if we were to resituate our idea in an urban setting, keeping but modifying the existing buildings and spaces to suit an environmental and collectivist society? Aside from making parks out of parking lots, what would this look like? And how could we rewild the people in the community, without imposing an authoritarian structure upon them?

In my early twenties, I moved from seeing Empathea as a map-able, physical space to framing it as a micronation. Some of these are tangible spaces—an island, or a private home. Others exist solely on the internet. So, I contemplated Empathea as a micronation in the form of an imaginary archipelago: small spaces, such as individual apartments, farms, or offices, connected only by their values and sharing no physical space, but surrounded by the seas of the (presumably corrupt) society at large. Then, concerned with the implication that such a model still relied on private property, I considered whether the islands could be much smaller: each island would consist of one consenting human body since our own bodies are the only spaces over which we can uncontestably hold sovereignty. Much more recently, I realized that boxing my imagination into even this model of a micronation still assumed that legitimacy comes with the model of the nation-state.

This is only one line of thoughtful concern that I now have about my aging childhood dream. I also wonder: could Empathea be an indigenized space without being appropriative and colonial? Could it be ecologically sustainable, and also accessible, following ideas of universal design, without being modernist? How do we avoid perpetuating an eco-apartheid in an ostensibly progressive community? Empathea is, on one level, unraveling, through the entropy of my constant questioning. But on another level, perhaps it is growing, as I question why it has, for nearly two decades, existed on paper, but why I have never taken steps to put it into practice. 

It's not actually about my feelings

A couple of months ago, I posted about a fellow grad student who has been harassing me for some time. He graduated at the end of the last semester, so in theory, he should be gone and the situation should be over. Not so. The first time I came to campus after the holidays, I ran into him a half dozen times. This may be coincidental rather than stalking - I have no means of judging his intent. But it's scary. He still has access to graduate office space and computing facilities, and someone in the department has employed him as a research assistant. So, I wrote to our chair to voice my concerns.

The chair met with a university conduct officer. Apparently, my options include going through human rights (tried that and failed), speaking to the ombudsperson's office (ditto), working with the campus safety officer (which I plan to do, though I'd hoped to resolve this at the departmental level) and speak with the guy's supervisor at his other job, in the hopes of changing his behaviour there. None of the options that the chair listed included anything that would change his behaviour within our department, where he is still present.

What irks me most, though, is that my chair's response focused on what could be done to address my feelings about the situation. Not addressing his behaviour, his ongoing presence. I don't need a safety officer to speak to me and try to get me to feel less afraid. I need someone to address the actions that are making me feel afraid. This is about harassment, about intimidation, about power - not about my individual feelings.

If someone was flicking a lighter menacingly at somebody's home, you wouldn't tell the homeowner to talk to the fire department about their fear of fire. You would speak to the lighter-wielder about the dangers of their actions, and potentially ban them from the vicinity.

As a woman, I will probably always be afraid of harassment. I don't truly anticipate that changing. My fear will go away when the harassment stops.

PTSD and higher education

Today, my department hosted a panel on mental health in university classrooms. Super necessary, and for the most part, reasonably informative. This was probably critical info for people who don't have much background in supporting students with mental health disabilities. The first two presenters were clear, and offered an overview of available resources that we could refer to. The last one, however, I feel was very problematic. The main part of his talk was ok - not the approach to accommodating students that I personally would have used, but it was fine. The trouble was after a faculty member asked what he thought of trigger warnings.

Our guest speaker doesn't like trigger warnings, because he doesn't find them effective. OK, I can see that, because they really aren't as effective as we'd like to hope they could be. The trouble I had was in his conceptualization of PTSD. He has been diagnosed with PTSD; so have I. We clearly have different experiences of it, but also different conceptualizations of the condition. I am distressed that he made out his perception to be indicative of everyone with PTSD.

He told us that people with PTSD are less sensitive than other people; numb. To a degree, yes, that's true - but we aren't numb to recalling our trauma. Instead we're numb to so many other things around us. He said that people who respond emotionally to depictions of trauma (and in this case his example was rape) don't actually have PTSD, but are merely upset about what happened to them. That's where I vehemently disagree. He talked about triggers as, for example, the little things - like if you're assaulted and you can smell onions nearby, you might be triggered by the smell of onions. And, yes, of course you might be. But that doesn't negate that you might still be triggered by, for example, a movie screened in class with a rape scene.

When PTSD was a challenge for me (it's not so bad recently), I could be triggered by little things that you'd never guess: things that were in the room at the time, that remind me of things he or I were wearing, smells, the pattern of the floor tiles. Things that I could run into, without warning, in a huge range of situations. They are bizarre, and specific to me and my experience. But I could also be triggered by perhaps more obvious things: the facial expression and body language of a man who knows he is about to get his way; phrases that connote pain and struggle. The sights and sounds that are fairly specific to rape or other bodily trauma. And lots of survivors, even with quite different experiences, will still find these things triggering. Think of if you break a glass: just because there are small fragments that end up under the oven that you find only years later does not negate that there are also fragments right there, under your nose. You still have to be careful not to step on any of them.

Police

A friend and I were talking today about the assaults at UBC, and how we need a coherent sort of policy/procedure for dealing with sexual assault in our department. I asked her whether she'd know what to do/who to approach if she were assaulted by someone at school; she was pretty quick in saying that she'd go to the police. And on one level, that makes sense, because that's what we're taught to do. But to the best of my knowledge, many (all?) the UBC women didn't approach the police, initially. As an assault survivor, that makes more sense to me. 

With other crimes, when you talk to the police, you are a plaintiff, a witness, and so forth. In rape cases, your body becomes a crime scene, disembodied from the rest of you. That's where the trouble is, to me, in going to the police: I didn't go, because I didn't want the terrifying scrutiny of every inch of skin that reporting would entail, when I had already been so violated. I didn't want to be a patchwork of pieces of forensic evidence, didn't want photos taken of everything that was bleeding and torn. Because once those pictures exist, you become bleeding and torn, in the eyes of the law, and yet are also scrutinized as a potential liar, with your body being what they use to judge your character and the veracity of your claims. 

It's supposed to be criminal justice, but it just feels like an extension of the crime.

Certain feelings stick like glue

Today, I went to a poetry reading - an event I normally really enjoy when I attend, and I loved the work that the poets read. However, for a reason that I'm not entirely certain about, nobody sat next to me. I came alone, but it was a packed room. There were people standing at the back and sitting on the floor at the front, and yet nobody sat down next to me. Odds are it's nothing, but after being the kid who nobody wanted to sit next to or play with, that empty seat hurt in a way that, years and years later, I can't even quite describe.

If it happened here, there would be little difference

A disturbing article came up tonight on CBC, regarding the University of British Columbia. UBC expelled one of their history PhD students this week, after half a dozen of his classmates came forward with reports that he had assaulted them over the past couple of years. It took months for the department to do anything, and their chair (a woman whose work I hold in high regard) reportedly was more inclined to cover up the incidents than to do anything about them. As a graduate student in a history department at a different university, that hit home pretty hard.

I will preface what I am about to write by clarifying that there has been no direct threat to my physical safety within my own department.

In my department, we have an MA student who is rather volatile to his peers. He is the self-appointed ruler of the graduate computer lab, accosting certain other students when we use the facilities. Over the past two years, he's hovered over me and called me an "entitled bitch" while I used his preferred computer (not his own machine, just the one he liked the best - and the only one available when I entered the room), swore at me in the halls as though it was a manner of greeting, blocked me when I tried to navigate the halls using a mobility scooter, muttered "looks like you're getting what you deserve" when I came in once with an IV line for a medical treatment. In short, he's nasty. His poor behaviour, while not physically aggressive, is unwelcome and has been ongoing for approximately two years. Over a year ago, I spoke with my thesis supervisor, our graduate chair, and the university human rights officer. Well, it's not a human rights issue, supposedly. Supposedly, there's no rule against being a world-class jerk to your peers. The human rights office suggested mediation. My supervisor suggested, after he sent me a profanity-laden email, that I ask him for coffee to see if we could work things out (I did, and his emails escalated; she was evidently taking him to be a more reasonable person than he turned out to be). The graduate chair listened sympathetically, but ultimately did nothing that I know of. Nobody followed up with me, perhaps thinking that if they didn't know about further incidents that they could pretend that everything had somehow resolved. It hasn't - I've just gotten fed up with advocating for myself, so instead I've been waiting for him to either drop out or graduate, which should be quite soon now.

The result is that, since April 2014, I have only used the computer lab when I am reasonably sure he isn't on campus, or when I'm accompanied by a friend. I avoid passing his office late in the day when there aren't many people around. Since he works at the library and a couple of weeks ago refused to check out a book to me, I now make sure I don't go to that library location on days when he might be working there. The onus has fallen on me to avoid him so that I don't have to listen to his profanity and insults. I am fairly sure that I am physically safe in the department, but I do not feel emotionally safe there, and have not for some time now.

I am not the only graduate student who has issues with this particular man. He behaves this way to a few other people, and will make quite nasty comments about a particular faculty member to anyone whom he thinks might listen.

I know that this is worlds away from sexual assault. I'm not trying to make an equivalency here. But from the complacency that I have seen from my department, and their inaction in making any sort of tangible change to address his behaviour, I can say that I have exceptionally little confidence that my department would do anything differently.

The faculty I've mentioned here are good people. I like them, and respect them. This isn't about them - if they were personal friends of mine rather than my professors, I don't doubt that they'd be doing what my friends have done (go to the lab with me if I can't avoid printing something so that I don't need to be alone with him; urge me to report incidents; listen to me ranting about the whole situation). This is about an institutional culture that has silenced even some quite justice-oriented faculty, because we work in an environment where a man moving through the program and getting a degree unobstructed is more important than a woman not being berated and harassed.

So in short, if someone predatory (or with a very skewed idea of what constituted consent, in any case) came upon my department, I truly think it would have played out the same way. The question is how to change that culture, so that we can make sure that it doesn't happen here.