When I wrote that I am a white, settler, cisgender woman, I meant it as an anchor. A statement of location. I have come to understand that location is not sufficient. Location without interrogation becomes a kind of self-congratulation: I named my privilege, therefore I am accountable. I am writing this post to refuse that easy resolution.
During my month by the Sea of Cortez, I was able to rest because I had the financial resources, educational background, documented health concerns such as depression and burnout, and the ability to travel for an extended period. These are advantages rooted in structural inequalities. According to research on labour precarity in Mexico’s service economy, the hospitality and domestic work sectors are characterized by low wages, irregular employment, and minimal social protections, particularly for women and migrants (Lara-Valencia, 2008). The people who cleaned my rental, served my meals, and maintained the beaches I walked on would not have access to thirty days of rest, whether in Mexico or elsewhere. I could rest because no one depended on my labour for their survival. I could rest because the colour of my skin meant that my presence in a small Mexican town, however brief, was not subjected to the same scrutiny as that of workers and migrants. I could rest because institutions would fund my healing if I could narrate it in the right way.
And I wrote a thesis about it. I theorized my rest. I called it alonetude. I used the language of resistance and structural critique. But the question that has haunted me since February is this: Whose rest am I centring when I refuse to acknowledge the labour that enabled mine? Who could not afford the thirty days? Who could not afford to return home to safety?
I did not ask the house cleaner in my rental in Loreto if she could rest. I did not ask the servers in the restaurants I frequented whether the gentle pull of the natural world was available to them, or whether they, like me, were scanning for threat. But for them, the threat was not the aftermath of institutional harm that could be healed. Their threat was ongoing, written into policy, into precarity without exit, into economies that depend on their constant availability and their invisibility.
I want to think carefully about what happens when alonetude encounters difference. What does it mean to rest when your rest has been criminalized? What does chosen solitude look like when solitude has been imposed through incarceration, through isolation, through confinement? How do we theorize the gentle pull of the natural world when the natural world is not safe, when the water at the shoreline is patrolled, when rest in public space is illegal? And perhaps most urgently: How do I theorize my own freedom when that freedom was built, in part, on the structured unfreedom of others?
The Researcher as a Particular Body
Emily Dickinson wrote, “I dwell in possibility,” and I think about that line often now. I dwelled in possibility. The possibility that rest was available to me, that thirty days of attention would transform understanding, that embodied inquiry could become scholarship. That possibility was not equally distributed. It came to me because of where I stood.
I am a Master’s student, which means I have had institutional affiliation, library access, and theoretical grounding. I am a woman with a work history that could be narrated as precarity (contract labour), but that also meant I had experience with educational institutions, how to navigate them, and how to speak their language. I am white, which meant that my depression, my burnout, my need for healing could be heard as legitimate. According to Robin DiAngelo (2018), white tears and white emotional distress often receive more institutional attention and validation than the structural realities experienced by people of colour. I wonder what my embodied knowledge would have been worth if I had not been white. I wonder if the sea would have been available to me in the same way.
My particular body, my particular access to resources, my particular legibility to institutions as someone worth studying, someone whose experience matters—these all shaped the knowledge I produced in Loreto. According to scholarship on academic privilege and precarity, the temporary precarity experienced by credentialed workers differs fundamentally from structural precarity, as they retain cultural capital and institutional pathways even after job loss (Skeggs, 2004). The thirty days by the sea produced knowledge from the standpoint of a white, settler, educated woman whose occupational harm was significant but whose educational credentials meant it was never permanent, never without the possibility of being legible to some institution that might employ her again. This is the standpoint that produced alonetude. And alonetude, because it emerges from that standpoint, might not be available to people who do not occupy it.
What I Cannot Know
Let me be direct about this. I cannot fully know how alonetude would function in the context of racialized precarity, of precarity without the buffer of education, without the buffer of citizenship documentation, without the buffer of whiteness. I can theorize it. I can read it. I can listen to others describe it. But I cannot know it as the thing-itself, the way I can know solitude as the thing-itself, because I have lived it as a consequence of choice rather than circumstance.
Situated knowledges asks that I remain accountable to what I see from where I stand, and to remain honest about what I cannot see, what falls outside my position. It asks that I resist the temptation to universalize from the particular, to speak as if everyone’s alonetude would look like mine.
And yet there is something troubling about remaining quiet. There is something troubling about the idea that because I cannot fully know, I should not think carefully about these intersections. So I want to do something else. I want to think about the gaps. I want to create space for the research and voices that should follow mine.
Precarity Without the Educational Buffer
One thing I know is this: my precarity was always legible as precarity. After nineteen years of contract labour in the academy, there was documentation. There was a narrative arc. There was a Master’s program I could enter, credentials I could accumulate, and a thesis I could write. There were institutions that would recognize my harm as worthy of study. According to scholarship on gendered precarity in academia, women contract workers are increasingly documenting and theorizing their experiences within institutional contexts, though their labour remains undervalued and their voices often marginalized within formal academic structures (Coulter & Ramirez, 2023).
What of the precarious academic worker who does not have a degree? What of the adjunct whose partner depends on their income, who cannot afford to step away, who cannot afford Mexico, cannot afford ten days, cannot afford the permission that illness grants? In Standing’s (2011) analysis of the precariat, he describes not just the structurally precarious but those whose precarity is compounded by other forms of social marginalization. Precarity can feel especially acute when you are racialized, undocumented, have disabilities that institutions do not recognize, or if your accent signals you as an outsider before you speak.
According to the 2023 University of California Graduate Student Experience Survey, graduate students of colour reported significantly higher levels of burnout compared to their white counterparts, particularly among Black, Indigenous, and immigrant scholars (Smith et al., 2023). The research also found that these scholars were less likely to take time away, less likely to access mental health resources, and more likely to attribute burnout to personal rather than structural causes. This last finding troubles me deeply. It suggests that the inversion I described in the main thesis—the move from “What is wrong with me?” to “What conditions produced this?”—is itself a privilege. It is the privilege of blaming the system rather than yourself, the privilege of being heard when you do, the privilege of having your structural critique validated rather than pathologized.
So what would alonetude look like for a racialized scholar whose burnout is compounded by the daily microaggressions of a predominantly white institution, by the expectation to represent entire communities, by the constant questioning of credentials? Would thirty days in Mexico be accessible? Would the nervous system recalibrate when the return destination is an institution that will immediately resume its harm? Would there be any point in seeking healing if the structures that produce the harm remain untouched?
I do not have the answer. But I name the question because to remain silent is to imply that alonetude, as I theorized it, is the complete answer. And I do not believe it is.
What Disability Teaches About Alonetude
I wrote in the main thesis about depression, about the nervous system’s capacity to register threat, about the body as an archive. But I wrote from a particular location within disability, or rather, I wrote without naming disability fully enough. Depression, for me, was something that happened to a functioning person. It was something I could recover from. It was occupationally induced, which meant it could be resolved by changing occupation.
Not all disabilities work that way. According to the Mayo Clinic, depression is a serious mental health condition that causes persistent feelings of sadness or loss of interest in activities. It is not weakness, and it is not something a person can simply overcome through willpower alone. It requires treatment, time, and support. But even more importantly, not all disabilities resolve. And not all relationships with solitude are healing.
Autistic scholars and disabled theorists have written extensively about how stimming (self-stimulatory behaviour) is often pathologized but is actually a crucial form of self-regulation and embodied presence. They have also written about the particular challenges of solitude for neurodivergent individuals, the way that alone time without structure can be destabilizing rather than restorative, and can amplify anxiety rather than quiet it. According to a comprehensive review by Rapaport and colleagues (2021), periods of reduced external demand or unstructured time can present both challenges and benefits for autistic adults, with some experiencing such periods as restorative and others finding them isolating or anxiety-inducing depending on their specific sensory and regulatory needs. The quiet I found in Loreto, the absence of demand, the freedom from performance—for some neurodivergent people, that would be torture. Sensory deprivation, the lack of structured input, the absence of stimulation that allows a neurodivergent nervous system to regulate—these would not be medicine. They would cause harm.
There is also the question of disability compounded by precarity. The disabled precarious worker. Someone navigating both the structural violence of precarity and the structural violence of living in a world not built for their body. Can they rest? Can they afford the thirty days, the medication adjustments, the therapy that helps make sense of what has happened? Or is their precarity of a kind that does not permit even the imagination of rest?
And then there is the complex relationship to the body itself. I wrote in the thesis that my body was an archive, that it had registered what had happened to me, and that the task was to listen to it, to let it grieve, to let it soften. But what of the body that has been violated, that has not just registered harm but carries the mark of harm, for whom the body itself is not a site of safety but of ongoing threat? What of the disabled person whose body, as disability scholar Jasbir Puar (2017) writes, is already marked as unliveable, already coded as disposable within ableist systems?
Disability scholars and activists have been teaching us for decades that accessibility is not about accommodation for the few. It is about recognizing that the norms we take for granted are not neutral. They benefit some people and exclude others. When I created my retreat, I shaped it around my own needs and experiences, focusing on solitude, presence, and connection to nature. But as research on disability and public space shows, many environments are not designed with disabled people in mind, actively excluding disabled people from the ability to rest, to be present, or to experience nature without pain or surveillance (Kapsalis et al., 2020). This raises an urgent question: What would alonetude look like if it were designed with disabled people, for disabled people, and by disabled people? I don’t have that answer. But the fact that I don’t have it matters. The fact that I cannot imagine it means I am not the person to theorize it.
Working-Class Precarity and the Right to Rest
I have been thinking about my mother. She is eighty years old and has worked her entire adult life. She has never had the luxury of a retreat. She has never had the economic means to not work. And when she has rested, when she has been ill, she has felt the weight of guilt—the same guilt I described in Phase One of the thirty days. But her guilt has had different consequences.
I remember one winter when she had the flu. She was sixty-five. She lay on the couch in her living room in Lethbridge, and I called to check on her. She was apologizing. She was apologizing for being sick. Her partner needed to drive to work in Edmonton. The bills still needed to be paid. Her grandchildren would expect their grandmother to be at Christmas dinner, fever or no fever. Her boss—she was working part-time in retail at sixty-five—had not explicitly said she would lose her job, but that threat hung there, unspoken. Her rest meant someone else had to carry what she could not. Her rest was experienced as failure. It was experienced as a burden on others.
According to scholarship on the cultural dimensions of class experience, working-class people are often trained from early childhood to view rest as selfish, to see illness as an inconvenience rather than a legitimate need, and to internalize the belief that survival is achieved through constant, often invisible labour (Lareau, 2011; Skeggs, 2004). The guilt I felt in Phase One of my retreat, sitting still without producing anything, was a class guilt. It was the echo of messages internalized over a lifetime: your body is for working, your value is what you produce, your rest is someone else’s burden. But I had the resources to unlearn it in thirty days. I had institutional support. I had savings. I had a thesis project that gave my rest a name, a purpose, a legitimacy.
My mother did not have these things. And according to research on how economic precarity shapes health outcomes, particularly for aging women, the stress of persistent insecurity takes a measurable toll on physical and mental health, creating a cycle in which working-class women’s bodies literally cannot rest because the conditions that would allow rest do not exist (Case & Deaton, 2020).
And then there is the added layer for those whose precarity is racialized, whose class position is inseparable from their racial location. Angela Davis (1981) has written about how the racialized working class experiences precarity differently, how slavery and its aftermath have structured labour and rest in fundamentally different ways for Black Americans. According to research by Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree (2010), the opportunities for rest that are available to some people are fundamentally shaped by social inequalities. They write that some people’s ability to rest, to have leisure time, to experience freedom from labour, is structurally dependent on other people’s lack of rest, on their invisible labour, on their willingness to be exploited. This raises the painful question: who was resting while I rested by the sea? Whose labour made that possible? And whose labour made that labour possible?
This is the form of accountability that goes beyond naming my positionality. It is the accountability to ask: what would aloneness require to be genuinely available to those whose relationship to precarity is both occupational and structural, both contemporary and historical?
Alonetude and Care Responsibilities
In the main thesis, I mentioned that I was engaged in what Arlie Hochschild (1997) calls the “second shift”—parenting in both directions, caring for ageing parents while potentially supporting adult children. But I did not fully theorize the sex and gendered dimensions of that care, or how care responsibilities structure the availability of rest.
It is primarily women, particularly women of colour, who provide the majority of care work: childcare, elder care, and support work for disabled people. And this care work is among the most precarious, most underpaid, most invisible labour. A woman working multiple part-time care positions cannot access alonetude the way I could. She cannot leave her responsibilities for thirty days. According to research on temporal precarity and border communities, the lived experience of caregiving in precarious circumstances often involves what scholars call “temporal sequestration”—the condition in which responsibilities and structural circumstances rarely allow for extended rest or true presence, making moments of relief fleeting, fragmented, and incomplete (Avalos & Argueta, 2019). This might look like a quick bathroom break, a few minutes before work begins, or the brief pause before the next demand emerges. This is not alonetude. This is survival.
Arlie Hochschild (1997) describes what she calls “the time bind”—the way working parents, particularly mothers, are squeezed between the demands of employment and caregiving. She describes this squeeze as a form of structural violence. The solution, she argues, is not better time management for women. It is a structural change that redistributes care responsibilities and recognizes care as labour, as valuable, as deserving of resources and protection.
If we are to think seriously about alonetude and intersectionality, we must ask: what does it mean to rest when rest comes at the cost of someone else’s labour going unmet? What does it mean to take thirty days for myself when someone is depending on my care? And how do we create structures in which care is not the burden of individuals, particularly women, but is recognized as a collective responsibility?
Undocumented Precarity
I want to name something I have been avoiding. I cannot write about undocumented precarity from inside it. I can only write about it from the outside, with the awareness that my documentation—my citizenship, my credentials, my ability to move across borders—is granted to me through accidents of birth and structural privilege, and that it is violently denied to others.
But I cannot stay silent about it either. There are people in academic and academic-adjacent labour who are undocumented. They are adjuncts, research assistants, and graduate assistants. They are teachers. They are precarious in a way that cannot be resolved by a Master’s degree, cannot be cured by a sabbatical, and cannot be ameliorated by any amount of institutional goodwill, because the institution itself and the state in which it is embedded have deemed them deportable.
Precarity scholar Alicia Schmidt Camacho (2008) writes about how deportability structures the lives of undocumented people. It is not just economic precarity. It is ontological precarity. The undocumented person is always-already criminal, always-already outside the protection of law, always-already subject to removal. And in that context, rest is not an option. Alonetude, as I theorized it, assumes a body that can be alone without fear. It assumes a body that is not being tracked, not dependent on employment verification, and not vulnerable to deportation. It assumes a freedom that is itself a form of privilege.
What would rest look like for an undocumented graduate assistant working multiple jobs, always alert to the possibility of deportation, unable to travel beyond a certain radius, unable to be alone without fear? What would solitude mean when your very presence is rendered illegal? These are not rhetorical questions. These are questions that urgently need answers from those who live them.
This is perhaps where I must be most honest. I have no pathway to knowing undocumented precarity from inside. I can only name it, only insist that any theory of alonetude that does not address it is fundamentally incomplete. I can only call on those who live inside this precarity—if they choose to, if it is safe for them to do so—to theorize what rest, what solitude, what presence might look like when one’s very presence is rendered illegal.
What This Essay Is and Is Not
I want to be clear about what I am and am not claiming. I am not claiming to have solved the problem of intersectionality. I am not claiming that alonetude can be made equally available through a simple modification or expansion. I am not claiming that my naming of these gaps is the same as doing the work to address them.
What I am doing is refusing to let the main thesis stand on its own. I am refusing to let the acknowledgement of my positionality function as accountability. I am insisting that the gaps are real, that they matter, and that future research must be grounded in the lived experiences of those who occupy positions I do not.
I am also, importantly, insisting that I am not the right researcher for the next phase of this work. If alonetude is to become something that can hold intersectional complexity, it must be theorized by people with intersectional standpoints, by people whose precarity is not temporary, whose burnout is not legible to institutions as something worth studying, whose rest cannot be funded through personal savings because there are no personal savings to fund it. It must be theorized by disabled people, by working-class people, by people of colour, by undocumented people, by people navigating multiple and compounded forms of precarity.
The researcher-as-subject principle that grounds Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004) says that I should write from my lived experience. My lived experience has now come to include this: the recognition that it is particular, located, and limited. And that its particularity has been elevated to a kind of universality in the original thesis. And that elevation itself—the ability to make my particular experience seem general, to speak as though my truth is everyone’s truth—is a form of power that I must reckon with.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) warns against research practices that take from communities without reciprocity, that extract knowledge without returning something of value. I worry that in writing a thesis about alonetude, in theorizing rest as a political practice, I may have extracted something—attention, resources, the legitimacy of studying my own experience—without offering anything back to those whose rest remains unavailable, whose alonetude is impossible because the conditions for it have not been created.
What I Can Offer
If I cannot theorize intersectional alonetude, what can I do? I can do what this essay is doing. I can name the limits of my knowing. I can insist on the incompleteness of my work. I can create space—textual space, theoretical space, institutional space, if I have any access to it—for other voices.
I can also commit to what Resmaa Menakem (2017) calls “cultural somatic practice,” the understanding that healing is not just individual but collective, that my freedom is implicated in systems that deny freedom to others, and that accountability means not just thinking differently but moving differently, building differently, organizing differently.
What might this look like concretely? It might look like creating access to rest within institutions, rather than requiring individuals to fund their own healing. It might look like advocating for paid sabbaticals for precarious workers, for genuine job security, for the structural conditions that would make rest a right rather than a privilege. It might look like examining how precarity is racialized, gendered, and classed, and designing structural responses that address these specific intersections rather than treating precarity as a monolithic problem. It might look like listening—genuinely, carefully, without the expectation that others will explain themselves to me—to people whose precarity does not permit alonetude, and asking them what they need, what rest might look like, what healing might require.
It might also look like being willing to not have all the answers. To sit in the discomfort of incompleteness. To resist the urge to synthesize and resolve. To let the questions remain open, productive, and generative.
Audre Lorde (1988) wrote that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” That statement has anchored my entire thesis. But I must now add to it: caring for myself while others cannot care for themselves is not an act of political warfare. It is a privilege. And the work is not to hide that privilege, and not to give it up, for I have not and will not. But to use it to name, to witness, to create space, and to insist on structural change that might someday make alonetude available to those for whom it is currently impossible.
That work begins with this: the commitment to being incomplete, to remaining accountable, to listening to voices outside my standpoint, and to insisting that future scholarship on rest, on precarity, on healing, be grounded in the intersectional complexity that my own work, for all its care and intention, could not fully hold.
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