Content Warning: This post contains reflections on trauma, childhood experiences, and the body’s memory of harm. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
May 2, 2025. Friday morning. My kitchen table at home.
The notification sound chimed while I was grading papers, the familiar tone I had conditioned myself to respond to instantly after seventeen years of contract teaching. I reached for my phone expecting routine correspondence, perhaps a student question or a committee meeting notice. Instead, the subject line read: “Employment Status Update.”
My contract position for the fall of 2025 and 2026 was uncertain.
The email was brief, professional, and efficient. It explained enrolment shifts, budget realities, and difficult decisions. It thanked me for my service. It wished me well in future endeavours. It arrived without conversation, without the relational check-in that twenty-five years at Thompson Rivers University might have warranted. It arrived as data, a notification, a conclusion reached somewhere in a spreadsheet I would never see.
I sat at my kitchen table, the same surface scarred by coffee rings from decades of grading student papers, and stared at the screen. Seventeen years as contract faculty. Twenty-five years total at the institution. Course materials I had developed, teaching awards I had won, students I had mentored, committees I had served. Excellence that had earned institutional recognition but never security, never permanence, never the guarantee that May would arrive without this particular notification.
The plaques were arranged on my shelf, forming a timeline of institutional validation: the TRU Student Empowerment Award (2021), the TRU Interculturalisation Award (2023), and the Faculty Council Service Award (2024). Each one represented students who had written nomination letters, colleagues who had advocated, and committees who had deliberated. Each one testified to work that the institution deemed exemplary. Yet on May 2, 2025, none of that mattered against the budget’s arithmetic.
Thirty days later, another notification arrived. This time, the subject line read: “Congratulations.” I had won the Faculty Council Teaching Award for 2025. The irony possessed a weight that was almost architectural. The institution that had deemed me expendable simultaneously declared I was exemplary. The same system that processed my termination processed my commendation. Two documents, two logics, two entirely separate bureaucratic pathways that never spoke to each other.
I understood something sitting at that kitchen table, something I had been circling around for years without language to name it: I had forgotten how to simply be. I could perform brilliantly. I could show up on time, deliver lectures, grade papers, serve on committees, support colleagues, and mentor students. I could produce evidence of my value constantly, compulsively, because survival demanded it. But when the institution finally severed that demand, when performance could no longer protect me, I discovered I had no idea who I was underneath all that doing.
The months between May and December 2025 felt like slow-motion drowning. I woke at 3 AM with panic attacks, my heart racing, convinced I had forgotten something critical, only to remember I had nothing to forget because I had no employment requiring vigilance.
I checked my email compulsively, even though I had no employer to email. I filled every hour with tasks, projects, obligations, anything to avoid the emptiness that waited when I stopped moving. The relief I expected from no longer needing to perform never arrived. Instead, what came was a vast, disorienting blankness, an inability to rest even when rest was finally possible.
Thompson Rivers University – Faculty Teaching Award 2026
Photo Credit: Jesal Thakkar, 2025