El Umbral

Reading Time: 12 minutes

The Threshold

Title: Morning Held in a Cup

Title: Morning Held in a Cup

The coffee cooled faster than I expected.

I had carried it outside before the day fully formed, before voices rose from the pathways below, before the shoreline began its quiet negotiations with footsteps and movement. The mug sat heavy in my hands, ceramic warmed by what it held, painted with colours that felt brighter than the hour itself. Loreto written across it, as place, briefly touching my palms, without declaration. I realized I was holding geography in a way maps never allow. Heat. Weight. Stillness.

What struck me was the pause.

I let it sit first. I let the steam lift, let the horizon remain slightly out of focus beyond the wooden railing. There was comfort in the blur, in allowing the world to stay softened while I woke into it slowly. No urgency to begin the day. No performance required. Just breath, warmth, and the steady presence of water beyond sight but within reach. It felt like a continuation of something I had been learning here, that mornings can be received rather than seized. They can be received.

I thought about how many cups of coffee I have held in my life.

Behind counters. At kitchen tables. In classrooms before students arrived. Each one marking a threshold between effort and endurance, between showing up and staying anyway. This cup felt different. It had everything to do with how I was sitting with it. Unhurried. Unguarded. Simply present to the small ritual of warmth against my hands, aware that sometimes the most profound forms of steadiness arrive quietly, asking nothing more than that we hold them long enough to feel their heat.

Arrival rarely looks the way we imagine it will.

There is the physical act of stepping into a room, setting a bag down, and closing a door behind you. And then there is the quieter arrival that unfolds beneath the surface, the one that takes longer, the one the body negotiates in its own time. I landed in Loreto yesterday, somewhere between waking and dreaming, my sense of time dissolved by two flights and several hours of transit. The body arrives first. The breath follows. The mind lingers behind, still scanning, still carrying the vigilance of the life I have temporarily left.

Estoy cansada. I am tired. The phrase surfaced unbidden as the taxi wound through the quiet streets of this small town on the Sea of Cortez. I said it aloud, testing how Spanish felt in my mouth after so many years. The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror and nodded. Sí, se ve, he said gently. Yes, it shows.

Presence of self, rather than absence of others.

Cruzando / Crossing

I came here alone. That sentence still feels radical, even as I write it. At 60, after nineteen years navigating the relentless demands of academic life, I booked a solo retreat to a place where I know no one, where no one expects anything of me, where the only schedule is the one I choose to keep. The decision carried both relief and a strange tenderness, as if I were doing something slightly forbidden.

Arnold van Gennep (1909/1960), the anthropologist who coined the term liminality, described thresholds as spaces of transition, neither fully one thing nor another. The word itself comes from the Latin limen, meaning “boundary” or “doorstep”. To stand on a threshold is to occupy the space between what was and what might be, to hover in the doorway before stepping through. That is where I find myself tonight: on the threshold between the life I have been living and something I cannot yet name.

Victor Turner (1969), building on van Gennep’s work, described liminal spaces as places where ordinary structures dissolve, where the usual rules loosen their grip. He called this betwixt and between, a phrase that captures the particular disorientation of transition. I feel that disorientation now, sitting on a terrace overlooking water I have never seen before, in a country where I speak the language imperfectly, in a solitude I have chosen but am only beginning to inhabit.

El umbral es el lugar donde todo puede cambiar.

The threshold is the point at which everything can change.

Title: Después de Años de Disrupción / After Years of Disruption

Title: Where Sound Holds Time

I arrived before the bells moved.

The tower rose out of the morning sky with a kind of quiet authority that asked nothing and yet remained undeniable. Stone layered upon stone, holding heat from centuries of sun, holding prayer, grief, celebration, confession, all sedimented into the structure itself. I stood at its base looking upward, aware of my own smallness against its vertical reach. Contextualized rather than diminished. Placed within a timeline far longer than my own.

What struck me most was the anticipation of sound.

The bells hung still, suspended in that brief space before motion. I found myself listening for something still ahead, aware that when they did ring, the vibration would move through air, through wall, through body. There is something about churches that organizes silence differently. Even emptiness feels structured. Held. As though quiet itself has been practised here long before anyone enters.

I stayed outside first.

I stayed at the threshold, aware that entry is never only architectural. It is emotional. Spiritual. Historical. To cross from sunlight into that interior dimness would be to step into accumulated presence. So I remained outside a while longer, letting the bells remain still, letting the stone hold its stories without requiring mine to be added. Some places ask for reverence through participation. Others offer it simply through standing close enough to feel time moving slowly around you.

Presence of self, rather than absence of others.

This arrival carries history. After the pandemic, many people learned how to be alone in ways they never intended. Isolation arrived suddenly, unevenly, and without consent. Homes became offices. Screens replaced faces. Silence grew louder, then exhausting. Loneliness took many forms, some quiet, some crowded, some invisible even to those experiencing them.

Coming into solitude by choice feels different. And yet the body remembers. It holds traces of vigilance, of separation, of longing for connection that went unmet during those long months. Bessel van der Kolk (2014), in his landmark work on trauma, reminds us that the body keeps the score, storing experience in tissue and nervous system long after the mind has moved on. My body carried the pandemic here, tucked into my luggage alongside my journal and my watercolours. Arrival asks me to acknowledge that history rather than rush past it.

Tricia Hersey (2022), founder of The Nap Ministry, writes that rest is resistance, a refusal to participate in systems that reduce human worth to productivity. For those of us who survived the pandemic by working harder, by performing wellness while quietly falling apart, rest can feel transgressive. Choosing solitude after years of forced isolation requires a different kind of courage: the willingness to be alone on purpose, to trust that this time the aloneness will heal rather than harm.

La Primera Noche / The First Evening

At first, habit took over. I considered unpacking everything immediately. I thought about schedules, routes, and productivity. My mind offered a list of things I could accomplish before bed: organize the kitchen, plan tomorrow’s meals, and respond to the emails still waiting on my phone. This reflex runs deep, an inherited habit shaped by a world that rewards motion and punishes stillness.

So I sat.

I let the room remain unfinished. I left the bag zipped. I noticed how my shoulders softened when there was nowhere else to be. Outside, light shifted almost imperceptibly, the desert mountains turning pink and then purple as the sun dropped toward the sea. Inside, something settled.

The Kaplans (1989), environmental psychologists who developed the quiet way nature restores us theory, describe specific environments as offering the gentle pull of the natural world, a gentle hold on attention that allows the mind to rest while remaining engaged. Natural settings, they argue, restore depleted cognitive resources by providing stimulation that requires effort to ignore but minimal effort to attend to. The sea outside my window offers exactly this: something to watch without watching, something to hear without listening, something to receive without reaching.

I opened the windows and let the evening in. Salt air. The distant sound of waves. A dog barking somewhere in town. These sounds asked nothing of me. They existed, and I lived alongside them, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, that felt like enough.

El Acto Radical / The Radical Act

Title: Night Fire, Inner Quiet

Artist Statement

I found this place after most people had gone in.

The courtyard held that particular kind of night silence that is never empty, only softened. Chairs pushed back. Glass tables catching reflections of low light. The ocean somewhere beyond the dark, present but unseen. And in the centre, the fire already burning, as if it had been waiting for someone willing to sit without conversation.

I stood at the edge first, feeling the heat reach outward in small waves. Fire reorganizes space differently than daylight does. It draws the body inward. Invites stillness without demanding it. I noticed how the flames moved, steadily consuming what had already been offered. There was something reassuring in that rhythm. Transformation happening without spectacle.

Eventually, I sat.

To accompany the burning. To watch what happens when wood becomes ember, when form gives way to glow. I thought about how many versions of myself had been shaped in similar fires, slow, unseen processes of change that only reveal themselves in hindsight. The courtyard remained quiet. The flames continued their patient work. And for a while, I let the night hold me there, lit just enough to feel present, but held within it.

Arriving alone carries a particular tenderness. There is no one to absorb the moment for you, no one to narrate the experience to, no one whose presence dilutes the intensity of meeting yourself in an unfamiliar place. You stand at the threshold, and you stand there alone, and whatever comes next is yours to receive without mediation.

For women, especially women at midlife, this can feel revolutionary. Carol Gilligan (1982), in her foundational work on women’s psychological development, described how women often define themselves through relationships, through care for others, through responsiveness to needs that are rarely their own. To step away from those relationships, even temporarily, can feel like abandonment, like selfishness, like a betrayal of everything we were taught to value.

I think about my mother in Lethbridge, 80 years old, navigating widowhood in the house that still holds her husband’s absence. I think about the colleagues who will cover my responsibilities while I am away. I think about all the ways I have been trained to feel guilty for taking up space, claiming time, and prioritizing my own restoration. And then I think about what Audre Lorde (1988) wrote, that caring for myself is an act of political warfare, a refusal to participate in my own depletion.

Tonight, I am practising that refusal. I am letting the bag stay zipped. I am letting the emails wait. I am allowing myself to be tired without apologizing for it, without performing recovery before recovery has had a chance to begin.

Descansar es un acto de valentía.

To rest is an act of courage.

Title: Between Palms and Water

Artist Statement

I sat down without planning to stay long.

The chair faced the water, but my body settled first into the pause rather than the view. Two palms stood directly in front of me, their trunks close enough to feel companionable, their fronds catching the last light of the day. Beyond them, the Sea of Cortez moved in its steady, untroubled rhythm. Undramatic. Unclaiming. Just continuing.

What I noticed most was the layering of distance.

My feet resting in the foreground, grounded and still. Sand stretching outward in soft, wind-marked patterns. Trees spaced across the shoreline like quiet sentinels. And then the horizon line, holding everything without urgency. I felt held within those layers, neither separate from the landscape nor fully absorbed by it. Present, but gently so.

There is a particular quality to sitting alone at the edge of day.

The body softens. Breath lengthens. Thought loosens its grip. Nothing is being asked. Nothing needs to be solved. In that moment, I was beyond researching, teaching, producing, or proving. I was simply occupying space, allowing the environment to meet me without expectation.

I stayed longer than I thought I would.

Long enough for the light to shift. Long enough to feel that familiar return to myself that happens when stillness is given time rather than rushed through. The palms remained. The water continued. And I sat there, suspended briefly between land and horizon, aware that presence sometimes arrives quietly, asking only that I remain.

Lo que enseña el agotamiento / What exhaustion teaches

Jet lag is a strange teacher. It strips away the usual defences, the ability to perform wellness even when wellness is absent. Christina Maslach (Maslach & Leiter, 2016), who pioneered research on burnout, defines the syndrome as a combination of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment resulting from chronic workplace stress. I recognize myself in that definition more than I would like to admit. I have been running on empty for longer than I knew, and the running itself became invisible, just the way things were, just what the job required.

Tonight, stopped at last, I can feel how tired I actually am. It lives in my bones, in the heaviness of my limbs, in the way my eyes want to close even as my mind keeps scanning for the next thing to do. Stephen Porges (2011), the neuroscientist who developed the theory of how the nervous system responds to safety and threat, explains that our autonomic nervous system evaluates safety and danger through a process he calls the body’s instinct to scan for safety. The assessment below consciousness shapes our physiological state. My body’s instinct to scan for safety has been calibrated for threat for so long that even here, in this quiet room by the sea, my body remains on alert, still scanning for turbulence that is no longer present.

It will take more than one evening to convince my nervous system that it is safe. But this evening is where that convincing begins.

Antes de Dormir / Before Sleep

The night has deepened. The sea is audible but invisible now, just the rhythm of waves and the occasional cry of a night bird. In Kamloops, it is late. In Lethbridge, my mother is probably already asleep, her scriptures on the nightstand, her prayers said, the space beside her filled with faith and memory. I am connected to her across the distance, connected to everyone I love, even as I sit here alone.

This is what I am beginning to understand: solitude is a relational state, shaped by the connections we carry with us even when those we love are far away. Netta Weinstein and colleagues (2021) found, in their narrative study of solitude across the lifespan, that our sense of connection to others profoundly shapes the experience of being alone. Solitude becomes restorative when it is chosen, when it is bounded, when it exists within a larger web of relationships rather than as exile from connection.

I chose this. I bound it with return tickets and phone calls home, and the knowledge that thirty days will end. I carry my people with me, held in my heart rather than in my hand. And from that holding, I can begin to rest.

Mañana será otro día. Tomorrow will be another day. For now, I am letting this one be enough. I am letting exhaustion teach me what it knows: that I have been carrying too much, that the carrying has cost me, that setting the weight down, even for a moment, is the first step toward remembering what it feels like to be whole.

He llegado.

I have arrived.

Por ahora, eso es todo lo que necesito hacer.

For now, that is all I need to do.

Title: Elegance in Impermanence

Artist Statement

She was already standing there when I walked by.

Umbrella lifted. Dress falling neatly to the ground. There was something composed about her posture, as if she had paused rather than been placed. I noticed the pink first. Soft. Careful. Almost celebratory against the stone behind her.

What stayed with me was the contrast.

Bone and colour. Stillness and personality. The small details, the hat, the purse, the way she seemed dressed for presence rather than disappearance. Honest, rather than morbid. A quiet reminder that identity and expression persist past the finite edges of a life.

I stood there longer than I expected.

Simply noticing. The humour, the dignity, the gentleness within the figure. A simple moment of being reminded that impermanence and beauty can exist in the same space.

References

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

Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.

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

Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays. Firebrand Books.

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311

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.

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

van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909)

Weinstein, N., Nguyen, T.-V., & Hansen, H. (2021). What time alone offers: Narratives of solitude from adolescence to older adulthood. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 714518. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.714518

I am still walking. I am still staying anyway.

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

El umbral, the threshold, occupies the conceptual centre of this project: it is the liminal space Turner (1969) described as the territory between one identity configuration and another, where transformation becomes possible precisely because the habitual self-structure has yet to reassert itself. The morning coffee ritual described here enacts what van Gennep (1960) called rites of passage in miniature: small, repeated ceremonies that mark the boundary between states of being and create the conditions for transition. Bachelard’s (1969) phenomenology of intimate space is directly relevant: the cup held in both hands, the morning light through the window, the first sip before the day’s demands arrive, all constitute what he calls the “felicitous space” of the inhabited moment. The bilingual form of this entry, moving between Spanish and English without explanation or apology, enacts Anzaldúa’s (1987) argument that the borderlands between languages are epistemological rather than merely geographic,ical: to move between tongues is to move between ways of knowing, and the threshold is precisely the place where such movement becomes possible.

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.

30 Days by the Sea: Master of Human Rights and Social Justice Creative Expression Project

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Research Note: On May 26, 2026, I defended my creative expression project, 30 Days by the Sea: A Scholarly Personal Narrative on Alonetude, for the Master of Human Rights and Social Justice program at Thompson Rivers University. This page gathers the academic poster and findings from that project.

Academic poster: 30 Days by the Sea — A Scholarly Personal Narrative on Alonetude, by Amy Tucker, Thompson Rivers University — 30 Days by the Sea — academic poster (A0). All visual work original, Amy Tucker, 2026.

About the Project

30 Days by the Sea is an integrative, multimodal Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004) on Alonetude: solitude, precarious academic labour, and the body’s capacity to recover. The inquiry took place over thirty consecutive days in Loreto, Baja California Sur, in January 2026, with ninety-one blog posts published in real time as the primary data set, alongside photography and arts-based artifacts, structured daily somatic check-ins, and bilingual English and Spanish entries.

Research Question

How does a precarious worker move from structurally imposed aloneness toward chosen, generative presence? What can a thirty-day embodied retreat by the sea reveal about the body’s capacity to recover from structural harm? And how might this recovery be theorised at once as healing, as method, and as a rights claim?

Findings

Somatic. A measurable trajectory from chronic sympathetic activation toward sustained ventral vagal safety across the thirty days.

Behavioural. A shift from escape (reading as avoidance, movement as stress management) toward presence (walking with no destination, sitting with the day, gathering stones as attention).

Structural. Peaks in physiological stress markers aligned with contract renewal periods across the employment history. The body reads the threat of a contract ending as it reads physical danger.

Linguistic. Spanish surfaced in forty-three of ninety-one posts. Code-switching rose through weeks two and three, the period of deepest somatic change.

Conceptual. A three-phase taxonomy emerged: imposed aloneness, transitional solitude, and alonetude proper.

Original Concepts Contributed

Alonetude — the intentional, embodied practice of turning structurally imposed aloneness into chosen, generative presence.

Three phases — imposed aloneness, transitional solitude, alonetude proper; a developmental taxonomy of the passage.

Multimodal SPN — written, visual, somatic, and linguistic data held together as a single evidentiary base.

Counter-archive — creative documentation of what institutional records leave out.

Structural inversion — the analytical shift from “what is wrong with me” to “what conditions produced this.”

Somatic labour — the uncompensated physiological self-regulation precarious workers do to appear well.

Implications

For SPN. A multimodal protocol that holds written, visual, somatic, and linguistic data as a single evidentiary base.

For somatic theory. Chronic occupational precarity registers in the autonomic nervous system in patterns previously attributed to discrete trauma.

For critical higher education. Embodied recovery becomes a research object in its own right.

For human rights. Occupational somatic harm enters the language of ICESCR Article 7 (just and favourable conditions of work) and Article 12 (the highest attainable standard of health).

Aquí estoy. (Here I am.) A body given time, safety, and care remembers how to be well. That finding belongs to anyone who has worked to the edge of themselves and wondered whether the way back was possible.

Suggested commentary citation

Tucker, A. (2026). 30 Days by the Sea: A Scholarly Personal Narrative on Alonetude — solitude, precarious academic labour, and the body’s capacity to recover [Creative expression project, Master of Human Rights and Social Justice, Thompson Rivers University]. Defended May 26, 2026.

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.

What the Machine Saw: Reading My Own Blog Through NVivo

Reading Time: 18 minutes

There is a particular vertigo in turning a research instrument on yourself. For thirty days by the Sea of Cortez, I was the one holding the camera, the pen, the collecting bag. This week, back in Kamloops with the commute and the marking waiting for me again, I did something colder and stranger. I fed the whole blog into NVivo and asked the software to tell me what I had been writing about. Not what I meant to write about. What was actually there, counted and coded, with no room for the story I tell myself.

I want to record what the machine saw, because it surprised me, and because the surprise is itself data.

The body was louder than the sea

My first assumption was that a project called 30 Days by the Sea would be, at its heart, about the sea. It is not. When I coded the full corpus, the Body/Somatic node returned 2,253 references across 172 of the 283 posts, more than double the Sea/Water/Place node at 1,093. The words nervous, system, and safety rank near the very top of the corpus frequency list, above water, above light, nearly level with alonetude itself. The sea was the setting. The nervous system was the subject.

I should not have been surprised. I have written, over and over, that the body is an archive of everything institutions prefer to leave unnamed. But it is one thing to write that as a claim and another to watch it come back as a number. The instrument confirmed the thing I most wanted to be true and had least evidence for: that this was never a travel diary. It was a somatic record.

The arc is real, and it is measurable

I have worried, privately, that the recovery I describe across the thirty days was a story I imposed afterward, a shape I wanted, rather than a shape that happened. So I asked NVivo to score each dated entry for vigilance language (fear, exhaustion, tension, hypervigilance, guilt) against safety language (calm, rest, ease, play, curiosity), and to watch the two lines across the month.

The vigilance line falls steadily, and it does not reverse: 5.48 references per thousand words in Days 1–8, down to 3.68 in the middle stretch, down to 2.08 in the final week. The turbulence peaks exactly where I remember it peaking, Day Eight, ¿Y Si Me Suelto?, the day I asked myself what would happen if I let go, which scored the highest on both fear and safety at once, a body caught mid-decision. And the two calmest days in the entire month are Day Fifteen and Day Twenty-Three, both of them about play.

That last finding undid me a little. I went to the sea to learn to rest, and the data says what actually regulated me was not rest but play. I will be sitting with that for a while.

The two words that hold the whole project

The single most-used content words across all 283 posts are without and rather, tied at 1,055 occurrences each. At first this looked like noise. Then I understood it as a confession. I define everything by negation and by contrast: alonetude is presence without performance, without audience, without apology; it is a practice rather than a place. I do not build my concepts by saying what they are. I build them by refusing what they are not. The machine found my deepest grammatical habit before I had named it myself, and that habit turns out to be the argument. To claim a right to rest inside a life that treats rest as theft, you have to learn to say without.

The book I did not know I had written

Here is the finding that stopped me. I have a category called Later Life & Care, 128 posts, nearly half the blog by count. I think of it as adjacent material, the pieces about my mother and my own aging that sit beside the “real” project. When I coded it, the core concept of the entire thesis, alonetude, appeared three times, in one post out of 128. The word that organizes everything I believe I am doing is functionally absent from the largest body of writing I have produced.

Instead, that category runs on Body/illness (157 references), Grief and mortality (79), Mother and parent (75 across 44 posts), and dementia (40). She Forgets the Year But Not the Grief. On Turning Sixty. The First Winter Without the Commute. It is a caregiving book. It is a mortality book. It is, whatever else it is, not the same book.

My first reaction was embarrassment, as though the software had caught me being incoherent. My second, slower reaction was that this is the praxis horizon I keep promising and never developing. In my abstract I write that the right to rest matters most urgently for the people who cannot leave, care workers, parents, people whose time is not their own. And here, unmarked, is 54,000 words about exactly those people, written from inside that exact bind: a daughter driving her mother to appointments, learning to stop correcting her on the year. The book I dismissed as adjacent is the book where the theory actually has to live.

The two projects are not as separate as the coding first suggested. The Body node tops both of them; it is the number-one code in the sea entries and the number-one code in the care entries. In one book, the institution that harms the body is the precarious university; in the other, it is aging and illness. Both are records of what the body knows after the mind has lost the narrative. My mother knows the grief without the calendar. My nervous system knew the danger long before I had language for the labour that caused it. Same archive. Different fire.

What travels together

The co-occurrence analysis gave me the sentence I have been trying to write for two years. The strongest thematic pairing in the entire corpus is Body × Precarity: the two appear together in 43% of all posts. Not Body and Sea. Not Alonetude and Solitude. Body and precarity, welded, in nearly half of everything I have written. The thesis I argued as an intellectual claim, that precarious labour is a slow violence stored somatically, turns out to be the structural water table under the whole site. And close behind it: Precarity × Grief, at 27%. I do not only critique the years I lost. I mourn them.

The Data Findings

Before the interpretation, here are the counts themselves, gathered in one place so the reader can weigh them directly. The full corpus coded was 283 posts, 321,342 words, across ten substantive categories. All figures below are file and reference counts produced by the coding pass, reported so that a long post cannot inflate its own importance.

Node	References	Posts coded (of 283)
Body / somatic	2,253	172
Precarity / labour	1,661	166
Silence / stillness	1,326	228
Sea / water / place	1,093	120
Alonetude / solitude	1,029	91
Play / creativity / art	762	103
Nervous system / regulation	749	74
Rest	573	113
Trauma / harm	513	80
Grief / loss	425	92
Rights / resistance	403	116

Table 5. Most-coded nodes across the full corpus (283 posts).

Note. The body is the single most-coded construct, more than double the sea/place node, confirming that the nervous system, not the landscape, is the true subject of the project. The words nervous, system, and safety rank near the very top of the raw frequency list, above water and above light.

Category (posts)	Body	Precarity	Alonetude	Sea / place	Grief
30 Days by the Sea (41)	9.7	4.5	2.5	4.8	1.5
Scholarly Personal Narrative (55)	7.3	9.6	4.9	3.5	1.5
Reflections (64)	6.1	6.9	4.7	4.1	1.3
Bilingual Writing (28)	10.5	2.4	2.8	5.0	2.3
Memory & Vignette (16)	8.9	2.5	4.4	2.0	0.3
Poetry (181)	2.9	2.9	0.2	1.2	1.4
Later Life & Care (128)	2.7	1.0	0.2	0.9	1.4
Human Geography (10)	4.6	8.5	0.9	4.5	1.0

Table 6. Node density by category, references per 1,000 words (normalized for comparison).

Note. Normalizing per thousand words lets categories of different sizes be compared. Precarity peaks in the scholarly and human-geography writing; the body peaks in the bilingual and daily entries. Most striking, alonetude, the organizing concept of the whole project, is near zero in the two largest categories, Poetry and Later Life & Care, which together are over half the corpus. The public thesis is carried by a minority of the posts.

Finding	Figure
Total corpus	283 posts / 321,342 words
Most-coded node	Body, 2,253 references in 172 posts
Strongest thematic pairing	Body × Precarity, co-occur in 43% of posts
Second pairing	Precarity × Grief, 27% of posts
“Hidden book” (Later Life & Care)	Alonetude appears 3 times in 128 posts
Top tied frequency words	without and rather, 1,055 occurrences each
Vigilance arc (per 1,000 words)	5.48 (Days 1–8) to 3.68 to 2.08 (final week)
Dated entries with a shift marker	26 of 33 (79%)
Best-associated condition	Absence of audience, 0.92 association rate

Table 7. Headline findings at a glance.

Note. These are the load-bearing numbers behind the essay. The vigilance figures fall monotonically across the three phases, the clearest single piece of evidence that the recovery I describe is traceable in the text and not only in memory. The association rates are co-occurrence measures within a single case and are read as associative, not causal.

An In-Depth Analysis: Four Deeper Passes

The coding so far measured how often themes appear. A deeper reading asks harder questions: where inside each entry the weight falls, how the language itself changes by genre, and, most importantly, whether the conditions I credited actually distinguish the days when something moved from the days when nothing did. Four further passes follow. One of them contradicted me, and I have kept the contradiction in.

1. The arc inside the entry

Splitting each of the daily entries into opening, middle, and closing thirds reveals that every entry re-enacts the shape of the whole retreat in miniature. Vigilance language rises slightly into the middle third and then falls in the close (3.01, 3.21, 2.14 per thousand words). Safety language is lowest in the middle and highest at the end (6.93, 6.54, 8.03). Somatic language climbs steadily across the entry, most concentrated in the final third (7.80, 9.83, 10.42). The writing consistently travels from unsettled attention toward a settled, more embodied close. The daily practice was itself a small regulation ritual, not merely a record of one.

Position in entry	Vigilance	Safety	Body / somatic
Opening third	3.01	6.93	7.80
Middle third	3.21	6.54	9.83
Closing third	2.14	8.03	10.42

Table 8. Within-entry arc, mean density per 1,000 words across the daily entries.

Note. The pattern holds on average across the entries; individual days vary. It suggests the act of writing each morning moved the nervous system toward safety, a within-day echo of the thirty-day arc.

2. The prose signature of each genre

A lexical pass distinguishes the categories by texture as well as theme. Type-token ratio, a rough measure of vocabulary variety, is highest in the small, dense Human Geography and Memory & Vignette pieces and lowest in Poetry, whose compression relies on repetition rather than range. Later Life & Care carries by far the longest average sentences (18.6 words) despite its emotional plainness, a slow, accumulating cadence quite unlike the short, breath-paced lines of the sea entries (11.8 words). The genres are not only about different things; they breathe at different rates.

Category	Vocabulary variety (TTR %)	Avg sentence length (words)
Human Geography	18.7	15.8
Memory & Vignette	13.0	13.3
Bilingual	10.5	11.1
SPN Scholarly	8.2	14.4
30 Days by the Sea	8.1	11.8
Reflections	7.4	13.8
Later Life & Care	6.2	18.6
Poetry	5.6	15.8

Table 9. Lexical texture by category.

Note. Type-token ratio falls as a category grows, because larger bodies of text reuse vocabulary; the figures are therefore best compared with corpus size in mind rather than read as pure complexity scores.

3. What actually distinguishes a day that moved

This is the pass that matters most, and the one I found most sobering. Across all 283 posts I separated those containing an explicit shift marker (109 posts) from those without (174), and asked which themes are genuinely denser in the posts where something changed. The clearest discriminator by a wide margin is play: it is 3.3 times denser in entries that record a shift than in those that do not. Solitude is second at roughly twice. The body and the sea and grief each run about one and a half times denser. And return to the same ground does not discriminate at all, its density is essentially identical in both groups (ratio 1.01).

Theme	Density in shift entries	Density in non-shift entries	Ratio
Play / creativity	1.48	0.45	3.31
Solitude	1.35	0.68	1.98
Grief	1.75	1.11	1.58
Body / somatic	5.79	3.88	1.49
Sea / water	2.56	1.76	1.46
Return to same ground	0.95	0.94	1.01

Table 10. Theme density in entries with a documented shift versus without (283 posts).

Note. A ratio above 1 means the theme is denser in entries where a shift is recorded. Play is the strongest single discriminator; return to the same ground is the weakest, which directly qualifies one of the four proposed conditions. These are correlational separations, not causal proofs, but they narrow the field considerably.

4. The finding that argued back

When I first coded co-occurrence, absence of audience showed the tightest association with change, and I retained it. A deeper, independent test complicates that. Correlating solitude language against interpretive-shift language across the daily entries produces only a weak positive relationship (r = 0.12). More uncomfortably, language of being watched, witnessing, performing, explaining correlates more strongly with interpretive shifts (r = 0.37), and appears at higher density overall (3.20 versus 1.99 per thousand words). One honest reading is that my interpretive breakthroughs often happen precisely when I am wrestling with the imagined gaze, the reader, the committee, the self that performs, rather than in pure solitude. Absence of audience may govern bodily settling more than it governs meaning-making. I therefore soften the earlier claim: solitude is well supported for somatic ease, but for interpretive change the evidence points the other way, and I would be misreading my own data to pretend otherwise.

Taken together, the deeper passes revise the story in a specific direction. The strongest, most defensible finding across the whole corpus is not the sea, not solitude, and not return, but play: it is the theme most concentrated in the daily arc, the strongest discriminator of days that moved, and the recovery mechanism I least expected to name. What I went to the water believing was a project about rest turns out, under sustained analysis, to be a project about permission to play.

Academic Lens

Using NVivo on my own Scholarly Personal Narrative sits in an unusual methodological position, and I want to name the tension honestly rather than smooth it over. Coding is a positivist-inflected gesture, counting, categorizing, rendering the singular as frequency, imported into an interpretive, arts-based project that explicitly refuses generalizability (Nash, 2004). There is a real risk of what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) would call betraying the form: flattening lived, embodied narrative into node densities that strip exactly the resonance the work is built on.

I hold two justifications. First, reflexivity. NVivo here is not a claim to objectivity but a mirror held up to my own patterns, a disciplined way of asking what I actually wrote versus what I believe I wrote, which is squarely within the reflexive tradition SPN demands. The count that revealed the “hidden book” did work no amount of re-reading had done for me. Second, trustworthiness. Richardson’s (2000) criteria ask whether a work is reflexive and whether it offers a credible account of a reality; letting the corpus talk back, and reporting where it contradicted me, is one way of being accountable to those criteria rather than merely asserting them. The numbers do not replace the stories. They point back at them and ask me to look again.

What the machine saw was not a truer version of the project. It was a colder one, and in its coldness it returned three things I could not see from inside the writing: that the body, not the sea, was always the subject; that play, not rest, did the regulating; and that I had written a second book about my mother without noticing it was the place my own theory needed to go next.

The instrument does not know what any of this means. That part is still mine.

A Structured Coding Pass: Conditions That Preceded Change

After the first, impressionistic reading, I ran a more disciplined pass, closer to a formal NVivo protocol, on the thirty-day daily record. The central question was deliberately narrow: across the thirty days, what recurring material, social, temporal, and participatory conditions preceded documented shifts in bodily state, attention, meaning-making, and my relationship with the place? I did not begin by hunting for four tidy conditions. I coded openly first, then tested.

A note on data and its limits. An orthodox protocol would triangulate several separate source types: contemporaneous journal, retrospective essay, photographs and material artifacts coded as distinct files, so that the retrospective account could confirm or complicate the daily one. What I actually have here is the published daily text, inside which photographs survive only as captions and notations rather than as independently codable images. I ran the textual analysis honestly on that basis and flag the rest as a limitation rather than pretending a multi-source triangulation I did not perform. This is a single-case, single-source reading, and I have kept the wording proportionate to that.

Identifying shifts. I coded a passage as a shift only where the language marked movement or contrast, phrases such as “for the first time,” “no longer,” “I used to,” “something loosened,” “I caught myself,” rather than treating every pleasant moment as change. Of the thirty-three dated entries, twenty-six (79%) contained at least one explicit shift marker. Following NVivo’s own guidance, I counted files rather than raw references, so that a long, wordy entry could not inflate its own importance.

Where the shifts cluster (phase matrix)

Distributed across the four phases, the count of entries carrying an explicit shift marker rises across the retreat: seven of the Days 1 to 7 entries, five across Days 8 to 14, seven across Days 15 to 21, and ten across Days 22 to 30. Attentional and interpretive shifts in particular concentrate in the final phase. This is consistent with, but does not by itself prove, a duration effect. Repetition, easing workload, and improving familiarity all move in the same direction as time, and the daily record cannot fully separate them.

Phase	Bodily	Attentional	Interpretive	Relational	Entries with a shift marker
Days 1–7	7	7	7	7	7 of 7
Days 8–14	5	5	5	5	5 of ~6
Days 15–21	5	7	7	6	7
Days 22–30	6	10	10	9	10

Table 1. Documented shifts by phase and type (entry counts, not reference counts).

Note. Cell values are the number of daily entries in each phase coded to a shift of the given type, following NVivo guidance to count files rather than raw references so that longer entries do not inflate their weight. Attentional and interpretive shifts concentrate in Days 22–30. Because repetition, easing workload, and growing familiarity all move with time, this pattern is consistent with a duration effect but does not isolate one.

Testing the four proposed conditions

For each candidate condition, I counted the entries in which it was present, how many of those also contained a shift marker, and, crucially, how many contained the condition but no shift (the counter-evidence). The association rates were: absence of audience, 0.92 (24 of 26 entries with a shift); return to the same ground, 0.86 (25 of 29); bodily and participatory practice, 0.81 (25 of 31); cumulative duration, 0.80 (20 of 25); and receptive practice such as reading or watching, 0.79 (26 of 33).

Two things follow, and both matter. First, absence of audience shows the tightest association with documented change, greater than bodily practice and higher than duration. The entries in which I explicitly name being alone, unobserved, or free of the expectation to perform are almost always the entries in which something moves. Second, and against my own initial story, receptive practice does not discriminate: it appears in every single entry, so its high raw co-occurrence is an artifact of ubiquity rather than evidence of effect. Bodily participation is better described, cautiously, as more frequently associated with documented shifts than receptive practice within this case, not as “outperforming” it.

The counter-evidence is real, and I am keeping it in view. Five entries show cumulative-time language with no accompanying shift; six show bodily activity that is not followed by any documented change; two show solitude without movement. Activity, in other words, did not reliably manufacture change. The safest reading is associative, not causal: these conditions co-occur with shifts more often than not, but the daily record frequently cannot establish that a condition preceded rather than merely accompanied the change it sits beside.

Proposed condition	Entries present	Present with a shift	Present, no shift (counter-evidence)	Association rate
Absence of audience	26	24	2	0.92
Return to the same ground	29	25	4	0.86
Bodily/participatory practice	31	25	6	0.81
Cumulative duration	25	20	5	0.80
Receptive practice (read/watch)	33	26	7	0.79

Table 2. Association between each proposed condition and documented shifts (n = 33 dated entries).

Note. Association rate is entries containing both the condition and a shift marker divided by all entries containing the condition. Absence of audience shows the tightest association. Receptive practice appears in every entry, so its high raw co-occurrence is an artifact of ubiquity rather than evidence of effect. The counter-evidence column records entries where the condition was present, but no shift followed. A cell indicates co-coding only; it does not establish that the condition preceded, rather than merely accompanied, the shift.

A register of shift events

Coding individual events rather than whole entries produced a traceable sequence. The earliest, on Day Two (Llegada), is explicit: an openness that “for the first time in longer than I could remember” registered as permission rather than threat, an emotional and bodily shift arriving before any sustained practice or return had accumulated, which itself complicates a strict duration claim. By Day Three, time has “become slippery,” an attentional shift. The interpretive and relational shifts, the sea as something that offers rather than merely surrounds, cluster later. The turbulence of Day Eight (¿Y Si Me Suelto?) remains the hinge: the entry scoring highest on fear and on safety at once, a body caught mid-decision rather than a body already changed.

Shift ID	Day	Type	Direct evidence (abbreviated)	Confidence
S01	Day 2 (Llegada)	Emotional/bodily	openness felt “like permission rather than a threat,” “for the first time in longer than I could remember”	Strong
S02	Day 3 (Perdida en el Azul)	Attentional	time “has become slippery,” “something I can no longer hold in my hands”	Moderate
S03	Day 8 (¿Y Si Me Suelto?)	Emotional (hinge)	entry scoring highest on fear and safety at once; a body caught mid-decision	Strong
S04	Day 15 (La Edad y El Juego)	Behavioural/emotional	calmest scored day; play displacing vigilance	Moderate
S05	Day 23 (Remembering How to Play)	Relational/interpretive	the sea as something that offers rather than surrounds	Moderate

Table 3. Register of representative shift events (S01–S05).

Note. Events were coded where the text marked movement or contrast rather than a static pleasant state. Confidence reflects the clarity of the earlier-versus-later contrast in the contemporaneous record. S01 arrives before any sustained practice or return has accumulated, which is one reason the duration claim is revised rather than retained.

Provisional evidence table

Weighing each condition against the criteria, precedes more than one documented shift, supported by the contemporaneous record, sequence identifiable, counter-evidence examined, no more plausible alternative, wording proportionate to a single case, I retain absence of audience and return to the same ground as the best-supported conditions. I revise the duration claim: the final phase does carry more attentional and interpretive shifts, but earlier shifts (Day Two, Day Three) show change did not wait for a settling period, so duration is contributory rather than necessary. I also revise the participatory-practice claim to the associative wording above. No condition rises to a causal claim on this evidence, and I would rather say that clearly than overstate what one body over thirty days can show.

Condition	Shifts preceded (>1?)	Contemporaneous support	Counter-evidence examined	More plausible alternative?	Decision
Absence of audience	Yes	Strong (0.92)	Yes (2 entries)	Not identified	Retain
Return to the same ground	Yes	Strong (0.86)	Yes (4 entries)	Passage of time	Retain
Cumulative duration	Yes, but early shifts too	Mixed	Yes (5 entries)	Repetition, workload, weather	Revise
Bodily/participatory practice	Yes	Moderate (0.81)	Yes (6 entries)	Heightened attention preceding making	Revise
Receptive practice	Yes	Non-discriminating (0.79)	Yes (7 entries)	Ubiquity	Reject as distinct driver

Table 4. Provisional evidence table and retain / revise / reject decisions.

Note. A condition is retained only when it precedes more than one documented shift, is supported by the contemporaneous record, has an identifiable sequence, has had its counter-evidence examined, and is not better explained by an alternative, with wording kept proportionate to a single case. On this evidence no condition rises to a causal claim; retained conditions are the best-supported associations within one thirty-day record.

What this stricter pass changed in me was small and specific. I came into it assuming the making, the walking and the collecting and the painting were the engine. The coding suggests the quieter condition, being unobserved, was doing at least as much work, and possibly more. That is not the finding I expected. It is the one the record gave me.

A full account of how the NVivo project was organized, its folders, file attributes, and codebook, follows in the methods appendix below.

Methods Appendix: How the Reading Was Set Up

For transparency, and so that the coding could in principle be repeated or challenged, I record here how the NVivo project was organized. This appendix describes the intended structure. As noted earlier, the working corpus for this pass was the published daily text; the photograph and material-practice folders are listed as part of the design rather than as fully independent coded sources, and that limit should be read alongside what follows.

Folder	Holds	Coded in this pass?
Daily Entries	The thirty-one dated daily posts	Yes, primary source
Research Journal	Separate reflective notes	No, not separately published
Photographs	Images as codable files	Partial, survive only as captions in text
Material Practices	Object work, painting, drawing records	Partial, described within entries
Retrospective Essays	Later framing and synthesis pieces	Referenced, not triangulated
Analytic Memos	One memo per credible shift	Yes
Query Results	Saved matrices and outputs	Yes

Table A1. NVivo folder scheme and coverage in this analysis.

Note. The right-hand column names what was actually available rather than what an ideal protocol would triangulate. The gap between design and coverage is the principal limitation of the reading and is stated plainly rather than smoothed over.

Attribute	Values used
Date	Exact calendar date
Day	1 to 30
Phase	Days 1–7, 8–14, 15–21, 22–30
Source type	Entry, journal, photograph, material practice, retrospective essay
Record timing	Contemporaneous or retrospective
Location	Shoreline area or other location
Activity	Walking, swimming, drawing, painting, object work, reading, writing, resting, other
Social context	Alone, others present, uncertain

Table A2. Attributes assigned to each source file.

Note. The record-timing attribute matters most: it is what would let a retrospective essay confirm, complicate, or challenge the daily record rather than quietly replace it. Because the retrospective material was not independently coded here, that check remains outstanding and is flagged for future work.

Parent node	Working definition	Anchor example
Bodily state	References to tension, fatigue, settling, ease, or changed rhythm	“my shoulders drop, my breath slows”
Quality of attention	Character of noticing, from scanning to sustained sensory focus	time “disappeared into flow”
Relationship with the site	Movement from site-as-backdrop toward familiarity and belonging	the sea as something that “offers” rather than surrounds
Interpretive meaning-making	New understanding, changed interpretation, or memory prompted by place	sea glass read as “data” rather than decoration
Activities / encounter conditions	Walking, swimming, making, reading, being alone or observed, weather	beachcombing coded as embodied mindfulness
Resistance / counter-evidence	No change, reversal, activity without a subsequent shift	bodily activity present, no documented shift

Table A3. Codebook: parent nodes with definitions and anchor examples.

Note. Coding proceeded openly first, so that different or contradictory findings could emerge, before any of the four proposed conditions were tested. The resistance and counter-evidence node was created deliberately, so the analysis could show where it failed to confirm what I hoped to find. All coding was a single automated pass with keyword rules and my own review; a human second-coder would be the appropriate next step for reliability.

Conclusion: Gaps and Future Research

An honest analysis should end by naming what it could not do. The coding narrowed the story and, in one case, overturned my own assumption, but it rests on a single body, a single month, and a single, imperfect method. The gaps below are not disclaimers added for form. They are the shape of the next study.

Gaps in the data

The most consequential gap is single-source dependence. The intended design called for separately coded journals, photographs, and material artifacts so that different records could confirm or challenge one another. In practice, I coded the published daily text, inside which images survive only as captions. Because the sources could not be triangulated, I cannot say whether a documented shift is corroborated by the photographic record or merely narrated. A study that coded the images as independent files, with date, location, and activity recorded before interpretation, could test that.

A second gap is the absence of a contemporaneous-versus-retrospective comparison. The retrospective essays were referenced but not coded as a distinct source with their own record-timing attribute, so they could not be used, as the design intended, to complicate the daily record. Whether hindsight smoothed the arc into a tidier recovery than the daily entries actually support remains an open and important question.

Gaps in the method

All coding was a single automated pass using keyword and phrase rules, reviewed by me. There was no second coder and no formal inter-rater reliability check, so the boundaries of every node reflect one interpreter. The shift detection in particular depended on explicit contrast phrases, which will have missed quieter changes carried by tone or image rather than by words such as “for the first time.” A human second-coder, and a measure of agreement between coders, would be the appropriate next step.

The analysis is also correlational throughout. Every matrix reports co-occurrence, not sequence; where an activity and a shift share an entry but their order is unclear, I have called them associated rather than one preceding the other. The play finding, the strongest result, is a separation between groups of entries, not a demonstration that play caused change. Establishing precedence would require finer-grained, timed records than a daily entry provides.

Questions the findings open

Three findings actively point beyond this project. First, play, not rest, was the strongest discriminator of days that moved; a future inquiry might centre play directly and ask whether it is the active ingredient that rest, solitude, and place merely make room for. Second, the audience result contradicted the solitude claim for meaning-making: interpretive shifts co-occurred more with language of being watched than with language of being alone, which suggests that solitude and the imagined gaze play different roles and deserve to be separated in any future framework. Third, return to the same ground did not distinguish days that moved from days that did not, which means the value I attributed to repetition needs either better evidence or retirement.

Toward a study with more bodies

The deepest limitation is structural rather than technical. This is one person, with the mobility, income, and freedom from caregiving that made a month by the sea possible, and the argument that rest and play are rights is strengthened, not weakened, by saying plainly that access to their conditions is unequally distributed. The next study needs more voices and more contexts: shift workers, carers, people who cannot leave, and a method that can hold their accounts collectively rather than resting on the resonance of a single case. The hidden book about my mother, coded here almost by accident, is one obvious place that wider inquiry could begin.

Gap	Consequence	Suggested next step
Single-source data	Shifts cannot be corroborated across records	Code photographs and artefacts as independent, attributed files
No timing comparison	Cannot test whether hindsight tidied the arc	Code retrospective essays with a record-timing attribute
Single coder, keyword rules	Node and shift boundaries reflect one interpreter	Add a second coder and an inter-rater reliability measure
Correlational only	Co-occurrence cannot establish precedence	Use timed, finer-grained records to test sequence
Single case, privileged	Findings illuminate but do not generalize	Multi-participant study across unequal access to rest

Table 11. Gaps, their consequences, and suggested next steps.

Note. The table is a research agenda rather than a list of apologies. Each gap names a specific, doable next study. The single-case design was chosen for depth, and its limits are the price of that depth rather than a failure of it.

What the machine saw was narrower and stranger than what I set out to write, and its gaps are as instructive as its findings. The honest close is not that alonetude is proven, but that one body, over one month, produced a traceable movement toward safety and play whose mechanisms this study can point to and cannot yet prove. That is a beginning. It is not the end of the inquiry, only the far edge of what a single shore can show.

References

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

Richardson, L. (2000). Evaluating ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 6(2), 253–255.

Richardson, L., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 959–978). Sage.

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.