I am grateful for the year that did not ask politely. For the grief that pressed its full weight against my chest. For the darkness that stayed longer than comfort allows. For the depression that hollowed me out, for the loneliness that stripped away every performance, every borrowed certainty.
I am grateful for reaching the bottom and finding no floor— only myself, breathing, still here.
For the end of an era that did not close gently, but demanded surrender. For the opening of a new chapter written without promise, only willingness.
For a body that carried trauma in silence until it could not anymore. For the slow, unglamorous work of healing. For learning that peace is not a reward, but a practice. For finding the Creator not in answers, but in endurance.
For forgiveness that burned on the way through. For forgiving others without excusing the harm. For asking forgiveness without protecting my ego. For learning that love requires truth, and truth costs something.
For walking away from the classroom— not because I failed it, but because I outgrew the shape it required me to hold. For choosing a life of writing and research, where listening is labour, and honesty is the measure.
For closing the door on a decade of becoming brave enough to say goodbye to what once kept me alive. For understanding that survival and belonging are not the same thing.
For my children, who taught me what love looks like when it is tested. For my parents, as time rearranged everything we knew. For my sisters, whose depth and courage reminded me I was not alone.
For finding love with Tom— steady, chosen, real— and for finding myself, without apology, without permission, at last.
And now, I give thanks for choosing life with my whole body. For committing to kindness after bitterness would have been easier. For continuing the work of healing when no one is watching.
I walk forward toward the highest spiritual vibration I can hold, aware that I will falter, aware that I will grieve again, and willing still.
This is my gratitude. Not because the year was gentle, But because I survived it awake.
@Amy Tucker #alonetudeu
Created by ChatGPT 5.2, Dalle 3, 2025
Author: amytucker
Weytk.
I am Amy Tucker, an educator whose life has been shaped by questions of belonging, precarity, and the institutions that hold us or let us fall.
I was the first person in my family to attend university. By the time I was twenty-five, I was a single mother of three, working at a donut shop, taking courses part-time when I could afford them, learning what it means to calculate whether you can afford both groceries and textbooks. Those years taught me things about resilience and systemic exclusion that no textbook could convey. They also taught me that the academy is simultaneously a site of possibility and a space where people like me were never quite expected to arrive.
For twenty-five years, I have worked in education, including eighteen years at Thompson Rivers University on the unceded territory of the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc within Secwépemcúl'ecw. Seventeen of those years have been as a contract faculty member, teaching organisational behaviour, business ethics, strategic leadership, teamwork, creativity and innovation, and human resources. I also serve as Prior Learning Assessment Advisor, guiding learners to recognise and document the knowledge they carry from lived experience. My pedagogy draws from trauma-informed education, Indigenous methodologies, and humanities theory, approaching each subject as a human question shaped by power, meaning, and the knowledge systems we choose to honour.
I am currently completing my Doctor of Social Sciences at Royal Roads University, with defence expected in early Winter 2026. My dissertation, Through Our Eyes: A Photovoice Study of Belonging, Precarity, and Possibility with International Students in Higher Education, employs participatory visual methodology to document how international business students experience and theorise the gap between institutional inclusion rhetoric and lived belonging. The research integrates sociology, leadership, communication, ethics, and higher education studies, grounded in what I call asymmetrical precarity: a recognition that precarities can rhyme without being identical, enabling solidarity without appropriation.
I serve as Chair of the Non-Regular Faculty Committee for the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC, advocating for sessional and contract educators whose resilience too often subsidises institutional failures they never created. This work is inseparable from my scholarship: both are forms of witnessing, naming, and refusing to accept conditions that diminish human dignity.
My research interests include academic precarity, equity and inclusion in post-secondary institutions, labour in higher education, community-based and participatory methodologies, trauma-informed pedagogy, AI ethics, and leadership in crisis. I seek an interdisciplinary postdoctoral position, doctoral fellowship, or qualitative research project to continue this work.
Beyond academia, I am a monthly columnist for The Kamloops Chronicle and a regular book reviewer for The British Columbia Review. I represent Team Canada in age-group triathlon and am a long-distance open-water swimmer, finding in endurance sport the same lessons I find in scholarship: that meaningful work requires patience, that discomfort is often the pathway to transformation, and that we are capable of more than we imagine when we refuse to quit.
I carry within me threads of French ancestry reaching back to Acadian territory, a distant Mi'kmaq connection I hold with curiosity and respect rather than claim, and an Austrian grandfather who crossed an ocean knowing that belonging must be made rather than assumed. These inheritances shape how I understand identity, territory, and the ethics of conducting research and teaching on Indigenous lands.
I believe the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy. I believe research should serve transformation. And I believe that belonging, when it comes, is made rather than given.
Kukwstsétsemc.
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