Prelude: What I Imagine

A prelude: what I imagine the sea will feel like before I go. A meditation on anticipation, longing, and the particular kind of hope that belongs to someone about to give themselves thirty days of uninterrupted presence.

Reading Time: 14 minutes

The research site is my own body. The methodology is presence.

A Deliberate Period of Research on Myself

What I Am Doing Here

I am sitting with my notebook, trying to articulate what this month is actually for. People keep asking. Are you on vacation? Are you writing a book? Are you running away from something?

The honest answer is: I am still finding the words. I know what I am leaving behind. I am leaving behind vacation in the way the word usually implies, with itineraries, tourist attractions, and the pressure to relax on schedule. I am beyond the wellness-industry retreat, where someone else structures my healing and tells me when to breathe deeply. I am running toward something, though I understand why the departure might look like a flight from the outside.

What I am doing is harder to name. I am conducting research. But the research site is my own body. The methodology is present. The data is whatever surfaces when I stop performing productivity long enough to notice what I actually feel.

This is what Scholarly Personal Narrative makes possible. Education scholar Robert Nash (2004) describes scholarly personal narrative as a form of writing that insists on the significance of the writer’s own lived experience as a site of genuine intellectual inquiry. My life signifies. My exhaustion signifies. My body, with its accumulated tensions and its slow-releasing grief, signifies. These belong to the research itself.

“For years, I have leapt out of bed with adrenaline already coursing, my mind racing through the day’s obligations before my feet touched the floor.”

Title: Selfie at the Beginning

Artist Statement

I nearly skipped this photograph. I have always avoided photographs of myself tired, and I have been tired for years. But Photovoice methodology, developed by Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris (1997), insists that the participant is the expert witness of their own experience. If I am going to document this inquiry honestly, I must document myself as I actually am, regardless of how I might wish to appear. This photograph is baseline data. It shows me at the beginning, before I know what thirty days of rest will do. The tiredness in my eyes is evidence. The uncertainty is evidence. The fact that I am here at all, despite everything, is evidence of something still beyond words. Perhaps courage. Perhaps desperation. Perhaps both.

Arriving Without an Agenda

I arrived with almost nothing planned. This was deliberate, yet terrifying.

For nineteen years, I have lived by agendas. Syllabi. Course schedules. Committee meetings. Deadline after deadline after deadline. My calendar has been a document of obligations, a record of all the places I needed to be and all the things I needed to produce. Arriving somewhere without a plan feels dangerous to a body trained by precarity to always be preparing for the next demand.

But that is precisely why I chose to come without one.

Transition theorist William Bridges (2019) describes the in-between as the disorienting space between an ending and a new beginning. In the in-between, the old structures have fallen away, but new ones are still taking shape. Bridges (2019) argues that this space, though uncomfortable, is essential for genuine transformation. If we rush to fill it with busyness and plans, we miss the creative potential it holds.

I am trying to stay in the in-between without filling it. I am trying to tolerate the discomfort of holding each day open, uncertain of what it will bring. This is harder than it sounds. My nervous system keeps wanting to make lists, set goals, and measure progress. I keep gently redirecting it back to the present moment.

What do I actually have? Curiosity. Books. A notebook. A camera. Art supplies. My body. Time. The sea.

The sea becomes my research site. I become both subject and observer.

The Body as Research Site

Each day begins quietly. I wake early and watch the light change before the world feels busy. I let my nervous system wake up slowly, which is a practice in itself. For years, I have leapt out of bed with adrenaline already coursing, my mind racing through the day’s obligations before my feet touched the floor. Here, I am practicing a different kind of waking. Gradual. Gentle. Without urgency.

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (2014) argues that learning to notice and interpret what the body is feeling is the essential first step in releasing the hold that past experiences maintain over present functioning. Physical self-awareness means noticing what is happening in the body: sensations, tensions, areas of ease and discomfort. It sounds simple, but for those of us who have spent years overriding our bodies’ signals, it requires relearning.

I am relearning.

Some mornings I swim, letting the salt water do its steady work on my breath and muscles. The sea holds me, and for once, I release the effort of holding myself. There is something profound about buoyancy, about being supported by something larger than my own effort. I float on my back and watch the sky and feel my shoulders release in ways they never do on land.

Other mornings, I walk along the shoreline, noticing birds, light, and small changes in the tide. I am learning again how to pay attention without trying to control what I see. This is what environmental psychologists Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan (1989) call “the gentle pull of the natural world”-the effortless attention that natural environments invite. the gentle pull of the natural world allows directed attention to rest and recover. It is the opposite of the vigilant scanning my nervous system has been doing for years.

Van der Kolk (2014) argues that learning to recognize and interpret the body’s internal signals is the foundational step in recovering from trauma, because healing cannot begin until we can perceive what we are carrying.

Movement as Inquiry

Movement becomes part of the inquiry. But it is a different kind of movement from the one I am used to.

For years, I have been an athlete. Triathlon. Long-distance open-water swimming. I have trained my body to push through discomfort, to ignore fatigue, to override the signals that say stop, slow down, or this is too much. That capacity served me in competition. It also served me in precarious labour, where I pushed through exhaustion semester after semester because stopping felt impossible.

Here, I am practicing a different relationship with movement. Yoga to listen rather than push. Walking without tracking distance or speed. Swimming to settle rather than to train. I am measuring nothing. I am simply moving and noticing what my body tells me.

This is a form of inner-body awareness that I introduced in earlier posts. Inner body awareness is the capacity to sense and interpret signals from inside the body. Neuroscientist Stephen Porges (2011) emphasizes that inner body awareness is foundational to well-being. We cannot regulate what we cannot feel. We can only care for ourselves when we know what we need.

My body becomes a source of information instead of something I manage or override. I notice where tension softens. I notice where grief still lives, tucked into my hips and my jaw and the space between my shoulder blades. I notice when joy appears without effort, surprising me with its presence.

“My former life has ended. My new life is still taking shape.”

Title: Morning Light on Water

Artist Statement

I photograph the morning light because it teaches me about presence. This particular quality of light exists only briefly. A moment of inattention and it is gone. There is no way to capture it later or recreate it artificially.

It requires me to be here, now, in this specific moment. Philosopher Donna Haraway (1988) argues that all knowledge is situated, emerging from particular bodies in particular locations at particular times. There is no view from nowhere. There is only the view from somewhere. This photograph is my view from here, from this morning, from this body standing at the edge of this sea. It is partial, specific, and completely true.

Art as Companionship

Art weaves its way through the days. Some days I paint or draw. Some days I photograph birds lifting from the water or shadows stretching across the sand. Some days, the art is simply sitting and watching the sea change colour.

This is art therapy without diagnosis, without fixing, without interpretation. It is creation as companionship.

Arts-based research scholar Patricia Leavy (2015) argues that creative practice accesses dimensions of human experience that other methods cannot reach. Art speaks to the aesthetic, the emotional, the sensory, the embodied. It generates knowledge that cannot be reduced to propositions or statistics. When I paint, I am discovering rather than illustrating what I already understand. I am discovering what I know through the act of making.

I brought watercolours with me. They are forgiving, which I need right now. If a mark arrives uninvited, I can let it bleed into something else. I can work with the accident rather than trying to erase it. This feels metaphorically apt. I am learning to work with what has happened to me rather than pretending it never occurred.

These simple materials are an act of resistance against a system that valued me only for what I could produce.

I also brought my camera. Photography, within the Photovoice methodology I am using, functions as a form of witnessing. Wang and Burris (1997) designed Photovoice to enable people to record and reflect on their own experiences. The camera becomes a tool for noticing. It asks, “What do you see?” What matters? What wants to be documented?

The reason for a photograph often arrives later. The image emerges first. The understanding follows, sometimes days afterward. This is part of the methodology. I trust that meaning will arrive in its own time.

Title: Art Supplies

Artist Statement

I photographed my art supplies because they represent permission. For years, I abandoned art. I told myself time was absent, which was true. I told myself it was unproductive, which was the language of a system that valued me only for output. These simple materials, watercolours and paper and a few brushes, are an act of resistance against that system. They say: making something for its own sake is enough. Beauty is enough. Play is enough. Moore (1992) argues that caring for the soul is a crafted, patient practice that requires openness to life’s unfolding rather than attempts to control or accelerate it. These supplies are tools for soul care. They ask nothing of me except presence.

Silence as Data

Writing happens when it wants to. Sometimes it comes as complete sentences. Sometimes as fragments. Sometimes in silence.

I am learning to permit myself to rest when there are no words. This is difficult for someone who has spent her career producing text: syllabi, assignments, feedback, articles, reports, emails without end. I have been trained to believe that writing equals work equals value. It is a false equation.

Here, I am practicing a different relationship with language. I am practicing trust, both in myself and in the process. I am learning that silence is also data.

Nash (2004) argues that human beings experience the world through mediation rather than directly, through the narrative frameworks we construct to make sense of it. The stories I have told about myself, the overworked educator, the reliable colleague, the person who always says yes, have shaped how I experience my life. But stories can be revised. New narratives can emerge. This requires silence, space, and time for the old stories to loosen their grip.

Some days I write pages. Some days I write nothing. Both are part of the inquiry.

Nash (2004) argues that we have only mediated access to reality itself, but rather inhabit the stories we construct about it, and that those stories shape our experience as powerfully as any objective circumstance.

Evenings and Reflection

I imagine evenings marked by sunsets and reflection. I review the day gently, asking what surfaced and what settled. I resist the rush to make meaning. I let experiences sit, knowing they will braid together in their own time.

This practice draws on what contemplative traditions call discernment, the slow work of noticing patterns and allowing clarity to emerge. It is the opposite of the rapid analysis I have been trained to perform in academic settings, where every observation must be immediately connected to theory, and every experience interpreted and explained.

Here, I am practicing a slower kind of knowing. I am trusting that understanding will come when it is ready. The sea holds my questions without demanding answers.

Donna Haraway’s (1988) concept of situated knowledge provides an important grounding for this project in terms of what and how we know. Haraway argues that knowledge is always partial, embodied, and located, and that broader understanding emerges from specific positions rather than detached universality. This perspective challenges claims of neutral objectivity, emphasizing that what we know is shaped by where we are, who we are, and how we are positioned within power relations.

In this inquiry, Loreto serves as a knowledge-based site where geography, solitude, and embodiment actively shape knowledge production. By situating this work in a particular body and place, the project embraces partiality as a methodological strength and foregrounds honest self-reflection, my position in this story, and relational accountability in the generation of knowledge. I am somewhere particular: Loreto, México, the edge of the Sea of Cortez, this specific body at this specific moment in history. The larger vision I am seeking, whatever it turns out to be, can only emerge from this particular location. There is no shortcut. There is no way to skip the slow work of being here.

Title: Sunrise

Artist Statement

I photograph sunrises because they mark beginnings without certainty. The day begins, offering itself without promises. Light returns, yet it does so quietly, without spectacle or demand. There is comfort in this daily renewal, in the gentle assurance that illumination follows darkness.

Anthropologist Victor Turner (1969) wrote about liminality as the threshold state between what was and what will be. Sunrise is a liminal time. It belongs neither fully to night nor fully to day. I am drawn to these threshold moments because I am living within one. My former life has ended. My new life is still taking shape. I stand in the early light, attentive to what is emerging, noticing what the morning reveals about who I am becoming.

The Human Right to Imagine

I want to pause here and connect what I am doing to the human rights framework that grounds this entire project.

Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) states that “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” This right to participate in cultural life, to make and enjoy art, is fundamental to human dignity, beyond luxury.

But precarious labour systematically erodes this right. When every hour must be monetized, when exhaustion is chronic, when the nervous system is trapped in survival mode, there is no space left for creativity. Art becomes something other people do. Imagination becomes a luxury we cannot afford.

This time by the sea is an exercise of my right to participate in cultural life. I am making art. I am writing. I am imagining possibilities beyond survival. These are expressions of human dignity, denied me for too long by years of precarious working conditions.

Van der Kolk (2014) emphasizes that trauma recovery requires more than the absence of symptoms. It requires the restoration of imagination, play, and creative engagement with life. Healing is about being able to imagine and pursue a life worth living, rather than just feeling less bad.

I am here to recover my imagination.

What I Imagine Finding

What I imagine most clearly is this: that after thirty days, I will return with something quieter and more durable than conclusions, etc.

A steadier body. One that has remembered what rest feels like and can recognize the difference between genuine peace and the numb exhaustion that masquerades as calm.

Clearer boundaries. The capacity to say no without guilt, to protect my time and energy, to refuse demands that diminish my wellbeing.

A renewed relationship with creativity. The knowledge that making art is a way of being in the world, beyond any reward for finished work, that I have a right to claim.

A deeper respect for slow, embodied ways of knowing. The understanding that wisdom arrives through many paths beyond analysis and argument. Sometimes it arrives through the body, through sensation, through the patient’s accumulation of presence.

Title: Before the Sea

Artist Statement

I include this photograph from before I left because it reminds me of where I started. This is the coast I know, the cold Pacific waters of British Columbia, where I have lived and worked and struggled for years. The Sea of Cortez, where I am now, is warmer, calmer, different in almost every way.

But I carry the northern waters with me. They are part of my body's memory, part of the archive I am learning to read. Including this image honours the full journey, the arrival and the departure, where I am and where I have been.

What Remains

This is what I imagine research can look like when it is grounded in care, honours the body, and makes healing a legitimate form of inquiry.

I am producing no outputs, generating no deliverables, optimizing nothing. I am simply here, attending to what surfaces, trusting that the inquiry itself is valuable even if I cannot yet articulate what it will yield.

Moore (1992) suggests that caring for the soul involves attentive practice, patience, and an openness to the natural unfolding of life rather than attempts to control or accelerate it. I am practicing that patience. I am cultivating that willingness. I am learning to let life unfold without forcing it into predetermined shapes.

And perhaps that, in itself, is the finding.

The ability to envision a life beyond survival is a human right.

An Invitation

If you are reading this and you have forgotten how to imagine, I want you to know: the capacity is still there. It may be buried under exhaustion, under obligation, under years of being told that dreaming is a luxury you cannot afford. But it is there.

Imagination is a human right. Rest is a human right. The ability to envision a life beyond survival is a human right.

I am here, by the sea, trying to remember what I already know.

Estoy imaginando. Estoy aprendiendo a soñar de nuevo.

I am imagining. I am learning to dream again.

Title: Where the Colours Meet

Artist Statement

This piece began without a plan.

I was sitting with paint, searching for a feeling rather than an image. The yellow came first. Wide. Expansive. Almost insistent. It held the space like light that refuses to dim.

Then water arrived. Blue, then green. Movement over stillness. A shoreline forming without being drawn.

There is a darkness on the right side that I chose to leave unresolved. It felt honest to leave it there. Some things in the landscape simply exist alongside the rest.

Within my creative practice, works like this function as emotional cartographies. They are less about representation and more about locating where I am internally at a given moment in time.

This one sits somewhere between emergence and rest.

Meeting itself.
Between departure and arrival.

I am here, by the sea, trying to remember what I already know.

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

References

Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2019). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes (40th anniversary ed.). Balance.

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Moore, T. (1992). Care of the soul: A guide for cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life. HarperCollins.

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

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.

Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine Publishing.

United Nations. (1948). Universal declaration of human rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behaviour, 24(3), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309

ACADEMIC LENS

This prelude establishes the methodological framework of the entire project through what Nash (2004) calls Scholarly Personal Narrative: a form that insists the researcher’s lived experience constitutes legitimate scholarly data. The declaration that “the research site is my own body” positions this inquiry within the somatic tradition that van der Kolk (2014) and Menakem (2017) describe, where the body holds knowledge that precedes and exceeds language. The resistance to wellness-industry frameworks and productivised retreat structures reflects what Nixon (2011) calls the temporal logic of slow violence in reverse: just as harm accumulates gradually without announcement, so too does healing require duration and unstructured time that institutional life systematically denies. Richardson and St. Pierre’s (2005) argument that writing is a method of inquiry rather than merely a vehicle for reporting findings, underpins the reflective, exploratory form of this opening piece. The question “what is this actually for?” is epistemological rather than merely rhetorical: it asks what counts as research, who counts as a researcher, and what the body knows that the curriculum vitae cannot hold.

Mi Madre, a la distancia

Reading Time: 10 minutes

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on grief, loss, and emotional exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

My Mother, From a Distance

(shared with permission)

You can listen to the NotebookLM Podcast here: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/c0840e9a-a297-49e5-b98d-3630125bb460?artifactId=e8fa1cc2-12a9-48f9-9462-5dec351d84b9

My mother is 80 years old. She now lives alone in an old folks’ home in Lethbridge, Alberta. I am sitting on a terrace in Mexico, watching the Sea of Cortez turn from blue to silver in the fading light, and I am thinking about her hands.

She has always had capable hands. Hands that kneaded bread dough on Sunday mornings, the kitchen warm with yeast and CBC radio playing softly in the background. Hands that crotched quilts for babies born, each stitch a prayer, each pattern chosen with care. Hands that combed my hair before church, her fingers quick and certain. The spirit of God’s hands, I think, though I hold that comparison with uncertainty, standing outside her faith and the faith I was raised in. Perhaps they are simply mother hands, shaped by decades of service, of showing up, of being useful to everyone but herself.

Recuerdos de Su Cocina / Memories of Her Kitchen

I remember standing on a step stool beside her at the counter, learning to roll pierogi. “Not too much flour,” she would say, her hands guiding mine. “You want it tender, not tough.” I was seven, maybe eight. The kitchen smelled of potatoes and cheese, and outside, the wind was blowing snow against the windows. I felt safe in that kitchen, in the warmth of the oven, in the certainty of her presence beside me.

Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), the humanist geographer, writes about topophilia, the affective bond between people and place. My mother’s kitchen was my first topophilic space, a location where I learned that love could be measured in teaspoons and rolling pins, in the quiet act of making something nourishing with your hands. I carry that kitchen with me still, even here, 2,800 kilometres away, watching a sea she has never seen.

She taught me to can plums in late summer, the kitchen steaming, jars lined up on the counter like soldiers. We would work for hours, cutting and slicing and packing fruit into hot glass, the syrup sweet and golden. “This will taste like sunshine in January,” she would say, and she was right. Those jars, lined up in the cold room, were promises against the long, cold winter. They were her way of saying, “I will take care of you.” I will make sure you have enough.

El amor de una madre vive en lo que prepara.

A mother’s love lives in what she prepares.

La Fe de Mi Madre / My Mother’s Faith

She raised me in the Church of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a faith I no longer practice but whose rhythms still live somewhere deep in my body. I remember the scratch of my Sunday dress against my legs, the smell of the Kingdom Hall a mix of old hymnals and furniture polish and the faint sweetness of old lady sweat. I remember my mother’s voice beside me, singing hymns she knew by heart, her alto steady and sure.

She believed, and still believes, in something with certainty as she later switched to the Mormon Church. I never saw “her God” in the way she did. For her, the gospel is as real as the mountains outside my home in British Columbia, as solid as the bread she bakes, as certain as the sun rising over the prairie. She knows that families are eternal, that her late husband waits for her beyond the veil, that God has a plan, and she is part of it. I envy her this certainty sometimes, the way it holds her steady through grief and loss and the long silence of widowhood.

I left the Church in my teens, quietly, without announcement, the way one might slip out of a party before the host notices. It was quiet, undramatic. There was no single moment of rupture, no crisis of faith that announced itself with thunder. It was more like a slow loosening, a gradual recognition that I no longer believed what I had been taught to believe, that the structure that held my mother so securely felt to me like a house I had outgrown.

Sandra Bloom (2007) writes about ambiguous loss, defined as grief that accompanies losses that are unclear, unresolved, and without the finality of death. I wonder sometimes if my mother grieves the daughter she thought she was raising, the one who would marry in the temple and bear children in the covenant and sit beside her in the celestial kingdom. I am still her daughter, but I am also a kind of ghost of the daughter she imagined. This is a loss we hold in silence, a room in our relationship we have agreed to keep closed.

Pequeñas Bondades / Small Kindnesses

And yet she loves me. This I know. I know it in the way she asks about my work, even when my work puzzles her, her questions sincere and slightly bewildered: “So you are still teaching at that university?” Yes, Mom. Still teaching. Her way of showing love is more in spirit than in words or deeds.

Gary Chapman (1992) popularized the concept of love languages, the idea that people express and receive love in different ways: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. My mother’s love language has always been acts of service, the doing of things, the making and mending and bringing of soup through snowstorms. She rarely says “I love you” directly, but she says it in every jar of peaches, every quilt, every four-hour drive through dangerous weather.

El amor no siempre tiene palabras. A veces tiene sopa de pollo.

Love finds other vessels. Sometimes it has chicken soup.

Viuda / Widow

Her husband died two years ago. They had been married for only a few years, long enough that she had learned the shape of his presence: the way he took his soda, the sound of his wheelchair in the hallway, the weight of his hand on her leg as he sat next to her.

I think about her alone in that apartment, moving through rooms that still hold his absence. The recliner where he sat to watch the news. The side of the bed that is still, somehow, his side, even though he will never lie there again. Miriam Greenspan (2004) writes that grief is one of the dark emotions, those feelings our culture teaches us to rush through rather than honour. For Greenspan, grief is what happens to love when it encounters loss, it is connection rendered as sorrow, and it carries within it the very bond it mourns.

My mother’s faith offers her a framework for this sorrow: the belief that marriage is eternal, that she will see him again, that death is a temporary separation rather than a final goodbye. I hold a different view, but I am grateful she has it. It gives her something to hold in the long nights, something to reach for when the house feels too quiet, and the bed feels too empty, and the grief feels too heavy to bear alone.

When I call her on Sunday evenings, she tells me about the temple sessions and the neighbour who helped her with the puzzle. She tells me about the weather, about the cat who visits her backyard, and about the book she is reading from the church library. She keeps to herself the moments when she reaches for him in the night and finds only empty sheets. She keeps to herself the crying in the shower, where no one can hear. These things I imagine, because I am her daughter, because I know her, because some things carry their meaning without words.

Lo Que Más Recuerdo / What I Remember Most

I remember her hands in the garden, turning soil, planting seeds, pulling weeds with a determination that seemed almost fierce. She grew tomatoes, potatoes, and carrots, and every summer we would spend long evenings in the backyard, the light golden and slanted, the smell of earth and green things all around us. “Everything needs tending,” she told me once, her fingers in the dirt, a tomato plant cupped gently in her palm. “Gardens, families, faith. You have to show up and do the work.”

After she left my dad in 1977, I remember her sitting at the kitchen table late at night, paying bills by the light of a single lamp, her forehead creased with worry she tried to hide from us children. I had no way to understand then what I understand now: how hard she worked, how much she sacrificed, how many of her own dreams she set aside so that we could have enough. I wonder what she wanted to be before she became a mother. I wonder if she remembers.

I remember the way she cried when she missed my grade eight graduation, her face wet with loss and somehow also sad, almost knowingly, that she had to choose to put food on the table over celebration. For years, I made her feel guilty about this, but as a parent, only I can now understand how challenging life can be as a single mother. Love and loss are always tangled together; mothers carry a grief their children cannot fully see.

Judith Herman (1992), in her landmark work on psychological trauma, writes about the importance of witnessing, the act of truly seeing another person’s experience and honouring it as real. I want to witness my mother. I want to see beyond the capable hands and the Sunday faith and the birthday cards that arrive on time, but also the woman beneath all that doing, the woman who had dreams before she had children, who carries losses she has never spoken aloud, who has spent eighty years being useful and may never have learned that she was allowed to simply be.

Detrás de cada madre hay una mujer que olvidamos ver.

Behind every mother is a woman we forget to see.

La Distancia Entre Nosotras / The Distance Between Us

There are 2,800 kilometres between Loreto and Lethbridge. I looked it up. It would take thirty hours to drive, if you could drive across the Sea of Cortez, which, of course, you cannot. The distance feels larger than kilometres can measure: the distance between faith and its absence, between the life she imagined for me and the life I have made, between who she raised me to be and who I have become.

Carol Gilligan (1982), in her foundational work on women’s moral development, argued that women often define themselves through relationships, through connection, through care for others. She called this the ethic of care, a moral framework centred on responsibility and responsiveness rather than abstract principles of justice. My mother embodies this ethic. She has spent eighty years caring for her children, her husbands, her clients, anyone who needed a casserole, a listening ear, or a quilt stitched with prayers. I wonder if she knows how to care for herself. I wonder if anyone ever taught her that she was allowed.

I am here in Mexico learning to rest, learning to be still, learning to believe that I am enough without producing, without performing, without earning my place. And I wonder: did I learn my relentlessness from her? Did she learn it from her mother? How many generations of women have run themselves ragged in service to others, believing that rest was selfishness, that stillness was sin, that their worth depended on their usefulness?

Una Carta Que No Enviaré / A Letter Left Unsent

Querida Mamá,

I am sitting by the sea in Mexico, thinking about you. I am thinking about your hands and your faith and the way you have always shown love through doing. I am thinking about the perogies you taught me to roll, the plums we canned in the summer heat, the quilt you drove through a snowstorm to bring me.

I am thinking about how tired you must be. How tired you have always been. How you never learned to rest because no one ever told you that rest was allowed. I wish I could give you what I am learning here: the knowledge that you are enough, that you have always been enough, that your worth was never something you had to earn.

I am sorry I left the Church. I am sorry I cannot be the daughter you imagined. I am sorry for all the silences between us, the questions we leave unasked, the truths we keep hidden to protect each other. But I am grateful, too. Grateful that you loved me anyway. Grateful that you still call on Sundays. Grateful that your faith gives you comfort even though I cannot share it.

I see you, Mom. I see the woman behind the capable hands, behind the Sunday faith, behind the chicken soup and the quilts. I see how much you have given. I see how much it costs. I wish I had told you sooner. I am telling you now, even though you will never read this letter.

Te quiero, Mamá. Siempre.

This letter will stay here. James Pennebaker (1997), whose research on expressive writing demonstrated the healing power of putting painful experiences into words, found that writing about difficult emotions can improve both psychological and physical health, even if the writing is never shared. The writing itself is the medicine. I am writing my way toward understanding, toward compassion, toward a peace I am still learning to name.

Esta Noche / Tonight

The sun has set. The sea is dark now, just the sound of waves and the occasional cry of a seabird. In Lethbridge, it is already late. My mother is probably in bed, her scriptures on the nightstand, her prayers said, the empty space beside her filled with faith and memory and the shape of a husband who is no longer there.

I will call her tomorrow. I will ask about the church, the neighbour and whether she has been sleeping well. I will keep this essay to myself, keep the memories I have been turning over like stones, about the letter I wrote and will never send. Some things are better held gently, privately, like a prayer offered in silence.

But tonight, across 2,800 kilometres of desert and mountain and sea, I am holding her in my heart. I am thanking her for the hands that shaped me, even as I am learning to shape myself differently. I am forgiving us both for the silences, for the distances, for the love that has always struggled to find its words. I am seeing her, finally, fully: as my mother and as a woman: tired and faithful and braver than I ever knew, standing in her kitchen, rolling out pie crust, teaching me without words that love is something you make with your hands.

Ella es mi madre.

She is my mother.

Y yo soy su hija.

And I am her daughter.

Eso es todo. Eso es suficiente.

That is everything. That is enough.

References

Bloom, S. L. (2007). Loss, trauma, and resilience: Therapeutic work with ambiguous loss. Psychiatric Services, 58(3), 419-420.

Chapman, G. (1992). The five love languages: How to express heartfelt commitment to your mate. Northfield Publishing.

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press.

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Google. (2026). Mi Madre, a la distancia [Audio podcast episode]. NotebookLM. https://notebooklm.google.com

Greenspan, M. (2004). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala.

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence, from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.

Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening up: The healing power of expressing emotions. Guilford Press.

Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.

Translation Note

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

ACADEMIC LENS

This bilingual elegy for the complexity of maternal relationships engages what Menakem (2017) calls intergenerational somatic transmission: the ways that unresolved nervous system patterns pass between generations through attachment, modelling, and the implicit choreography of family life. The grief described here is what Boss (1999) extends beyond personal loss, terms ambiguous loss: mourning a relationship that remains physically present but emotionally unresolved, or that exists in a form different from what was needed or imagined. Hochschild’s (2012) concept of emotional labour applies here in a particular way: the lifelong management of one’s own emotional responses within complex family systems, the careful calibration of need, disappointment, and love that caregiving dynamics require. The distance between continents that frames this reflection also enacts what Tuan (1977) calls topophilia in reverse: the way geographical separation from formative places and relationships illuminates their emotional weight precisely through their absence. Writing this reflection in both Spanish and English performs Anzaldúa’s (1987) borderlands methodology: moving between tongues to access the full complexity of a relationship that neither language alone can hold.

Finding My Alonetude

Reading Time: 16 minutes

Keywords: alonetude, precarious labour, somatic archive, institutional harm, embodiment, healing, solitude, identity, scholarly personal narrative

Alonetude exists between being alone, loneliness, and solitude, where presence replaces performance.

The Weight I Carry

I am sitting in an airport terminal, somewhere between the life I have been living and the life I am trying to reach. The fluorescent lights hum above me. Strangers move past with purpose. My body is here, but my nervous system is still scanning, still bracing, still waiting for the next demand.

This is what precarity feels like from the inside. It is a labour condition, yes, and also a way of living in a body that has forgotten how to rest.

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (2014) describes how traumatized people carry a persistent sense of bodily unsafety, with the unresolved past continuing to register as physical tension and discomfort in the present. When I read those words, I recognized myself. The gnawing is familiar. It has lived in my stomach for years. I had simply stopped noticing it because noticing felt like a luxury beyond reach.

For more than nineteen years, I have lived inside the slow violence of precarious academic labour. Slow violence, a term coined by literary scholar Rob Nixon (2011), describes harm that unfolds gradually and often invisibly, accumulating over time rather than arriving as a single dramatic event. Precarious labour is slow violence. It arrives without announcement. It settles. It accumulates. It becomes the water you swim in until you forget you are wet.

The phrase maybe next semester has followed me through contracts, calendars, and classrooms. It has accumulated as a quiet weight in my body, a residue difficult to name. Over time, that uncertainty settled into my jaw, my breath, and my nervous system. This is how survival feels when flexibility is demanded, and care remains absent.

Title: Pretending I Am Okay

Artist Statement

I chose this image because it documents the performance of precarious labour demands. For nineteen years, I showed up. I smiled. I won teaching awards. I served on committees. I said yes when I meant no. I performed wellness because the alternative felt too risky. What would happen if they saw how tired I really was? Would they renew my contract if they knew I was struggling? This photograph is evidence of what sociologist Arlie Hochschild (2012) calls emotional labour, the work of managing one's own emotions to fulfil the requirements of a job. Emotional labour is exhausting precisely because it is invisible. It appears on no workload document. It earns no compensation. But it is real, and it accumulates in the body. This image documents that accumulation.

What the Body Holds

I have come to think of my body as an archive. An archive, in the traditional sense, is a place where records are kept. It is where we store documents that matter, evidence of what has happened. My body is an archive of what institutions leave unnamed.

The term body-based comes from the Greek soma, meaning “body.” When I speak of what the body holds and remembers, I mean the way my body has recorded and stored my experiences of precarious labour. These records are held in my jaw, which clenches without my awareness. They are held in my shoulders, which rise toward my ears when I hear an email notification. They are held in my breath, which shallows in the presence of institutional authority. They are held in my sleep, which remains shallow and easily disrupted.

Van der Kolk (2014) established that the body keeps the score. What I am learning is that my body has been keeping score for nineteen years. It has recorded every contract renewal that came late. Every semester, I taught an overload to make ends meet. Every meeting where I was treated as disposable. Every time I was reminded, subtly or directly, that I occupied the margins.

These experiences passed through me without resolution, through me. They accumulated. They settled. They became part of how my nervous system operates.

The body becomes an archive of what institutions leave unnamed.

When the Body Forgets What Safety Feels Like

Neuroscientist Stephen Porges (2011) developed a the polyvagal theory to explain how the autonomic nervous system responds to these states. I introduced this theory in my opening post, but I want to return to it here because it helps me understand what has happened to my body.

Porges (2011) explains that the body initiates its threat-response sequences below the level of conscious awareness, meaning a person can be fully convinced they are calm while their nervous system is already mobilizing for danger. This means my body can respond to a threat even when my conscious mind insists that everything is fine. My nervous system has its own intelligence. It reads cues from the environment and responds accordingly, often before I am aware of what is happening.

For years, my nervous system has been stuck in what Porges (2011) calls the body’s alert state. This is the fight-or-flight response. It is useful in genuine emergencies. It mobilizes energy, quickens the heart, and sharpens attention. But it becomes harmful when it is chronic. When the nervous system remains in a state of alert for years, it begins to treat that state as normal. The body forgets what safety feels like.

Porges (2011) points out that social engagement and genuine connection require the prior condition of perceived safety; the nervous system holds its defensive posture until it registers that the environment can be trusted. I have felt unsafe at work for a very long time. My body has been vigilant, scanning, bracing. It has been waiting for the next threat, the next demand, the next reminder that my position was contingent.

This time by the sea is an attempt to shift my nervous system toward what Porges (2011) calls a state of genuine safety and connection. This is the state of safety and connection. It is the state from which healing becomes possible. But I cannot simply decide to feel safe. I must create the conditions that allow my nervous system to perceive safety. That is why I am here, by the sea, in a place where no one needs anything from me.

In Between: The Space That Has No Name Yet

Transition theorist William Bridges (2019) describes a three-phase model of change. The first phase is endings, where something familiar comes to a close. The third phase is new beginnings, where something new emerges. But between these two phases lies what Bridges calls the in-between.

The in-between is disorienting. It is the space where the old identity has ended, but the new self is still in formation. Bridges (2019) describes it as a time of confusion, uncertainty, and even despair. It is also, he argues, a time of profound creativity and possibility, if we can tolerate the discomfort of holding open who we are becoming.

I am in the in-between. The identity I built over nineteen years, the contract faculty member, the award-winning educator, the person who was always available, has ended. That person existed in a relationship to an institution that no longer employs her. Without the institution, who am I?

The honest answer: I hold the question open still. I am sitting in the uncertainty, trying to resist the urge to fill it with busyness, with productivity, with another performance of competence. Bridges (2019) suggests that the in-between requires slowing down and a willingness to be in the in-between without rushing toward resolution.

This is harder than it sounds. My nervous system wants to do something. It wants to scan for threats, make plans, and solve problems. Sitting with uncertainty feels dangerous to a body trained by precarity to always be preparing for the next crisis.

Title: Suitcase Is Packed

Artist Statement

I photographed this suitcase because it represents a boundary. Everything I am bringing fits inside. I made deliberate choices about what to carry and what to leave behind. I left behind the stacks of academic books that usually travel with me. I left behind the multiple devices that keep me tethered to institutional demands. I packed clothes, a camera, watercolours, and a notebook. I packed tools for presence rather than tools for productivity. This image connects to the concept of liminality, the threshold state described by anthropologist Victor Turner (1969).

A packed suitcase is liminal. It belongs neither fully to the place being left nor to the place being entered. It holds the traveller's identity in suspension. I chose the colour orange without thinking about it, but now I notice that orange is the colour of warmth, of citrus, of the desert flowers I will soon see. It is also the colour of safety vests, of visibility, of being seen. Perhaps I chose it because I am tired of being invisible.

From Letting Go of Performance

Nineteenth-century psychologist Pierre Janet, as cited in van der Kolk (2014), observed that traumatic stress is fundamentally an inability to inhabit the present fully, a condition that traps the person in past events even when the original threat has long since ended (as cited in van der Kolk, 2014). This resonates deeply. For years, I have been present only for performance. I have been performing presence while my attention remained split, part of me always monitoring for danger, calculating risks, managing impressions.

Performance, in the sociological sense developed by Erving Goffman (1959), refers to the way we present ourselves to others in social situations. Goffman argued that social life is like a stage, where we play roles and manage the impressions we create. This is entirely human. It is simply how social interaction works. But for precarious workers, the stakes of performance are particularly high. We perform competence, enthusiasm, and wellness because our livelihoods depend on it. We cannot afford to let the mask slip.

My goal for this time by the sea is to move from performance to presence. I want to practise being with myself without an audience. I want to discover what it feels like to be free from the tether of my productivity.

This is unfamiliar territory. I have spent so many years being available to others that I have become profoundly unavailable to myself. I have lost the thread of my own wanting, my own needing, my own feeling. These are things I need to relearn.

What My Body Knows Before I Do

Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas (2017) introduced the concept of what we hold in our bodies before we have words for it. This phrase describes knowledge we hold in our bodies and our being, still waiting to be articulated in conscious thought. It is what we know without knowing that we know it.

I carry a great deal of what we hold in our bodies before we have words for it. My body holds knowledge about precarity that I have never fully articulated. It knows things about survival, about adaptation, about the cost of endurance. This knowledge has been waiting for words to catch up.

This is what Scholarly Personal Narrative does for me. It keeps me honest. By sitting with sensation and memory rather than rushing past them, by refusing to leap to conclusions, I make room for what I already know yet left unsaid.

Bollas (2017) suggests that what we hold in our bodies before we have words for it often emerges in moments of stillness, when we stop the busyness that usually keeps it submerged. This is another reason for this time by the sea. I need to be still long enough for what I know to become thinkable.

Alonetude: The Concept Takes Root

The concept of alonetude first took root during the global stillness of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the world outside was fraught with uncertainty, I discovered something unexpected. For the first time in my career, the absence of institutional obligation felt like freedom.

This was confusing. I was isolated, like everyone else. The news was frightening. The future was uncertain. And yet, paradoxically, I felt more at peace than I had in years. The quiet felt more like peace than loneliness. The absence of commuting, of meetings, of the constant performance of institutional belonging, created space for something I had been without for a very long time.

I began to wonder about this. What was the difference between the isolation I was experiencing and the loneliness I had felt at other times in my life? What made this aloneness feel restorative rather than painful?

The answer, I began to realize, had to do with choice. During the pandemic, aloneness was imposed on everyone. But within that imposed condition, I was able to choose how I inhabited my solitude. I could structure my days according to my own rhythms. I could attend to my own needs without constantly deferring to institutional demands. The aloneness was imposed, but the quality of presence within it was chosen.

This is what I am calling alonetude: the active, intentional work of transforming imposed isolation into chosen presence. It is a practice, something that must be cultivated. It requires intention, attention, and care rather than arriving on its own.

Rest as a Human Right

I want to return to the human rights framing I established in my opening post, because it matters deeply to what I am doing here.

Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) affirms the right to rest and leisure. This is a fundamental human right, no suggestion or reward for productivity, as essential to human dignity as the right to food, shelter, and freedom from torture.

And yet. For the past nineteen years, I have been unable to fully exercise this right. I have worked through summers, through illnesses, through grief. I have taught overload semesters to pay my bills. I have never had a sabbatical, paid or otherwise, until now. And even this sabbatical is unpaid. I am funding my own rest because my institution refused to prioritize it.

Nash (2004) notes the etymology of the word scholar, tracing it back to the ancient Greek skholē, a term that meant leisure and play before it ever meant study or scholarship. The original scholars were people with enough leisure to think, to wonder, to follow curiosity without the pressure of immediate utility.

I am choosing to treat the right to rest as lived practice rather than distant declaration. This time by the sea is an exercise of a fundamental human right that has been systematically denied to me by the conditions of my labour.

Title: The Stories Rocks Tell

Artist Statement

I began collecting stones during this journey, and I photograph them because they teach me about time. A stone is patient. It takes its time. It has been shaped by forces acting over thousands or millions of years. When I hold a stone, I am holding time I cannot comprehend.

This practice connects to what environmental psychologists Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan (1989) call the gentle pull of the natural world, the kind of gentle, effortless attention that natural objects invite. the gentle pull of the natural world is restorative. It allows directed attention to recover from the depletion caused by sustained cognitive effort. These stones are small teachers. They remind me that my urgency is one way among many to be in the world. They remind me that slowness is wisdom. They remind me that I, too, am being shaped by forces beyond my control, always becoming.

Moving Research into the Body

Scholarly Personal Narrative, developed by Robert Nash (2004), shifts inquiry from the library into the body. This is a profound methodological move. It says that lived experience is data. It is evidence. It is a legitimate site of knowledge production.

Nash (2004) describes scholarly personal narrative as an unapologetic insistence that the writer’s own life carries genuine scholarly meaning, that experience counts as a legitimate form of knowing alongside abstraction. This admission is both liberating and frightening. It liberates me from the pretence that I am a detached observer of phenomena held at a safe distance. It frightens me because it requires vulnerability. I cannot hide behind the passive voice or the third person. I must say I. I must own what I know and how I know it.

Nash (2004) describes the elements of effective scholarly personal narrative:

The Personal: I use my own transition, my own exhaustion, my own body as the primary site of inquiry.

The Scholarly: I anchor my experiences in established theories of transition, neurobiology, trauma, and human rights.

The Universal: My story of burnout serves as a mirror for a broader systemic crisis in academic labour.

Nash (2004) urges writers to preserve the distinctive, hard-won quality of their own voice in favour of academic convention; the particularity of that voice, he insists, is itself the most valuable thing a scholarly personal narrative can offer. I am trying to trust my voice. I am trying to believe that what I have lived is worth telling, that my experience contributes to understanding, that my story might offer something to others who recognize themselves in it.

Daily Practices by the Sea

Title: Learning the Rhythm

Artist Statement

I stood at the shoreline watching the waves come in, one after the other, without urgency. There was no need to measure time here. The water moved as it always has, steady and unconcerned with outcome.

I found myself staying longer than planned. Beyond thinking. Just watching the repetition, the way each wave arrived fully and then released itself back into the whole.

This moment became a quiet lesson in pacing. Nothing forced. Nothing held. Motion without pressure.

I am learning that restoration has its own rhythm. It cannot be rushed. It can only be entered.

Van der Kolk (2014) emphasizes that neuroscience consistently points toward body-based awareness, the capacity to sense what is happening inside the body, as the necessary entry point for emotional change. Healing requires inner body awareness, the capacity to sense and interpret signals from inside the body.

My plan for the days ahead remains intentionally simple:

Writing in the morning light. Words come differently when the day is new and quiet.

Swimming in salt water. The sea holds me, and for once, I release the work of holding myself.

Walking without a destination. Movement without purpose. Presence without productivity.

Painting without expectation. Colour and water on paper. No outcome required.

Sitting long enough to feel sensation return. This is perhaps the hardest practice of all.

These are ordinary activities that create conditions, beyond any elaborate intervention, for awareness. They are the practical application of what I am calling the discipline of arrival, which is the practice of landing fully in a moment without any next thing pressing against the edge of the current thing.

Porges (2011) emphasizes that the body’s ability to find calm is biological and experiential, shaping how individuals engage with the world, relationships, and perceived risk. If I want to experience the world differently, I must shift my physiological state. This cannot be accomplished through willpower alone. It requires environmental conditions that communicate safety to my nervous system. It requires time. It requires patience with a body that has forgotten what rest feels like.

Title: White Ford Bronco

Artist Statement

I passed this white Ford Bronco while walking, sun already high, palm shadows stretching across the road. It was parked without urgency, dust settled into its surface, gear strapped to the roof as if ready but in no rush to move.

I stopped because it felt familiar. The stance drew me rather than the vehicle itself. Prepared, yet resting. Capable of motion, yet still.

This moment reflected something I am learning to practise. Readiness can hold stillness. One can be equipped for the road while allowing pause.

I am beginning to understand that rest is part of the journey rather than its opposite.

Stepping onto the Third Shore

I think of this month as a movement toward what I am calling the Third Shore. If one shore is loneliness (the pain of unwanted isolation) and another shore is solitude (the peace of chosen aloneness), then the third shore is alonetude: the space where imposed isolation is transformed through attention and care into something generative.

The third shore is a threshold. It is a liminal space. It is a quality of presence to be practised: a quality, never a destination.

I arrive by the sea to listen. To write. To breathe. To remember what a body feels like when it receives permission to rest.

Van der Kolk (2014) argues that the capacity to act in one’s own interest, genuine agency, depends on inner body awareness, the ability to sense and interpret the body’s internal signals. Inner body awareness, as I explained earlier, is the capacity to sense the body’s internal state.

I am here to recover my inner body awareness. I am here to relearn the signals my body has been sending that I have spent years ignoring. I am here to discover what I need, what I want, and who I am beyond performance for an institution that no longer employs me.

Title: Sea of Cortez

Artist Statement

The sea is why I came here. I needed to be near water. I needed the sound of waves, the smell of salt, the horizon line that reminds me how small my concerns are against the scale of geological time. Environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich (1983) demonstrated that visual exposure to water and natural environments reduces stress and supports psychological restoration. This is physiology, beyond metaphor. My nervous system responds to this landscape in ways my conscious mind cannot fully control. I photograph the sea because it is my co-researcher in this inquiry. It holds space for me. It asks nothing. It continues its ancient rhythms regardless of whether I am watching. There is comfort in that indifference. There is freedom in being witnessed by something that holds me beyond performance.

An Invitation to Continue

Title: Holding the Same

Artist Statement

Two pelicans moved slowly across the marina, bodies low, unhurried, carried more than directed by the tide. Boats rested behind them, tethered, waiting for other hands, other departures.

I lingered here longer than expected. What held my attention was their rhythm rather than the birds themselves. Separate, yet aligned. Moving through the same water without the need to converge.

This moment offered a gentle teaching. Solitude allows proximity without requiring isolation. It allows proximity without pressure. Presence without performance.

There is room to share space while still remaining wholly one’s own.

This is the second entry in a thirty-day inquiry. I hold what comes next as still open. I know only that I am here, that my body is beginning to register the absence of institutional demand, and that something is shifting in ways I cannot yet name.

If you are reading this and you recognize yourself in these words, I want you to know: you are held in a community of exhaustion. It is structural. It is systemic, lodged in conditions beyond your personal failing.

And if you are lucky enough to have security, to have rest, to have a body that rests rather than constantly bracing for the next threat, I hope this offers a window into what precarious labour actually feels like from the inside. I hope it helps you understand why your contingent colleagues seem tired, why they hesitate to say no, and why they perform well even when they are struggling.

The sea is calling. I am going to answer.

Estoy llegando. Estoy aprendiendo a descansar.

I am arriving. I am learning to rest.

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

References

Bollas, C. (2017). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the what we hold in our bodies before we have words for it. Routledge.

Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2019). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes (40th anniversary ed.). Balance.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.

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

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.

Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine Publishing.

Ulrich, R. S. (1983). Aesthetic and affective response to natural environment. In I. Altman & J. F. Wohlwill (Eds.), Human behaviour and environment: Advances in theory and research (Vol. 6, pp. 85–125). Plenum Press.

United Nations. (1948). Universal declaration of human rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

ACADEMIC LENS

This post enacts what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) describe as writing as inquiry: the personal narrative constitutes the research itself rather than merely illustrating it. The somatic methodology here draws directly on van der Kolk’s (2014) clinical finding that traumatic experience is encoded in the nervous system rather than declarative memory, which is why the body’s vigilance persists long after the threat has passed. The concept of alonetude developed in this reflection names a state that existing scholarship leaves only partially captured: neither Moustakas’s (1961) existential loneliness nor Tillich’s (1963) contemplative solitude, but a third orientation characterized by presence without performance. Hochschild’s (2012) framework of emotional labour helps name the invisible cost of precarious institutional life, while Nixon’s (2011) concept of slow violence illuminates how institutional harm accumulates gradually, without announcement, leaving the body as its primary archive. The research methodology is autoethnographic in the tradition of Ellis and Bochner (2000), using the first-person body as both site and source of knowledge.

Who Gets to Rest? Alonetude, Privilege, and the Limits of My Knowing

Reading Time: 16 minutes

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.

References

Acker, J. (1973). Women and social stratification: A case of intellectual sexism. American Journal of Sociology, 78(4), 936–945. https://doi.org/10.1086/225415
Avalos, M. A., & Argueta, M. (2019). Temporality and precarity: Understanding time in border communities. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 34(3), 423–442. https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2017.1370145
Camacho, A. S. (2008). Migrant imaginaries: Latino cultural politics in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. New York University Press.
Case, A., & Deaton, A. (2020). Deaths of despair and the future of capitalism. Princeton University Press.
Choo, H. Y., & Marx Ferree, M. (2010). Practicing intersectionality in sociological research: A critical assessment of the literature on inequality and precarity. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 35(4), 785–810. https://doi.org/10.1086/651220
Coulter, N., & Ramirez, H. (2023). Gendered precarity in the academy: Documenting women’s contract labour. Feminist Review, 134, 45–62. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-023-00397-2
Davis, A. Y. (1981). Women, race, & class. Random House.
DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press.
Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.
Hochschild, A. R. (1997). The time bind: When work becomes home and home becomes work. Metropolitan Books.
Kapsalis, A., Walker, T. D., Blackburn, B., & Woolfrey, B. (2020). Public lands, access, and disability: What research on disability and public space tells us about inclusive recreation. Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership, 12(2), 93–106.
Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life (2nd ed.). University of California Press.
Lara-Valencia, F. (2008). Labor precarity and environmental inequality in the U.S.–Mexico border region. Environmental Justice, 1(3), 157–165. https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2008.1.157
Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays. Firebrand Books.
Mayo Clinic. (n.d.). Depression (major depressive disorder). Retrieved from https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/symptoms-causes/syc-20350057
Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathways to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Puar, J. K. (2017). The right to maim: Debility, capacity, disability. Duke University Press.
Rapaport, C., Oswald, T. M., & Quadflieg, S. (2021). Autistic camouflaging: A review of the literature and directions for future research. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 60–73. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2020.0026
Skeggs, B. (2004). Class, self, culture. Routledge.
Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books.
Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic.

Ambiguous Loss: Grief Without Closure

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Keywords: ambiguous loss, grief without closure, Pauline Boss, frozen grief, scholarly personal narrative, embodied knowing

What This Essay Names

Some losses do not arrive with a body to bury, an ending to mark, or a moment in which the world agrees that something has ended. The person is still there but has been transformed by addiction, illness, or estrangement. The relationship is still present, but no longer holds. The identity one expected to grow into has been foreclosed but never formally given up. The grief is real, but the social rituals that allow grief to be witnessed are unavailable because no death has occurred.

I call this what Pauline Boss called it: ambiguous loss. Naming matters because without a name, grief has nowhere to go.

Defining Ambiguous Loss

Ambiguous loss, as defined by Pauline Boss (1999), is grief that accompanies losses that are unclear, unresolved, and without the finality of death. Bloom (2007) refines the definition of grief without closure, as the conditions for closure do not exist.

The boss distinguished two forms:

Physical presence with psychological absence — the person is still there but is transformed beyond recognition (the parent with dementia, the loved one displaced by addiction, the partner withdrawn into untreated illness).
Psychological presence with physical absence — the person is gone but remains alive in the relational imagination (the missing person, the estranged family member, the unrealized self).

I would add a third form, drawn from my own corpus and from the literature on precarious belonging:

Foreclosed possibility — grief for an identity, vocation, or future that was made impossible by structural conditions rather than by death (the academic career that contingent labour foreclosed; the rest that precarity made unavailable; the self that compliance with institutional demands required one to abandon).

How the Senses Relate

Ambiguous loss operates across four interlocking registers:

Relational — the relationship persists in some form, even as what it once was has ended. The grief cannot be resolved because the loss cannot be located.
Temporal — the loss does not end. It accompanies the person across years, present in each encounter, and refuses the closure that ritual provides.
Social — the loss is not witnessed. The community does not gather. The cards are not sent. The grief is borne alone because no public event has named it.
Political — many ambiguous losses are produced by structural conditions (precarity, displacement, addiction, exclusion) rather than by chance. To name them as losses is also to name the conditions that produced them.

These four senses converge on a single recognition: ambiguous loss is grief that cannot be metabolized through the usual channels because those channels require a closure that the loss does not contain.

Where I Have Lived Inside Ambiguous Loss

I have already written about ambiguous loss in several places. With my mother (Bloom, 2007), the loss of the daughter she thought she was raising and the daughter I became. With a loved one displaced by addiction (Boss, 1999), the grief of watching the person I knew become someone else while remaining physically present. With the foreclosed possibility of stable academic work, a loss for which there is no ritual because nothing visibly ended.

What links these is the absence of a moment to mourn. The relationship continues. The work continues. The person continues. The loss is real, but the world offers no occasion to register it.

Alonetude, as I have come to define it, is in part a practice for being with ambiguous loss. The intentional, embodied solitude of alonetude makes room for grief that has nowhere else to go. The slowness, the unhurried witness of one’s own company, becomes the ritual that the world withholds.

Why the Name Matters

To name a loss as ambiguous is to claim that it is a loss. Without the name, the grief becomes evidence of personal weakness (“why can’t you move on?”) rather than evidence of a real and ongoing absence. Institutional gaslighting, which I have written about in a companion essay, often relies on the unnameability of ambiguous loss: if the grief cannot be named, the conditions that produced it cannot be named either.

The work of naming ambiguous loss is, therefore, not only personal. It is part of the larger work of insisting that what we have lost counts as loss, even when the world has provided no ritual for its witnessing.

References

Bloom, S. L. (2007). Loss, trauma, and resilience: Therapeutic work with ambiguous loss. Psychiatric Services, 58(3), 419–420.

Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.

Boss, P. (2006). Loss, trauma, and resilience: Therapeutic work with ambiguous loss. W. W. Norton.

A Note to the Broader Precariat

The precariat I document in this project is shaped by my specific location. I offer this as one situated, theorized account, with the explicit hope that it invites other accounts, from other bodies, in other contexts.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Many Bodies, Same Ground

On the limits of any one account, and the invitation that follows from those limits.

Weathered stone discs arranged in a group beneath a tree, resting on pine needles and dry earth in afternoon light. — Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

The precariat I document in this project is shaped by my specific location: white, settler, Canadian, English-speaking, working within a particular institutional culture at a particular historical moment. I know that. I want to say it plainly here, in a post of its own, because it matters to the meaning of everything else.

Fractured Ground

A dark crystalline rock fragment resting on a wooden surface, its fractured edges catching the light. — Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Precarious academic labour looks different across national contexts, languages, genders, races, and institutional cultures. A contract instructor in Mexico navigates different structures, different protections or their absence, different relationships between labour, identity, and institutional belonging, than a contract instructor in Canada. A sessional lecturer in the United Kingdom faces different union landscapes, different visa conditions, and different histories of what the university is and who it serves. A contingent faculty member in the United States works within a different legal framework and a different geography of precarity than someone at a Brazilian federal university or a South African college under austerity. The structural conditions are related but far from identical, and collapsing them into a single story would harm each.

What Endures

A large weathered rock formation standing at the shore under an open sky, its surface layered and worn by time. — Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

What is shared across these contexts is real and significant: the insecurity, the chronic self-monitoring, the way worth becomes tied to the next contract, the exhaustion of performing enthusiasm for an institution that holds you at arm’s length, the particular loneliness of caring deeply about work that the system treats as interchangeable. These are patterns that cross borders. This project names them from one body, in one country, in one language.

Your account is the one this one cannot give. I hope you write it.

What is different across these contexts is equally real and equally significant. I offer this project as one situated, documented, and theorized account, grounded in the specificity of where I stood and what I carried. It is the beginning of an argument, and beginnings require continuation. The next study needs more voices, more bodies, more contexts, in other languages and other institutional landscapes, with methodologies capable of holding that breadth without flattening it.

If you are reading this and you recognize something here, I am glad the account reached you. If you are reading this and thinking, “but it was different for me, my country, my language, my body,” then I want you to know that difference is exactly what this project is calling for. Your account is the one that this one cannot give. I hope you write it.

Carried Here

A pale flat stone with golden and cream tones resting in dark sand, smooth-edged and quietly present. — Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Still Standing

A stone cairn balanced carefully in the night outside a lit building, stones stacked in quiet equilibrium. — Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

The stones hold each other. That is enough to begin.

Still: A Door at King’s College and the Geography of Academic Precarity

Reading Time: 6 minutes

I stood in the corridor of the Foundation Year Program at the University of King’s College in Halifax and read a door. Two posters were taped to its panels, framing the nameplate of Dr. Maria Euchner, Senior Fellow in the Humanities and Associate Director, FYP (Academic). The poster on the left read, in heavy black type: “First-Year Fellows Don’t Make a Living Wage.” The poster on the right read: “Overworked.” Underpaid. Disposable. Above the word “Overworked,” a hand had written “STILL” in blue marker, underlined twice.

I have spent years thinking about precarity in higher education. I have written about it as my doctoral committee at Royal Roads University helped me sharpen my argument. I have lived it as a contract academic at Thompson Rivers University for nearly two decades. I thought I understood the architecture. Standing in front of that door, I felt the weight of the word Still. That single adverb, written by hand, did more theoretical work than most of the literature I have cited.

Still, Dr. Euchner’s Door, Foundation Year Program, University of King’s College, Halifax

A door at King's College with two union posters reading First-Year Fellows Don't Make a Living Wage and STILL Overworked. Underpaid. Disposable. — Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

What the Door Said

The posters were produced by the University of King’s College Teaching Association (UKCTA), the union representing Faculty Fellows and Senior Fellows in the Foundation Year Program. Faculty Fellows are appointed to three-year non-renewable contracts. Senior Fellows are appointed to two-year non-renewable contracts. According to a position posting for the role, the starting salary for a Faculty Fellow in the Humanities was $52,343 to $56,627 as of July 1, 2022, with future scales tied to bargaining (University of King’s College, 2026). The duties listed include four to eight hours of tutorials per week, eight hours of lecture attendance, weekly office hours, bi-weekly essay grading, and an average reading load of sixty pages per day, four days per week.

Set this beside the most recent calculation from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) Nova Scotia office. Saulnier and Williams (2024) calculated the 2024 living wage for Halifax at $28.30 per hour, the highest rate in Atlantic Canada. The CCPA methodology assumes a household with two adults, each working thirty-five hours per week to support two children, which translates into roughly $51,506 in annual earnings per adult before taxes. The arithmetic is uncomfortable. A first-year Faculty Fellow at the 2022 salary floor of $52,343, working a load that almost certainly exceeds thirty-five hours per week once preparation, marking, reading, and committee work are honestly counted, is hovering at the line. The poster is correct. When the actual hours are accounted for, the line is behind them.

A tentative agreement was reached and ratified in early April 2026, after conciliation talks broke down and a strike appeared imminent (Chiasson, 2026; Taylor, 2026). The strike was averted. The structural questions on that door remain.

The Word That Did the Work

The word “Still” was what stopped me. The literature on contingent and contract academic labour returns again and again to the same pattern: a campaign, a report, a brief moment of public attention, and then quiet. The poster on the right side of Dr. Euchner’s door was familiar; this poster had been up before. The handwritten Still in blue marker suggested that the same poster, or one very much like it, had been put up before. The fight had been waged. The conditions had shifted too little for the poster to come down.

Time itself becomes a feature of precarity. In my dissertation at Royal Roads, Through Our Eyes: A Photovoice Study of Interconnected Precarity, Belonging, and Possibility in Higher Education, I argue that contract faculty and international students are bound together by parallel vulnerabilities. I call this interconnected precarity. The institutional logic that recruits international students for tuition revenue and discards them at graduation is the same logic that hires Faculty Fellows for teaching capacity and discards them at the end of the contract. The pattern is rhythmic. The bodies rotate through. The titles remain. The students change, the Fellows change, and yet the work and the conditions of the work persist. Still.

The Titles and the Trap

I have been developing a concept in a separate manuscript, recently advanced to conditional acceptance at Group and Organization Management, that I call malperformative inclusion. It names a particular institutional move: an organization performs the gestures of inclusion through titles, ceremonies, publicity, and acknowledgement programs, while the underlying structures continue to exclude. The performance is included only in the form. It is inclusion that performs the function of exclusion under another name (Tucker, in press).

The title “Faculty Fellow” is prestigious. It carries the resonance of Oxford and Cambridge collegiate traditions, of community, of belonging. It signals scholarly seriousness. It tells parents, applicants, and donors that the people teaching the foundational program are valued members of an intellectual community. The reality, laid out in plain language on paper taped to a door, is that the Fellowship is a non-renewable contract, that the salary in the first year falls at or below the regional living wage, and that the position will end on a fixed date with no path to continuation. The title performs inclusion. The contract performs disposability. This is what I mean by malperformative inclusion. The door named it more economically than my chapter does.

A Door Is a Photograph Is a Method

I look at this door, and I see a photovoice frame. Photovoice is a participatory research methodology developed by Wang and Burris (1997) in which participants use photographs to document conditions of life that conventional reporting cannot reach. The image becomes a means of testimony. It carries information that paragraphs cannot, because the image asserts: this is here, this is now, this is real.

The Faculty Fellows had no need for a researcher to come and document their conditions. They produced their own photovoice frame. They printed the words. They taped them to a door at the height of an adult reader. They wrote Still by hand. The hand-lettered word is the methodological signature. It says: a person did this. A person stood in this hallway and amended the original poster because, despite its accuracy, it was no longer accurate enough. Conditions remained unchanged. The poster required updating. Still.

The Faculty Fellows at King’s are doing the same work with paper and tape. The door is the camera. The corridor is the gallery. The asterisk citing Living Wage Canada is the methodological footnote. I find this beautiful and devastating in equal measure.

What I Take With Me

I take three things from this door into my own work and into my dissertation defence in the coming weeks.

The first is that precarity is rarely solved by a single agreement. The strike was averted at King’s College. I am genuinely glad. I also know from my work with the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of British Columbia (FPSE) and my role as Chair of the Non-Regular Faculty Committee that aversion is a pause, and that resolution requires more. Three-year and two-year non-renewable contracts will continue to shape the working lives of those who teach in the foundational humanities program at one of Canada’s oldest universities. The poster must be taken down by the institution; the workers alone cannot remove it.

The second is that scholarly personal narrative is appropriate and, at times, necessary in such moments. I write in this voice because the door is in the first person. The hand that wrote Still is a worker’s hand, personal and deliberate, distinct from any institution’s. Theory should answer in kind.

The third is that the Foundation Year Program’s foundation rests on the labour of people paid at or below the living wage in the city where they live. The undergraduate students who arrive for their first year of university, often on student loans and family sacrifice, are taught by scholars whose own household economies are governed by precarity. Interconnected precarity is concrete, immediate, and present. It is the floor and the ceiling of the same building.

I left the corridor. I carried a photograph of a door. I carry it still.

References

Chiasson, N. (2026, April 8). Strike looming for some staff at Kings College in Halifax. Country 103.5 / Acadia Broadcasting. https://hotcountry1035.ca/2026/04/08/strike-set-for-some-staff-at-kings-college-in-halifax/

Saulnier, C., & Williams, R. (2024). 2024 living wages for Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Nova Scotia. https://www.policyalternatives.ca

Taylor, E. (2026, April 9). Strike avoided at University of King’s College after deal reached. Country 103.5 / Acadia Broadcasting. https://hotcountry1035.ca/2026/04/09/strike-avoided-at-university-of-kings-college-after-deal-reached/

Tucker, A. (in press). Malperformative inclusion as institutional practice [Commentary]. Group and Organization Management.

Tucker, A. (in progress). Through our eyes: A photovoice study of interconnected precarity, belonging, and possibility in higher education [Doctoral dissertation, Royal Roads University].

University of King’s College. (2026). Faculty fellowship in the humanities [Position posting]. https://ukings.ca/campus-community/employment/faculty-fellowship/

University of King’s College Teaching Association. (2026, April 9). Statement on tentative agreement. UKCTA.

Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behavior, 24(3), 369-387. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309

What I Have Been Learning About Myself

Reading Time: 8 minutes

This essay is the limiting-beliefs and introversion companion to Finding Myself: A Reflection. The companion essay sits with what personality inventories reflect back; this one stays with the specific beliefs operating beneath my days and with the reclamation of an introverted temperament long performed as its opposite.

There are seasons in a life when the questions we are asking quietly change without our noticing. For most of my adult years, I had been asking what I should do next. What to study, what to publish, what to train for, who to become. These were useful questions, and they shaped a productive life. What I am only now beginning to see is that they all rested on an assumption I had never examined. The assumption was that I already knew who I was, and that the work was simply to decide where to take her.

That assumption has quietly fallen apart this year, and the falling apart has turned out to be a kind of gift.

The Ground Beneath

I am sixty years old. I have spent most of my life in the academy, teaching, researching, writing, and contributing across a career largely defined by what I produced. I have been a triathlete for years, and I will represent Canada at the World Championships in September in Aquabike and Sprint events. I have finished my dissertation. I have kept a wellness column for the Kamloops Chronicle. I have loved a man for seven years. I have built a home, a body, and a body of work. I have, by most measures, been doing well.

And yet, quietly and persistently, something in me has been asking for more honesty. No more accomplishments. More honesty. More attention to who is actually living this life from the inside.

Small Acts of Finding

I am, at my core, an introvert, and I am only recently beginning to give that fact the weight it deserves. I draw my energy from solitude, from quiet rooms, from unhurried time with my own thoughts. I prefer to be alone, and for most of my life, I felt a quiet shame about that preference, as if it were a failure of sociability rather than a feature of how I am made. What I am finally letting myself say out loud is that I feel most at peace when I am alone, because I am free from judgment, free from navigating someone else’s expectations, free from worrying that I have said the wrong thing, misread the room, taken up too much space, or taken up too little. I feel at ease with myself. I cause no accidental harm to anyone. I am simply here, in my own company, without the low constant hum of relational vigilance that has followed me through so many rooms in my life.

Watching from the Inside

For much of my career, my work taught me to be extroverted. Teaching demanded it. Meetings demanded it. Conferences, committees, advising, and leading all demanded it. I learned to do it, and for a long time, I believed I had genuinely become it. What I am realizing now is that extroversion was a performance I could sustain because I am attuned, capable, and quick in a room, but it was never the truth of my energy. It was a skill I had built at high cost. Every extroverted day drained me in ways my extroverted colleagues seemed to recover from easily. I went home depleted. I ate to fill the hollow. I slept poorly. I found it impossible to understand why others found the same rooms energizing while I found them exhausting. I thought there was something wrong with me. What was actually wrong was that I was living inside a professional identity that asked the opposite of what my temperament needed, day after day, for decades, and I had no framework for naming the cost.

The Performance of Looking Up

I am naming it now. The solitude I crave is purposeful. It is a love of people, from the right distance. It is a form of connection chosen freely. It is the way my temperament refuels itself, and it is also the space in which I am finally able to be with myself without the exhausting weight of being watched, evaluated, or needed. I have come to believe that my preference for being alone deserves to be honoured rather than apologized for, and that the extroversion I performed for so many years was one of the quieter costs of a working life that was never quite designed for someone built like me.

Rooms I Have Learned to Leave

The deeper looking began, as it often does, with a list. I sat down and wrote out the limiting beliefs I could feel operating underneath my days. There were nine of them by the time I finished. I named them carefully, and I tried to be honest about the ones I was most tempted to skip. The one that had the deepest roots was the belief that my worth was tied to what I produced. Around that belief, I could see that an identity had formed over many years. I had become the one who holds it all together. The woman who could be counted on, who showed up, who carried, who managed, who kept going. That identity had worked well for me. It had also cost me things I am only beginning to add up.

What Has Grown in the Waiting

I decided to sit with that belief and identity honestly and trace them through the different domains of my life.

In my relationships, I have found that I most often show care through doing, giving, and supporting others in tangible ways. The care itself is genuine. It is an expression of something real in me. What I noticed when I looked closely was that this way of expressing care has quietly become a form of currency. Being valued and being useful have become almost the same thing in my interior world. I feel more comfortable offering than receiving. I find it easier to be the person who shows up with a meal, a piece of advice, a note of encouragement, than to be the person who lets someone else show up for me. The cost has been that my relationships have often been anchored in contribution rather than in mutual presence. The polished version of me has gone outward. The unfinished version has stayed private, sometimes even from myself. I am beginning to ask what it would feel like to be valued simply for being present, without producing anything at all. The answer is still ahead of me. The question itself is still new.

What We Carry Forward

In my work, I found that the belief has been both an engine and a weight. It has driven me to achieve and to contribute, and the life that has resulted is one I am genuinely proud of. It has also made rest into something I could only access if I had earned it first. Even moments of stillness have come with conditions. Rest had to be justified by what came before or what would come after. The possibility of simply resting, because a human body and mind need rest, has been almost entirely unavailable to me. The belief, I now see, is closely tied to decades of moving through environments that made my place feel conditional. Those environments were real, and the belief was accurate in them. What I am learning is that the environments have changed, and that the belief has quietly persisted past the conditions that produced it. It is doing work that is no longer required.

In my outlook on the world, the belief has shaped how I walk into rooms. Rooms have sometimes felt like assessments. Opportunities have felt like tests. New relationships have felt like introductions I needed to pass. I also hold, in the same heart, a real belief in possibility and in care and in the ordinary goodness of people. Both perspectives live in me at once. What I have begun to notice is that when the limiting belief is loud, I walk past the rooms where I am already welcome. My attention is given entirely to the rooms that are asking me to prove something, and the rooms of welcome stand quietly beside me, unrecognized. I am learning to notice them. I am learning to stay in them longer before reaching for the next thing.

What I am coming to understand is that my beliefs were the interpretations I absorbed along the way about what life required of me. Some of them were accurate. Some of them were distortions. The belief that my worth was tied to what I produced was a distortion. It took something real about who I am, which is a person who genuinely cares about contribution, and it quietly twisted that care into a demand. The care itself is beautiful. The demand attached to it is where the suffering has lived.

Alongside this work, I have been naming my values with a precision I have never given them before. I value care and compassion. I value justice and fairness. I value integrity. I value meaningful contributions. I value growth and self-understanding. I value relationality. I value authenticity. I value resilience and perseverance. I value creativity and expression. These go beyond a list I recite. They are the grain of the wood. They describe a woman oriented toward meaning, depth, and human flourishing. They also ask a great deal of me, and I have been holding them for a long time without quite allowing myself to rest inside them.

The Grain of the Wood

What I want to say, as a closing thought, is that I am writing this as someone still on the way. I am writing it from inside the work. The woman I am becoming is still finding her way, and she has some distance to travel. She will still be recognizably me. She will still be an introvert who finds her home in solitude. She will still carry the same values she has always carried. But she will move through the world more lightly, with less self-punishment, and with more room to simply exist as the particular person she was made to be. That is the work I am doing this year. That is what all of this has finally been for.

If you are reading this and you are in the middle of your own becoming, I want you to know that your unfinished work is welcome here. You are welcome to speak before you arrive. Figuring it out can come later. You are allowed to be where you are, and to say so out loud, and to trust that the saying itself is part of how you get to wherever you are going.

That is the work. That is all it has ever been.

Finding Myself: A Reflection

Reading Time: 11 minutes

This essay is the personality-frameworks companion to What I Have Been Learning About Myself. Here I sit with what temperament inventories (MBTI, True Colours) reflect back and where I push against them; the companion essay carries the deeper work on limiting beliefs and on reclaiming introversion.

There comes a point in a long life of reflection when the question quietly changes. For most of my adult years, I had been asking what I should do next. What should I study. What should I publish? What should I train for? What should I become? These were useful questions, and they shaped a productive life. But they were all questions about direction, and they rested on an assumption I had never quite examined. The assumption was that I already knew who I was, and that the work was simply to figure out where I was taking her. In recent months, that assumption has quietly fallen apart. I have come to realize that I am still in the process of knowing who I am, and that much of what I thought was my identity was actually a set of adaptations I had made to the environments I moved through over a long career. The question shifted, almost without my noticing, from what I should do next to who was asking. That question is harder. It is also, I think, the question that matters most in the second half of a life.

Title: A Moment of Reflection

Warm sunset sky over park trees with mountains in the distance — Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

The look began with the frameworks. I had read about personality for years without quite using the material on myself, and I finally decided to sit with it honestly. I took the inventories. I read the profiles slowly. I let the descriptions have their chance to reflect something back. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Briggs Myers & Myers, 1980) profile that emerged was INFJ, which describes a person oriented toward depth, meaning, attunement, and the interior life. The True Colours system (Lowry, 1978) placed me as Orange and Blue with Green close behind, and with Gold noticeably absent from my top colours. Reading these descriptions was a curious experience. Some of what they said landed with an almost physical recognition. Some of it made me pause. Some of it I wanted to push back against. I want to write about that honestly, because I think the habit of accepting every flattering description as the truth about ourselves is one of the subtle ways we keep ourselves hidden.

Title: New Growth

Green shoots emerging from soil — Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

There was more agreement than I expected. The description of the INFJ as someone with a rich inner world that she rarely shares at its full depth, and whose composed external presentation often fails to match the complexity of her interior, was accurate enough that I sat down while reading it. That description named the girl I was at nine years old, already learning to arrange her face before entering a room, and it named the woman I have been for most of the years since. The description of a temperamental drive toward meaning-making was equally accurate. The dissertation, the wellness column, the blog, the book I am shaping, and much of the work I have done across a long career are all evidence of this pattern. I have been turning what I have lived through into contributions for as long as I have been alive. The True Colours reading of Orange and Blue and Green as roughly equal in me was also true, and the agreement there was harder to bear, because it named a tension I have lived with without having the language to describe it. My Orange wants to be in my body, training, running, and moving. My Blue wants to be with people, writing to them, caring for them. My Green wants to sit quietly with books and ideas. Each is legitimately me. Each asks for real time and energy. The tension between them has been part of my daily experience for as long as I can remember.

And yet, even as I was nodding, I was also pushing back. The frameworks describe a tendency toward perfectionism and a disproportionate sense of shame over small lapses, often framing these as essential features of the type. I disagree. I believe these are injuries rather than essential features. They are what happens when a sensitive, ethically attuned person absorbs performance standards that were never meant to be internalized and spends decades in environments that reward their internalization. The ethical rigour itself may be temperamental. The punishing internal critic attached to it is, I have come to believe, a learned response to environments that conflated high standards and self-punishment. That distinction matters more than almost any other insight I have arrived at this year, because one of those patterns is something I will live with to the end of my days, and the other is something I can set down. A framework that collapses the two into a single feature of the type deprives me of the distinction. I would rather hold the framework lightly, honour what it reflects accurately, and reserve the right to disagree when it tries to turn my adaptations into my essence.

What the frameworks were unable to reach, I am finding, lies beneath them. Temperament explains the shape of how I move through the world. Values explain what I am oriented toward. Neither of them describes the specific beliefs I have been operating from, the quiet instructions that have been running underneath my days for so long that I had stopped noticing them. Those beliefs are what actually organize a life. A framework can point in their general direction, but only the slow, unglamorous work of looking at my own days can bring them into focus. This is the work I have been doing recently, in a lesson on limiting beliefs, and it has been the most clarifying thing I have done in a long time.

Title: Deep Roots

Rhubarb plant with broad leaves growing in a garden bed — Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

When I made my list of beliefs and looked at them honestly, one rose quietly above the others as the belief with the deepest roots. It was the belief that my worth was tied to what I produced. Of all the beliefs I named, this one ran beneath almost everything else. It shaped what I thought about rest. It shaped how I approached relationships. It shaped my relationship with my work. It shaped how I perceived value itself. I have no memory of a version of myself unfamiliar with this belief. It felt, in a way, like bedrock. Around it had grown an identity, which I could see clearly once I looked. I had become, over many years, the one who holds it all together. That identity was the public-facing expression of the deeper belief. If my worth was tied to what I produced, then the identity that made the belief workable was the identity of a woman who could be counted on to produce, to lead, to carry, to manage, to hold the centre of things when others were unable to. The belief was the instruction. The identity was the role that followed.

The exercise I was asked to do was to examine this belief and identity across three domains of my life, to see how they had shaped the texture of my days. I sat with the first domain, my relationships with others, and asked myself how the belief and identity were showing up there. What I noticed was that I most often show care through doing, through giving, through supporting others in tangible ways. The care itself is real. It is an expression of something genuine in me. What the belief has quietly done is turn that care into a form of currency. I feel more comfortable offering than receiving. I find it far easier to be the person who shows up with a meal, a piece of advice, a note of encouragement, than to be the person who lets someone else show up for me. I noticed that I overextend myself, particularly when I sense that someone else is struggling, and that I take on more than is mine to hold. I read the room quickly, identify what is needed, and step into the role of the one who provides it. This has been rewarded often enough in my life that I have come to rely on it. What the belief costs me, in a relationship, is the depth of connection that becomes possible only when I am willing to be received rather than only to provide. Equating being valued with being useful leaves very little room for the simple experience of being loved when I am producing nothing. The question that arose from sitting with this domain was what it might feel like to be valued simply for being present, rather than for what I provide. The answer remains ahead of me. The question itself is new.

The second domain was my work. Sitting with the belief and the identity here was more complicated, because my work has been both a source of profound meaning and a place where this belief has done much of its quiet damage. The belief has driven me to achieve, produce, lead, and contribute meaningfully across teaching, research, and service. The life that has resulted is one I am genuinely proud of. I want to honour those accomplishments fully by pretending the belief was only harmful. It was also, in its way, generative. What the belief has cost me, though, is the possibility of simply resting. Rest, under this belief, has always come with conditions. It had to be earned through prior productivity. It had to be justified by future productivity. It had to be framed as recovery, never as its own good. The possibility of simply resting, because a human body and mind need rest, without any reference to output at all, has been genuinely unavailable to me for most of my working life. The belief is closely tied, I realize, to experiences of precarity and to the need to demonstrate credibility within institutional systems that treated people, and me, inequitably. I have spent much of my career in environments where my place was precarious, and where visible effort was the price of remaining. The belief was accurate, far from paranoid. It was a memory. It was an accurate reading of the environments I was actually living in. What I am beginning to understand now is that those environments have changed, and that the belief has quietly persisted past the conditions that produced it. I am beginning to consider how my work might feel if it were grounded in purpose rather than proof. That is a different relationship with my work than I have ever had. I am still making my way toward it. Imagining it is itself a change.

Title: The Work of Wisdom

Owl carved into a wooden box — Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

The third domain was my broader outlook on the world. Here, I noticed, with some discomfort, that I sometimes see environments as places where value must be demonstrated, recognition is tied to performance, and effort is required to secure belonging. Rooms can feel like assessments. Opportunities can feel like tests. New relationships can feel like introductions I need to pass. This is only part of my outlook. I also hold parallel beliefs in possibility, care, and transformation. The two perspectives coexist, and I move between them depending on the day and the room. What the limiting belief does, when it is running strongly, is narrow my view. It makes the world feel more demanding and evaluative than it may actually be. It obscures the rooms where I am already welcome, the people asking nothing of me by way of proof, the ordinary moments in which my presence alone is enough. When the belief is loud, I walk past those rooms without noticing them, because my attention is given entirely to the rooms that are asking me to perform. I am exploring the possibility that the world can also be a place where I am already enough, without continually having to demonstrate it. That exploration is slow and more demanding than positive thinking. It is the gradual reorientation of perception, room by room, over a long period of time.

Title: Environments That Demand

Pay parking sign on a pole with a mountain town view below — Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Sitting with this belief and this identity across these three domains taught me something that the personality frameworks, useful as they are, were unable to reach on their own. The frameworks describe my temperament. They suggest my natural orientation. They hint at where my strengths and my difficulties may lie. But they leave unaddressed which specific beliefs I have absorbed and how those beliefs are shaping the particulars of my daily life. That work is mine alone. It requires a different kind of looking. It also requires a different kind of patience, because the beliefs have been in place for so long that they no longer feel like beliefs. They feel like facts about the world. The work is to see them again as beliefs, which is to say, as interpretations I absorbed along the way and can, with time, revise.

What I am discovering is that the relationship between temperament, values, and beliefs is more complex than I had assumed, and that each layer requires a different kind of attention. My temperament gave me certain capacities, including my attunement, my depth, and my meaning-making. My values gave those capacities a direction, orienting me toward care, integrity, meaningful contribution, authenticity, and the other commitments I hold. My beliefs, on the other hand, were the interpretations I absorbed along the way about what my temperament and my values required of me. Some of those beliefs were accurate. Some of them were distortions. The belief that my worth was tied to what I produced was a distortion. It took something real about my temperament and my values: I am a person who genuinely cares about contribution, and it quietly twisted that care into a demand. The care itself is beautiful. The demand that has lived alongside it is where the suffering has been.

What I am slowly discovering is that I am neither the woman the frameworks describe nor the woman I have been performing for most of my life. I am somewhere between the two and still figuring myself out. I am an INFJ, insofar as that means anything useful. I am Orange and Blue and Green, with Gold mostly absent. I am a woman with nine clear values. I am also someone carrying specific limiting beliefs that I am now, for the first time, examining openly and naming out loud. The woman underneath all of these descriptions is someone I am only beginning to meet. She is ordinary and recognizable. She is recognizable. She is the kind of person who has always existed in human history, and who has always struggled with the same patterns I struggle with, and who has always found her way through the same honest work I am now doing. What makes her mine is simply that she is the particular version of this pattern that has shown up in my life, and that she is the one I am now responsible for tending.

There is an emerging belief underneath the older one, quieter, still learning to speak. I am worthy of connection, rest, and belonging without needing to prove it. I am practising this sentence, alongside the belief I have carried, as a companion to it rather than a replacement. Both are present. One is old and tired. One is new and tentative. I am letting them both exist, and I am trusting that over time, the newer voice will grow stronger, simply by being allowed to speak.

Title: Simple and Whole

Wooden bowls on a granite countertop — Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

What I would say to anyone who is in a similar season is something quiet. Take the frameworks seriously enough to let them reflect something back, and lightly enough to keep the right to disagree with them. Take your values seriously enough to name them honestly, perhaps in writing, where you can see them all at once. And take your beliefs seriously enough to examine them in the specific domains of your daily life, where they actually do their work. The frameworks will give you vocabulary. The values will give you direction. The belief that work will give you traction. All three are needed. None of them is sufficient on its own. The woman you are becoming will still be recognizably you. She will carry the same temperament she was born with. She will honour the same values she has claimed. But she will move through the world more lightly, with less self-punishment, and with more room to simply exist as the particular person she was made to be. That is the work. That is what all of this is finally for.

References

Briggs Myers, I., & Myers, P. B. (1980). Gifts differing: Understanding personality type. Davies-Black Publishing.

Lowry, D. (1978). True Colours. True Colours International.

3 Minute Thesis: Alonetude at Thompson Rivers University

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I stood at the podium with three minutes to explain thirty days, nineteen years, and the question that has been living in my body for longer than I can name.

The 3 Minute Thesis competition at Thompson Rivers University, March 2, 2026. Secwépemc territory. One slide. One photograph I took beside the Sea of Cortez. One question on the screen behind me:

What happens when we stop running from silence and let it teach us how to heal?

Amy Tucker presenting Alonetude research at the 3 Minute Thesis competition, Thompson Rivers University, March 2, 2026. She stands at a microphone gesturing toward a slide that reads: Alonetude: The Healing Practice of Chosen Solitude. — Photo: Deiveek | Thompson Rivers University Photography | 3MT, March 2, 2026

I had three minutes. I had the whole project behind me: thirty days, eighty-one blog entries, thousands of kilometres of nervous system regulation, grief held and released, stones collected, pelicans watched, tears cried into salt water. I had a methodology grounded in the body. I had a word I invented, alonetude, and the conviction that it names something real.

Three minutes to say: precarious academic labour goes beyond economics. It lives in the body. It reshapes the nervous system. It forecloses the capacity for rest. And rest, genuine rest, embodied and unhurried, is a human right under international law, a matter of human dignity.

Three minutes to say: I went to Loreto, México, for thirty days alone. I brought my research questions, my sixty-year-old body, and one orange suitcase. I stayed until the sea taught me something a desk could never have offered.

I have no distance on exactly how it went. I was inside it. I could feel the room listening. I could feel myself steady in a way I was unsteady a year ago, or six months ago, or even four months ago when I sat alone in the casita watching the sun set over the Sea of Cortez, wondering if any of this would ever be finished.

It is finished. And it is being heard.

Alonetude: The Healing Practice of Chosen Solitude.

Three minutes. Nineteen years. Thirty days by the sea. One breath before I spoke.

Thompson Rivers University | 3 Minute Thesis | March 2, 2026 | Kamloops, BC | Secwépemc Territory