Day Two: The Clinical Layover: Rehearsing the Unlived Life

I am sitting in a hotel room in Calgary. I am a ghost haunting my own transition.

This space is the architectural equivalent of a blank stare. It is clinical and sterile, a box designed for the thousands of weary travellers who have sat in this exact chair before me, leaving behind nothing but the faint scent of industrial cleaner and the echo of a television left on too long. There is a bed, a desk, a television, and the relentless, mechanical humming of the mini-fridge. This low-grade vibration mimics the anxious, internal chatter of my own mind.

I have set up my “maintenance equipment” on the desk: my laptop, my books, and the literature review I am currently using as a shield. I wake at 5:00 a.m. sharp, Pacific Standard Time, my body moving as if this were a typical workday of busyness, as if staying occupied might still offer a sense of order.

The Trap of the Rehearsal

Even here, in this Neutral Zone between the life I left in British Columbia and the Alonetude awaiting me in Loreto, I am desperately trying to establish structure. I can feel my old self, the one who built an entire identity around reliability, availability, and competence, attempting to reestablish control.

The rehearsals begin almost immediately. Do I wake early to watch the sunrise, as someone grounded and intentional might? Do I anchor the day by watching the sunset, as if presence itself could be scheduled?

I am mentally planning my arrival as if it were a syllabus. I find myself agonizing over the mundane details of a life I haven’t even started yet:

The Routine: Should I plan a strict writing schedule to ensure productivity?
The Performance: Should I jog at 7:00 am to prove I’m still disciplined, or should I swim at 1:00 pm and siesta at 2:00 pm like a “proper” retiree?
The Logistics: Where should I shop? How will I navigate the village without looking like “just one” inadequate person at a table?
The Diet: Should I maintain a strict low-carb regime, or should I finally learn how to “go with the flow” and listen to what my body actually needs?

I am realizing that these questions are just the “lies that burnout tells”. They are my “rehearsed explanations” and elaborate to-do lists used to avoid the disorienting blankness of being truly alone.

I am addicted to the dopamine hit of a completed task, and I am terrified that if I stop acting, I will discover I am nothing.

The Unthought Known

By the door, my orange suitcase sits unopened. It is my “transformational object,” a vessel for the “unthought known,” the knowledge held in my body that I haven’t yet found the words to tell. Christopher Bollas (1987) suggests that such objects hold parts of the self waiting to be rediscovered. Inside that suitcase is more than just linen and walking shoes; it keeps the “ash” of twenty-five years of academic performance and the quiet grief of the pandemic years that hollowed me out.

As I sit here, my nervous system is in a state of chronic activation, scanning for demands even in this unlived-in room. As I sit here, my nervous system is in a state of chronic activation, scanning for demands even in this unlived-in room. Drawing on Stephen Porges’ (2011) Polyvagal Theory, I recognize I am struggling to move from hyper-vigilance into a Ventral Vagal state of safety. I am a ghost haunting my own morning, showering without feeling the water, eating without tasting the food.

I am a ghost haunting my own morning, showering without feeling the water, eating without tasting the food. I am already mentally in the Sea of Cortez, replaying the past and rehearsing the future, while completely missing the sensory reality of the present.

The 25-Year Performance

For the past quarter century, I have been juggling roles: the mother, the educator, the spouse, the neighbour, and the athlete. I sat on endless committees unpaid. I was the graduate student competing for two degrees at once, yet never taking the time to finish either, always rushing to the following requirement, truly.

I was the “poster child” of institutional success, the office superhero who showed up at 8:00 a.m. and stayed long after the day was over. I collected the markers of value:

The Best Teacher
The Best Employee awards.
The Interculturalization Award
Doctorate Research Award
Student Experience Award (twice)
The Advocate for precarious workers

I was kind, present, and reliable. I was shouting to the world: Look at me, I am a person of value and worth. But standing here now, I have to ask: Who was I trying to prove my worth to?

Nobody was listening—not even me.

The Discipline of Staying

The invitation this morning is to stop the rehearsal.

I must notice the urge to escape into planning and “doing”.
I must pause and breathe through the clinical hum of the fridge.
I must practice the discipline of staying—staying with the silence, staying with the transition, and staying with the discomfort of having no next thing pressing against me.

Today, I leave the clinical layover in Calgary on the direct flight to Loreto. I am flying south to a place where the light is soft, and the water is gold. But the work of Arrival begins here, in the sterile quiet, by letting go of the need to manage the menu of my own transformation.

Actual arrival is about presence in the internal sense: being fully where you are, with no next thing pressing against the edge of the current thing. By letting go of the need to manage the menu of my own transformation, I am practicing what William Bridges (2004) identifies as the difficult necessity of the transition process: allowing the old identity to fall away before the new one has even begun to take shape.

As I prepare to board, I am consciously practicing the discipline of staying—staying with the silence and the discomfort of having no role to perform. I am moving from a state of hyper-vigilance into a Ventral Vagal state of safety, recognizing that my body is already softening as I move toward the Sea of Cortez.

I am leaving behind the performance of the “office superhero” and the award-winning educator. I am choosing to be a “body in water,” a being alive on a planet spinning through space, rather than a vehicle carrying a brain to a meeting. I had arrived. And for this morning, in this clinical box, that has to be enough.

Image: Alonetude: A Practice for Renewal

Created Gemini, Flash variant, Google, 2 Jan. 2026, gemini.google.com/.

References

Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. Free Association Books.

Bridges, W. (2004). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes. Da Capo Press.

Heidegger, M. (1971). Building dwelling thinking. Harper & Row.

Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.

Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. University of California Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

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. View all posts by amytucker