She used to have a name.
Now she is a number
in a column
next to other numbers
who also used to have names
and also no longer matter.
Row 14. Column B.
The spreadsheet does not know
she spent seven years
dragging the uncounted
through doors that were never meant to open,
that she memorized the language of people
who hoped she would not learn it,
that she came back.
Every time.
She came back.
The spreadsheet does not care.
The formula is elegant in its cruelty:
hours input, output divided,
worth calculated,
Amy rounded down,
the remainder discarded.
She does not fit the cell.
She has never fit the cell.
Eighteen years of spilling into margins,
of filing what they hoped would be lost,
of standing in rooms designed
to make people like her
feel like footnotes,
and refusing,
loudly,
to be a footnote.
#VALUE, says the spreadsheet.
#VALUE, says the formula.
#VALUE, says the institution
that has never once
said her name correctly.
Somewhere, a cursor hovers.
Someone in a building
she was never given a key to
selects her, drags her,
considers deleting her,
decides to just move her
somewhere less visible.
The spreadsheet autosaves.
Amy is preserved.
Amy is a number.
Amy is, according to the data, fine.
The data has never sat across a table from Amy.
The data has never watched her open her mouth
in a room full of people
who were counting on her not to.
The data would not have lasted a semester.
Amy has lasted eighteen years.
The spreadsheet will not be thanked.
I was standing at the edge of something I could not name yet: a fence that had been there longer than the argument it was built around, a tangle of dry roots that had outlasted their season. I photograph what the poem cannot hold. The image is not an illustration; it is the part that stays quiet. Where the verse spills into white space, the photograph stands still and waits. Together, they are the same act: the refusal to let a moment be rounded down and discarded.
Rooted in Difficult Soil Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Artist Statement: I found this cactus in a greenhouse, labelled and priced, shaped unmistakably like a heart, growing out of a small pot of rocky soil with a stick holding it upright. Something about it stopped me. It had been tagged and categorized, given a name, a number, a value, and it was still, without apology, a heart. I photograph what the poem cannot hold. This image is the part that stays quiet while the poem says everything else. Together they are the same refusal: to be reduced to the cell, the row, the formula. The cactus does not explain itself. Neither does Amy.
Translation Note: Where Spanish appears in this collection, it was assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
Reading Time: 32minutesThe concluding creative thesis chapter of 30 Days by the Sea. A scholarly personal narrative gathering the discoveries of thirty days of alonetude by the Sea of Cortez.
Reading Time: 32minutes
What Was Found, What Was Made, What Remains
Concluding the Creative Thesis
30 Days by the Sea: A Research Inquiry into Alonetude
Amy Tucker
Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice
Thompson Rivers University
Secwépemc Territory | Kamloops, British Columbia
March 1, 2026
Audre Lorde (1988) argued that tending to one’s own survival and well-being is a political act rather than a private luxury, a form of resistance against systems that benefit from the exhaustion and self-erasure of those they marginalize.
Keywords: alonetude, creative thesis, precarious academic labour, embodiment, human right to rest, scholarly personal narrative, body-based inquiry, arts-based research, healing, social justice
Part I: The Threshold Crossed
I went to Loreto for a reason I could barely articulate at the time. I had lost the capacity to feel the difference between exhaustion and living, and I needed to know whether that difference still existed.
After nineteen years of precarious academic labour, contract work that renewed semester by semester, sometimes week by week, always with the implicit understanding that gratitude was the appropriate response to continued employment, I was laid off due to unstable enrolments. The termination arrived less as a single event than as the final gesture of a system that had been slowly extracting my health, my time, my creative energy, and my sense of worth for more than two decades. By the time it ended, my body had been keeping score for so long that I could no longer read the tally.
So I went to the sea. I went to Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico, a small town on the Sea of Cortez where desert mountains meet turquoise water, and pelicans dive without needing permission. I went alone. I stayed for thirty days. And I documented what happened when a woman who had spent her adult life performing competence, availability, and resilience finally stopped performing anything at all. I called this practice alonetude (defined in this study as intentional, embodied solitude practised as a method of healing, reflection, and critical inquiry), and I wrote about it every day on a blog called The Third Shore.
This document is the concluding chapter of that creative thesis. It gathers what was found, names what was made, and offers what remains, offered as reckoning rather than resolution. A reckoning with the body. With the institution. With the structures that produce exhaustion and then pathologize the exhausted. With what it means to heal in public, through scholarship and art, and to insist that the personal is more than political: it is methodological.
Aquí estoy. Here I am. Still.
What I Carried
I arrived in Loreto on January 1, 2026, carrying a suitcase, a camera, books, and a body that had forgotten how to rest without guilt. The body is, as Bessel van der Kolk (2014) argues, an archive. Mine held nineteen years of contract uncertainty, of scanning inboxes for renewal notices, of performing wellness during semesters when depression had made getting dressed an act of will. My shoulders had been braced so long that I no longer noticed the bracing. My jaw ached from holding words I was unable to afford to say. My sleep had been fractured for years, my nervous system perpetually scanning for threat in the way that Stephen Porges (2011) describes as the body’s instinct to scan for safety, the body’s unconscious assessment of safety or danger operating below conscious awareness.
I also carried grief. My adult son was deep in addiction, and I had been witnessing his disappearance, what Pauline Boss (1999) names ambiguous loss, the grief that arrives when someone is physically present but psychologically gone. My mother, eighty years old in Lethbridge, was declining slowly, and I was learning that midlife is the season when you parent in both directions simultaneously. I carried the accumulated weight of generational care.
And I carried a question that had been forming for months, a question I had yet to articulate fully but that Byung-Chul Han (2015) would later help me name: What happens when the structures meant to sustain us are the very structures producing our exhaustion?
This inquiry enters an established conversation about the value of solitude in intellectual and creative life. Paul Tillich (1963) explored how solitude functions less as absence than as presence, a condition in which the self becomes available to itself. More recently, scholars in contemplative studies have examined how sustained aloneness supports reflection, creativity, and moral discernment. Alonetude extends rather than borrows from this tradition by situating solitude within the specific conditions of precarious academic labour and by proposing that chosen solitude can function simultaneously as a personal healing practice, a methodological approach, and a structural critique.
What the Sea Received
Title: What the Sea Receives
January 29, 2026
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Artist Statement
The sky was rarely still. It moved in layers, cloud pulling against cloud, light shifting across the water in patterns that required nothing of the witness but attention.
This photograph was taken on an early morning walk along the shore, the camera tilted upward as though the horizon itself had shifted. The Sea of Cortez stretches away at the left edge, mountains dissolving into haze at the far shore. What drew me was the asymmetry of the sky, the way the clouds gathered and thinned without effort or audience.
Rachel and Stephen Kaplan (1989) describe this quality as the gentle pull of the natural world: the capacity of natural environments to hold attention gently, without cognitive demand, allowing depleted attentional resources to replenish. I stood here for a long time. The minutes went uncounted. That, too, was data.
The sea received all of it. Water is metaphorically healing, yes, but because the sea requires no performance. It holds no evaluation. The tide comes in regardless of whether you are productive or paralyzed, published or precarious. The pelicans dive without concern for your curriculum vitae.
As described in the preceding artist statement, it is the gentle pull of the natural world that served as medicine. For thirty days, the Sea of Cortez offered it freely. I watched. I walked. I photographed. I wept. I wrote. And slowly, in increments so small they were sometimes invisible, my nervous system began to recalibrate.
Descansa, the sea seemed to say. Rest. And I did. And I wept. And both were holy.
A Note on Who I Am and Where I Stand
I am a white, settler, cisgender woman. I am a contract academic worker with 19 years of experience, now completing a Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice at Thompson Rivers University on Secwépemc Territory. I write from within the very conditions I am studying. My body has been a site of precarious labour and its aftermath. My experience of exhaustion, recovery, and alonetude is simultaneously my subject of inquiry and my method of knowing. I hold both the specific vulnerability of a contingent worker and the specific privilege of someone with the education, means, and mobility to spend thirty days by the sea. I name both because both are true, and because the scholarly personal narrative tradition (Nash, 2004) asks us to be accountable to the lived ground of our knowing.
Part II: Findings, What the Body Learned
This research documented a thirty-day solo retreat through daily written reflection, contemplative photography, and theoretical analysis, producing an integrated qualitative record of embodied experience. The thirty-day retreat unfolded in four distinct phases, each documented through daily blog entries that combined the Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology with contemplative photography, creative writing, and interdisciplinary theoretical engagement. The phases arrived without being planned in advance. They emerged, as qualitative data does, through the process of attending to what was actually happening rather than imposing a predetermined framework onto experience.
Robert Nash (2004) describes Scholarly Personal Narrative as a methodology that positions lived experience as legitimate scholarly data when properly theorized within academic frameworks. Nash (2004) often describes Scholarly Personal Narrative as involving three interwoven voices operating simultaneously: the personal voice that speaks authentically from lived experience, the scholarly voice that contextualizes experience within theoretical frameworks, and the universal voice that connects individual experience to broader human concerns. While related to personally-grounded traditions, this study adopts Nash’s Scholarly Personal Narrative framework, which explicitly integrates personal experience, theoretical analysis, and universal insight. This methodology guided every blog entry. What follows are the findings that emerged when those three voices were permitted to speak together across thirty days. The four phases that emerged from this documentation are summarized in Table 1.
Table 1
Four Phases of the Alonetude Retreat
Phase
Days
Embodied Experience
Theoretical Framework
1. Arrival and Disorientation
Days 1–7
Guilt at stillness; body bracing against perceived threat; inability to rest without productive justification; scanning for danger in a safe environment; early photographs of weathered objects and thresholds
how the nervous system responds to safety and threat (Porges, 2011); the body’s instinct to scan for safety; the quiet way nature restores us theory (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989); liminality (Turner, 1969)
2. Softening and Grief
Days 8–18
Tears arriving unbidden; dreams returning; body softening; dark emotions emerging; grief for lost years surfacing once the nervous system registered safety; photographs of absence and shadows
Dark emotions (Greenspan, 2003); emotional alchemy; embodied trauma (van der Kolk, 2014); ambiguous loss (Boss, 1999); emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983)
3. Clarity and Naming
Days 19–25
Structural critique emerging from personal experience; naming precarity as a system rather than personal failing; refusing self-blame; photographs of gathering, arrangement, and quiet order; writing with increasing directness
Carrying practice forward; alonetude as portable rather than place-dependent; colour returning to visual practice; goodbye as continuation; photographs of fragments in new context; return home to Harrison Hot Springs
Wholehearted living (Brown, 2010); contemplative photography (Karr & Wood, 2011); human rights integration (UDHR; ICESCR); self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000)
Note. Phases emerged inductively from daily documentation rather than being imposed predetermined. The transitions between phases were gradual rather than discrete, with considerable blurring between adjacent stages. UDHR = Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ICESCR = International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
Phase One: Arrival and Disorientation (Days 1–7)
The first week was the hardest. Less because anything felt wrong than because nothing was required of me, and I was uncertain how to inhabit that freedom. Nineteen years of precarious academic labour had trained my nervous system to equate stillness with danger. When there was nothing to do, my body interpreted the lack of demand as a threat.
Porges (2011) explains this through the concept of the body’s instinct to scan for safety, the autonomic nervous system’s below-conscious evaluation of environmental safety. In environments characterized by chronic uncertainty, the system defaults to the body’s alert state (the fight-or-flight response) or, when activation is unsustainable, to dorsal vagal shutdown (the freeze response characterized by numbness, disconnection, and the flat affect that can resemble depressive states). After decades of contract labour, where each semester brought the question of whether employment would continue, my body’s instinct to scan for safety had been calibrated to threat. Safety felt unfamiliar. Rest felt suspicious.
Title: Still Here
February 8, 2026
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Artist Statement
I photographed this piece of driftwood on Day 3, crouching low on the dark sand with the camera held close to the ground. What arrested me was beyond its shape; it was its quality of having endured. The wood has been worked by time, water, and shore into something that no longer resembles what it was, yet it holds together. The grain runs deep. The hollows where it was once punctured by something sharp have been smoothed rather than closed. It is beyond intact. It is beyond broken. It is here.
Within the first phase of the retreat, when my nervous system was still scanning for threat, and the guilt of stillness had yet to release, I was drawn repeatedly to objects shaped by forces outside their choosing and simply, quietly still. This image belongs to the category I came to call “environmental witnesses”: non-human elements that co-document the research by holding qualities the researcher needs to see.
I documented this in early blog entries through language that surprised me with its honesty. I wrote about the guilt that arrived when I sat without producing anything. I photographed weathered objects, worn shoes, abandoned bags, and driftwood arranged by no one, because these objects held the quality of having endured without performance. They had been shaped by time and elements rather than will. They were still here. They were enough.
Victor Turner (1969) describes liminality as the threshold state between what was and what will be, a space characterized by ambiguity, disorientation, and the dissolution of previous identity structures. The first week in Loreto was deeply liminal. I was no longer an instructor (the institution had ensured that), and still becoming whatever I was becoming, suspended between identities in a small town where no one knew my professional history and no one cared.
The shoreline became a metaphor and a method. Where desert met sea, where sand became water, where solid ground gave way to something that moved, these edges held the quality of my own transition. I began to call this space the third shore: beyond loneliness, beyond solitude, but the liminal territory between them where the labour of transformation occurs. The term third shore refers to the liminal space between loneliness and solitude, a conceptual terrain where imposed isolation can be transformed into chosen presence. In this thesis, the third shore functions both as a metaphor and as a methodological site, a place where personal narrative, visual practice, and structural analysis meet.
Title: The Third Shore
January 23, 2026
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Artist Statement
This is the photograph I had yet to know I was waiting to take. I was standing at the edge of the water on an early morning, shoes off, the dark volcanic sand cold beneath my feet, when the pelicans began to feed. They gathered in the middle distance, working the water together without urgency, the mountains of the far shore dissolving into haze above them. A single bird moved through the frame above, unhurried. I raised the camera and waited. The wave broke at my feet as the shutter opened.
What is visible here is the thing the thesis is about: the exact line where desert sand becomes water, where standing ground gives way to something that moves, where one condition ends, and another begins. This is the third shore. Victor Turner (1969) describes liminality as the space between what was and what will be. Here it is, in salt water and morning light.
The tide comes in regardless of whether you are productive or paralyzed. These are observations the natural environment offered freely to anyone willing to stand still long enough to receive them.
Phase Two: Softening and Grief (Days 8–18)
Around the eighth day, something shifted. My body, having spent a week registering the absence of institutional threat, began to soften. And with the softening came grief.
Title: The Door That Has Outlasted Its Institution
January 2026
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Artist Statement
The Misión San Francisco Javier de Viggé-Biaundó was founded in 1699 and completed in 1758. It has been here for longer than Canada has existed as a country. Longer than the institution that employed me for twenty-five years. Longer than any of the administrative structures that decided, semester by semester, whether I would continue.
I taxied forty-five minutes into the Sierra de la Giganta on a dirt road to find it, and when I arrived, what arrested me was the quality of endurance rather than the grandeur. The rough rubble wall on the left has been losing its facing for centuries and is still standing. The carved stone around the doorway is still precise. The wood of the door is warm and worn and wholly present. The small figure in red at the left edge of the frame was a child crossing the plaza, unaware that it was being documented. She will carry this morning differently than memory allows.
The building will still be here when her grandchildren bring their grandchildren. This is what endurance without performance looks like at an architectural scale: beyond intact, beyond broken, simply here. Victor Turner (1969) describes the liminal state as the dissolution of previous identity structures. Standing in front of this door, in the second week of the retreat, I understood that what was dissolving in me had never been as solid as it seemed. The institution had offered the appearance of structure. This building offered the thing itself.
This was a demanding process. On Day 17, I was watching pelicans fish, and suddenly I was weeping, the kind of crying that starts somewhere below the ribs and moves through the whole body, the kind that makes you sit down because standing requires more structure than you currently have.
Miriam Greenspan (2003) names grief, fear, and despair as dark emotions, beyond negative: purposeful, carrying information the body needs us to know. She writes that the dark emotions become toxic through our strategies of avoiding rather than through their presence: suppressing, denying, transcending prematurely, and escaping. The emotions themselves are neutral. Essential. Diagnostic. Greenspan offers a process she calls emotional alchemy, moving through seven steps: intention, affirmation, bodily sensation, contextualization, non-action, action, and transformation.
What I was grieving was complex. I was grieving the lost years, the decades spent overworking, taking on multiple contracts because I feared having none, trying to be everything for everyone while the institution offered nothing in return but the implication that I should be grateful for the opportunity. I was grieving what Arlie Hochschild (1983) calls the accumulated toll of emotional labour, the invisible work of managing feelings, performing wellness, maintaining the appearance of someone who was coping when coping had become its own full-time occupation.
Finalmente segura para sentir. Finally safe enough to feel.
Title: Presence Registered
January 29, 2026
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Artist Statement
I have never been comfortable with self-portraiture. The face in front of a camera performs; the shadow performs nothing. It is simply the mark of having been present: a body in light, documented through the absence of appearance rather than appearance itself.
This photograph was taken sometime in the second week, when the grief that had been building in the body began to surface. The sand is scattered with broken shells and small stones, the kind of shore that rewards slow attention. My shadow extends ahead of me, the camera visible in the raised right hand, the sandals improbably blue against the monochrome of the rest. What I notice now, looking at it, is how long the shadow is. How much space does it take? How completely it is just here.
Within the research, I came to call this category shadow studies: self-documentation through mark rather than performance, presence registered without self-surveillance. This is what Donna Haraway (1988) means by situated knowledge: seeing from somewhere specific, from a body that casts a shadow on the ground.
The photographs from this phase documented absence: shadows on sand, empty doorways, objects at rest. The camera became what Ariella Azoulay (2008) describes as a civil instrument, one that witnesses conditions rather than producing beauty. Each image was a quiet refusal to look away from what had been endured.
Phase Three: Clarity and Naming (Days 19–25)
Once the grief had been met rather than avoided, something unexpected happened: clarity arrived. It was the clarity of better questions rather than settled answers. The question shifted from the one I had been asking myself for years, What is wrong with me?, to the one that structural analysis demands: What conditions produced this outcome, and who else is affected?
This shift is the central methodological commitment of the thesis. It is the inversion that transforms personal narrative into structural critique, that moves individual suffering from the domain of pathology to the domain of politics. Byung-Chul Han (2015) provides the theoretical architecture for this inversion through his concept of the burnout society, a society in which the imperative to achieve replaces external discipline with internal compulsion, producing subjects who exploit themselves more effectively than any external authority could. The achievement-subject, Han argues, is simultaneously a perpetrator and a victim, an exploiter and an exploited. The violence is auto-aggressive.
Guy Standing’s (2011) concept of the precariat, a new social class defined by chronic insecurity, lack of occupational identity, and truncated access to rights, gave me language for my structural position within the academy. I was far more than a contract worker; I was a member of a structurally produced class whose insecurity was functional rather than incidental, serving the institution’s need for flexible, disposable, and infinitely replaceable labour. Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades (2004) name this system academic capitalism, the regime in which universities operate as market actors, treating knowledge and labour as commodities to be extracted rather than cultivated.
The blog entries from this phase became more direct. I named what had happened to me as structural harm rather than personal failure. I examined Erving Goffman’s (1959) distinction between frontstage performance and backstage reality, recognizing how decades of performing competence and wellness had depleted the very resources those performances were designed to protect. I wrote about the invisibility of precarious academic work: the grading done at midnight, the courses prepared without compensation, the emotional labour of caring for students while the institution extended care to no one, least of all those doing the work.
Phase Four: Integration and Departure (Days 26–31)
The final phase was characterized by integration rather than resolution. Alonetude, I understood now, was a practice rather than a destination, portable, repeatable, available anywhere one was willing to turn toward oneself with intention and without judgment. On Day 27, I photographed in colour, departing from the black-and-white aesthetic that had defined the retreat. Colour arrived when I was ready to receive it. A flash of orange fruit. A red Volkswagen. Bougainvillea against a desert wall. Andy Karr and Michael Wood (2011) describe this in their work on contemplative photography, the practice of seeing with fresh perception, of receiving visual experience as it presents itself rather than imposing narrative upon it.
Title: The Colour That Arrived
January 29, 2026
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Artist Statement
On Day 27, I departed from the black-and-white aesthetic that had defined the retreat and began photographing in colour. The first colour image that mattered lay beyond the spectacular. It was this: a single fragment of red brick lying on dry earth, surrounded by pale gravel and small stones. The red is sudden and warm, the first warmth the visual record had admitted in nearly four weeks. I arrived at it beyond conscious choosing. I crouched near it because it was there, because the red registered in my body before my mind had decided anything.
Andy Karr and Michael Wood (2011) describe contemplative photography as the practice of receiving visual experience as it presents itself rather than imposing narrative upon it. The brick received me before I received it. It holds a beauty beyond the conventional. It is damaged, irregular, and slightly coffin-shaped if you are in a particular mood. But it is wholly, unapologetically red, and on Day 27, that colour was what the nervous system needed to confirm: something is returning. Something is warm.
On Day 28, I wrote about the quiet permission of invisibility, the discovery that being unseen in a small Mexican town, where no one knew my professional history, had allowed me to encounter myself without the armour of institutional identity. On Day 29, the shore began to speak: I photographed bricks embedded in sand, feathers after ascent, footprints being erased by tide, bone fragments that might be smiling. These images were the healing itself, made visible through a methodology that treats art-making as a form of knowledge production (Leavy, 2015).
Title: Without Concern for Your Curriculum Vitae
January 23, 2026
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Artist Statement
I had been watching them for weeks before I captured them like this. Every morning they were there, working the water in the early light, and I photographed them from the shore at a distance that preserved their indifference. They never posed. They were never performing. They were simply doing what they do: diving, surfacing, diving again, completely absorbed in the fact of their own hunger and the abundance of the sea.
What I kept returning to notice, across thirty days, was that their commitment to the work of being pelicans was absolute. They held no pause to evaluate whether today’s dive was as good as yesterday’s. They held no need to scan the shore for approval. On the day I photographed this, a group of perhaps 60 birds was working a school of fish near the surface, and the resulting image is almost abstract: wings and water and the blur of concentrated, purposeful movement.
Andy Karr and Michael Wood (2011) describe contemplative photography as the practice of receiving visual experience before interpreting it. What I received here, and what I return to when I need reminding, is this: the natural world requires no audience. It holds no evaluation. The pelicans dive without concern for your curriculum vitae, and in thirty days of watching them, I understood that this was the most useful thing I had ever been taught.
On Day 31, I said goodbye to Baja and returned to Canada. On February 1, I arrived at Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia, and practised alonetude in community, carrying the discipline of chosen presence into shared space. The practice had become what Brené Brown (2010) might recognize as an expression of wholehearted living: the willingness to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to let go of who you thought you were supposed to be in order to become who you are. The evolution of the nervous system response across the retreat is documented in Table 2.
Title: Still Here (Harrison)
February 8, 2026
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, February 2026
Artist Statement
On February 1, the day after leaving Loreto, I stayed at Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia, to practise alonetude in community while attending labour school. I was walking the lakeshore when this stump stopped me. It is massive, darkened by water and time, its root system exposed and reaching, its silhouette against the still lake holding the same quality I had been photographing for thirty days on the Sea of Cortez: endurance without performance. It is beyond intact. It is beyond broken. It is here.
I understood, crouching by the water to photograph it, that this was the thesis proving itself. The practice had travelled. The attention I had trained in Loreto, the capacity to be stopped by worn things, to find in darkened wood and still water the quality of having-been-through-something-and-remained, had come with me. This is the companion image to Still Here, made on the dark volcanic sand in Loreto on Day 3. Those two photographs, one from a Mexican sea and one from a British Columbia lake, are the same photograph. Same quality of attention. Same subject. Different shore.
Alonetude, I wrote on the final day of the retreat, requires no thirty days or a retreat in Mexico. It requires intentionality, presence, and the willingness to turn toward oneself without judgment. This stump is the evidence.
Table 2
Nervous System Transitions Across the Retreat
Nervous System State
Retreat Phase
Embodied Indicators
Photographic Register
Involuntary weeping, fatigue, deep sleep, appetite changes, and dreams returning
Phase 1: Arrival
Braced shoulders, clenched jaw, fractured sleep, guilt at rest, scanning
Softened expression, laughter returning, capacity for colour, readiness for community
Colour photography, found colour, playful compositions, environmental witnesses
Note. nervous system states are described as documented through Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology, based on Porges (2011). States are dynamic and overlapping rather than discrete categories. Photographic register describes the predominant visual qualities of images produced during each phase, functioning as embodied data within arts-based research methodology (Leavy, 2015).
Part III: Reflections, The Researcher as Subject
On Methodology as Medicine
Healing was beyond what I expected the methodology to do. I expected it to document. But Scholarly Personal Narrative does something that more detached methods cannot: it requires you to stay in your own experience rather than hovering above it with analytical distance. Nash (2004) insists that the researcher acknowledge their positioning rather than hiding behind passive constructions that imply objectivity. This insistence, stay in your body, write from where you are, resist pretending you are nowhere, turned out to be therapeutic in the deepest sense.
Donna Haraway (1988) describes this as the refusal of what she calls the god trick, the pretence of seeing everything from nowhere, the disembodied gaze that claims universality by erasing its own location. Haraway argues for situated knowledges: partial, accountable, embodied perspectives that gain their authority from within the partial rather than from the claim to see everything, the honesty of acknowledging what they see from where they stand. My thirty days by the sea provided knowledge in its purest form. I could only see from the shore I stood on. And that was enough.
On What Arrived Without Being Planned
None of the most important findings were anticipated. Weeping on Day 17 while watching pelicans arrive beyond planning. Splashes of colour on Day 27 arrived in greater numbers than planned. The question inverts itself from personal pathology to structural critique. These emergences are precisely what qualitative methodology is designed to honour, the recognition that the most significant data often arrives unbidden, in the spaces between intention and attention. Following the retreat, the daily blog entries were reviewed as a chronological research journal and interpreted thematically, with patterns and phases identified through repeated reading of the complete record.
Patricia Leavy (2015) argues that arts-based research generates knowledge unavailable through conventional methods precisely because artistic processes engage perception, intuition, and embodied knowing alongside analytical reasoning. The camera reached beyond mere recording of what I saw; it revealed what I was yet to say in words. The blog reached beyond documenting what happened; it produced understanding in the act of writing. Method became medicine because the method required presence, and presence is what trauma steals.
Where I Stand and What I Carry
I must name what is true about my position. I am a white, cisgender, settler woman who had enough resources to spend thirty days in Mexico healing from institutional harm. Indigenous peoples on the very land where I live, the Secwépemc Territory, may lack such mobility options while navigating compounded harms of colonial dispossession, environmental racism, and institutional exclusion. Precariously positioned Mexicans in Loreto may serve tourists like me while carrying their own invisible burdens.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) warns against research practices that take from communities without reciprocity. While this personally-grounded work focuses on my own experience, it must contribute to broader conversations about labour rights, institutional accountability, and collective healing rather than centring individual self-improvement divorced from structural change. My solitude was chosen. Many people’s isolation is imposed. The distinction matters enormously, and this thesis refuses to collapse them into a single category. Alonetude names the labour of transforming imposed aloneness into chosen presence, but the fact that such labour is necessary is itself an indictment of the structures that produced the imposition.
This research reflects the perspective of a single researcher and is shaped by particular social, geographic, and institutional conditions that remain unevenly shared. These constraints are part of the situated knowledge this work produces rather than limitations that undermine it, but they should be held in view as readers consider how these findings might speak to experiences beyond this one.
Title: Situated at the Edge
February 8, 2026
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Artist Statement
It was made at Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia, on February 1, the day after I left the Sea of Cortez, when I stopped to practise alonetude in community before returning home to Kamloops.
The water is almost still, reflecting the pale sky and the sedge grass at the far bank. My shadow extends ahead of me, long and thin, reaching toward the reflection of the world. I include it here, in this position in this story section, because it offers what this section requires: the image of a researcher at the edge of her own territory, neither inside nor outside the frame, present without being centred.
Donna Haraway (1988) calls this situated knowledge: the understanding that all knowing comes from somewhere, from a body standing in a specific place, casting a shadow in a particular direction. This shadow points outward, toward water, toward sky, toward the reflected world. It persists within the image. It is the image.
Part IV: A Human Rights Reckoning
From Personal Pathology to Structural Critique
The most important finding of this thesis reaches beyond solitude. It is about the inversion, the moment when the question shifts from “What is wrong with me?” to “What conditions produced this outcome, and who else is affected?”
This inversion is the methodological heart of human rights inquiry. Human rights frameworks ask far more than for individuals to heal themselves from structural violence. They ask structures to account for the harm they produce. When a worker collapses from exhaustion, the human rights question reaches beyond whether they should have practised better self-care but whether the conditions of their employment violated their fundamental rights to health, rest, and dignified labour.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR; United Nations, 1948) establishes in Article 1 that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity. Article 23 affirms the right to just and favourable conditions of work. Article 24 establishes the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours. Article 25 guarantees the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being.
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR; United Nations, 1966) operationalizes these declarations through binding obligations. Article 7 requires just and favourable conditions of work, including safe and healthy working conditions and reasonable limitation of working hours. Article 9 establishes the right to social security. Article 12 recognizes the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.
My experience, nineteen years of precarious academic employment culminating in occupational burnout, depression, and institutional termination, is far more than a personal narrative. Read through the lens of international human rights law, it may constitute a pattern consistent with potential violations of labour and health rights, requiring structural remedy. Table 3 maps these conditions against the relevant international human rights instruments.
Table 3
Human Rights Violations in Precarious Academic Labour
Right Violated
Legal Source
How Violated
Evidence from Retreat
Chronic stress, burnout, and depression are produced by insecure employment; occupational trauma unrecognized as workplace injury
ICESCR Article 12; WHO Constitution
Body bracing documented in Phase 1; weeping in Phase 2, indicating stored body-based trauma; depression worsening, requiring medication adjustment
Body bracing documented in Phase 1; weeping in Phase 2 indicating stored body-based trauma; depression worsening requiring medication adjustment
Body bracing documented in Phase 1; weeping in Phase 2, indicating stored body-based trauma; depression worsening, requiring medication adjustment
UDHR Article 24; ICESCR Article 7
Constant availability expected; rest experienced as guilt; boundaries punished through non-renewal of contracts
Guilt at stillness in Phase 1; inability to rest without productive justification; seventeen days required before the nervous system registered safety
Right to decent work
ICESCR Article 7; ILO Decent Work Agenda
Structural critique emerging in Phase 3; naming precarity as system failure; recognizing that gratitude was demanded in exchange for exploitation
Structural critique emerging in Phase 3; naming precarity as system failure; recognizing that gratitude was demanded in exchange for exploitation
Right to dignity
UDHR Article 1; ICCPR Preamble
Institutional disposability; treatment as an extractable resource; termination after decades of service
Phase 4 integration: refusing to internalize disposability as personal failure; reclaiming worth beyond institutional validation
Right to social security
ICESCR Article 9; UDHR Article 22
Institutional disposability; treatment as an extractable resource; termination after decades of service
Contract labour excludes access to employment insurance, a stable pension, benefits, and structural vulnerability by design
Note. ICESCR = International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (United Nations, 1966). UDHR = Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948). ICCPR = International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (United Nations, 1966). ILO = International Labour Organization. WHO = World Health Organization. These frameworks establish that the conditions described in this thesis constitute potential human rights violations requiring structural remedies rather than individual coping strategies.
The Structural Inversion
The following table presents the central inversion of this thesis, the reframing that occurs when individual experience is read through structural analysis rather than personal pathology.
Table 4
The Structural Inversion: From Personal Pathology to Systemic Analysis
“She just needs to be more resilient.”
Structural Reframing (Human Rights Analysis)
“She needed therapy for her depression.”
The workload was structurally unsustainable; burnout is an institutional outcome rather than a personal failure (Han, 2015)
“She should have set better boundaries.”
Boundaries are punished in precarious employment through non-renewal; the demand for boundarylessness is structural violence (Standing, 2011)
“She needed therapy for her depression”
The depression was occupationally produced; the remedy is structural change alongside individual treatment (van der Kolk, 2014)
“She chose to go on retreat, that is self-care”
The retreat was necessitated by institutional harm; rest should exist beyond requiring private funding and personal crisis to access (ICESCR Article 7)
“She just needs to be more resilient”
Resilience narratives individualize structural problems; the question is why individuals must endure rather than whether they should have to (Berlant, 2011)
“She should be grateful for the opportunities she had”
Gratitude cannot be demanded in exchange for rights violations; exploitation holds no benignity through the expectation of thankfulness (Hochschild, 1983)
Note. This table illustrates the central analytical move of the thesis: reframing individual experience within structural critique. Each dominant framing locates the problem within the individual; each structural reframing locates the problem within institutional systems and policy failures. The inversion holds personal agency intact but refuses to let structural accountability be displaced onto individual coping.
Part V: Key Learnings
What This Research Taught Me
Table 5
Ten Key Learnings from the Alonetude Retreat
Learning
Explanation and Theoretical Grounding
1. The body is an archive.
Van der Kolk (2014) argues that trauma is stored in the body, in braced muscles, fractured sleep, and chronic activation. This thesis confirms that the body is also an archive of institutional harm, holding the cumulative weight of structural conditions that official records leave unnamed. My body had registered what had happened to me long before my mind could articulate it.
2. Rest is a human right rather than a reward.
Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) establishes the right to rest and leisure, unconditionally, regardless of productivity, performance, or institutional approval. When rest requires private funding and personal crisis to access, the system has failed.
3. Grief is diagnostic.
Greenspan (2003) teaches that dark emotions carry information. The grief that surfaced on Day 17 was evidence of truth rather than weakness; it was the body’s truthful account of what had been lost. Grief for the years spent overworking, for the relationships deferred, for the creative life deferred, this grief was evidence of harm, as legitimate as any clinical assessment.
4. The question must invert.
The most significant shift in the retreat was the inversion from “What is wrong with me?” to “What conditions produced this?” This is the essential move of human rights inquiry: locating the problem in structures rather than individuals, in policy rather than personality.
5. Alonetude is labour.
Choosing to be alone, staying with discomfort, transforming imposed isolation into generative solitude, this is work. It requires intentionality, courage, and the material conditions (time, space, safety) that are themselves structurally distributed. Alonetude is active identity work rather than passive withdrawal.
6. Art makes knowledge that words cannot.
Patricia Leavy (2015) argues that arts-based research generates knowledge unavailable through conventional methods because artistic processes engage perception, intuition, and embodied knowing alongside analytical reasoning. The photographs in this thesis said things the written entries could only approach. Contemplative photography, painting, and found-object work produced findings that propositional language alone could carry only partially. Art is a research method, and its data is real.
7. Healing is beyond the individual’s responsibility alone.
When harm is structurally produced, healing must be structurally supported. Privatizing recovery, expecting individuals to heal themselves from institutional violence using their own resources, is itself a form of structural violence. The retreat I undertook was necessitated by institutional harm and funded through personal savings. That arrangement should be understood as a symptom of structural failure, and as an argument for collective institutional remedies.
8. Seeing slowly is a methodology.
Contemplative photography (Karr & Wood, 2011) and Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) treat the act of looking as a form of inquiry. Slowing down visually, crouching in the sand, waiting for the light to shift, spending twenty minutes on a single feather, proved to be the same practice as healing. Both resist the urgency to make meaning before the experience has been fully received. The camera trained the researcher to be present before being analytical.
9. The personal is methodological.
Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology (Nash, 2004) insists that personal experience, properly theorized, constitutes legitimate scholarly data. This thesis demonstrates that the I in research carries analytical weight. The voice that says I was exhausted, I was laid off due to unstable enrolments, I went to the sea, is also the voice that reads Porges, cites Standing, and analyzes human rights law. The personal is the methodology, and the methodology is the scholarship.
10. The practice is portable.
Alonetude requires intentionality, presence, and the willingness to turn toward oneself without judgment. It can happen in five minutes on a park bench or in a quiet room after the children have gone to school. Thirty days in Mexico made the practice visible; the practice itself travels wherever the practitioner travels. It asks only for attention.
Note. These learnings emerged inductively from thirty days of daily documentation using Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology (Nash, 2004), contemplative photography, and interdisciplinary theoretical engagement. They represent the primary findings of this creative thesis.
What Alonetude Is and Is Beyond
Table 6
Alonetude: Clarifying the Concept
Alonetude IS
Alonetude IS BEYOND
Both body-felt practice and a critical analytic lens
Loneliness rebranded with a gentler name
The labour of transforming imposed aloneness into chosen presence
Passive withdrawal or avoidance of difficulty
Both body-felt practice and a critical analytic lens
Both body-felt practice and a critical analytic lens
Situated within institutional and political architectures that produce separation
An individual coping strategy that excuses institutions from accountability
Accessible through four typologies: restorative, creative, political, and ceremonial
A single, fixed practice with prescribed steps
Portable, adaptable, available in five minutes or thirty days
Requiring a retreat, financial resources, or geographic relocation
A rights-bearing practice grounded in the right to rest, health, and dignity
A luxury available only to those with privilege
Note. Alonetude is the original theoretical framework introduced by this thesis. The four typologies, restorative, creative, political, and ceremonial, are described in the thesis and are complementary rather than mutually exclusive.
Part VI: Artist Statement
Seeing Slowly: Photography and Visual Art as Research Methodology
Ariella Azoulay (2008) argues that the camera is a civil apparatus and a contract rather than merely a mechanical device for producing images, a civil instrument for negotiating relations between people and their conditions.
In this study, photographs and artworks function as primary research rather than illustrative data within an arts-based methodology. This thesis treats visual art, photography, drawing, watercolour, painted stones, mixed-media assemblage, and found-object work as a form of scholarly argument rather than an illustration, but as a primary mode of knowledge production. Every image in The Third Shore blog is research data. Every painted stone is a finding. Every photograph of a shadow on sand, a worn shoe, or an empty doorway constitutes evidence within an arts-based research methodology that recognizes what words alone cannot capture. The visual materials were organized chronologically alongside the daily written entries and revisited during the analysis stage to identify recurring motifs, transitions, and emergent themes.
On the Photographic Practice
The photographic practice developed during the retreat is characterized by deliberate imperfection. I shoot primarily in black and white, employing high- and low-contrast, minimalist compositions, intentional under- and over-exposure, blur, grain, fixed-frame perspectives, and ground-level handheld techniques. These are methodological choices rather than aesthetic failures. Each technical decision serves a purpose within the research inquiry.
High contrast serves the thesis because the experience being documented is one of extremes, the sharp edges between institutional performance and private collapse, between exhaustion and emerging rest. Blur serves the thesis because some experiences resist clarity, and the attempt to render everything in sharp focus is itself a form of violence against the imprecise, provisional quality of healing. Ground-level perspectives serve the thesis because the researcher’s position during much of the retreat was literally low, sitting on rocks, crouching by the waterline, lying on sand, and the camera should document the body’s actual position rather than the elevated position of an observer who stands above experience.
Sarah Pink (2013) argues that visual research methods must attend to the sensory, embodied dimensions of experience rather than treating images as mere records of what was seen. My photography practices what Pink calls sensory ethnography, an approach that attends to how seeing, hearing, touching, and moving create knowledge. The camera is an extension of the body rather than separate from itn of the body’s attention, pointing where the nervous system directs it, pausing where the breath pauses, holding still when stillness arrives.
On Subject Matter
I arrived in Loreto without a shot list. I arrived with a camera and a body that had forgotten how to rest, and the subjects found me before I found them. What I photographed across thirty days was received rather than chosen, the way a driftwood piece arrests you mid-stride, the way a shadow falling across wet sand demands that you stop and look. This responsiveness is entirely intentional. It is the point.
The subjects that recurred throughout the retreat shared a quality I came to recognize as endurance without performance. Worn objects. Threshold spaces. Things shaped by forces outside their choosing that were, nonetheless, still here. A piece of driftwood smoothed by decades of tide and sand. An abandoned structure behind a rusted fence, its walls intact, its institution gone. A spent half-citrus on dark stones, its geometry still legible even after everything extractable had been taken. I was drawn to these subjects precisely because of their ordinariness. They were doing nothing for the camera. They were simply present. And presence, I was learning, was the practice.
There is a particular challenge in photographing stillness when you have spent your adult life in motion. The academic precariat persists. It holds no luxury of stopping. You teach while grieving, grade while ill, prepare courses that may never be offered again, and show enthusiasm for institutional initiatives unlikely to survive the next budget cycle. The body becomes accustomed to perpetual forward movement, to the posture of someone who is always almost catching up. To stop and look at a stone, to crouch in the sand and wait for the light to shift, to spend twenty minutes photographing the way a feather rests against gravel; this is an act of resistance that the body resists before the mind can name it. The first week, I photographed quickly. I was efficient. I had somewhere to be, though I had nowhere to be. By the second week, I was beginning to slow. By the third, I understood that the slowing was the subject.
Wang and Burris (1997) developed Photovoice as a participatory research methodology in which people use cameras to document their lived realities and bring those realities into conversation with broader social analysis. While this thesis is personally-grounded rather than participatory in the traditional sense, it draws on Photovoice’s central commitment: that the person who experiences a condition is also the person best positioned to document it. My camera shared my experience rather than translating it for an outside audience. It participated in the experience itself, shaping what I noticed, directing where I crouched and waited, insisting that I remain in contact with the physical world when the easier option was retreat into abstraction.
The non-human world proved to be an unexpectedly generous research collaborator. The tide comes in regardless of whether you are productive or paralyzed; these were observations the natural environment offered freely to anyone willing to sit still long enough to receive them. Rachel and Stephen Kaplan’s (1989) concept of the gentle pull of the natural world (the capacity of natural environments to hold attention gently, without cognitive demand, allowing depleted attentional resources to replenish) describes precisely what I experienced when I stopped trying to photograph something significant and simply began attending to what was there: the way light moved across the Sea of Cortez at six in the morning, the arrangement of stones someone had made and left without signature, the blue of a sea-tumbled glass fragment resting in pale gravel as though it had always been there and had never needed to be anywhere else.
I want to say something honest about self-portraiture, because it is the category that surprised me most. I have always found my own face an uncomfortable subject. The face performs. It knows it is being watched and arranges itself accordingly. But the shadow performs nothing. A shadow is simply the mark of having been present: a body in light, documented through the absence rather than through the appearance of light. When I began photographing my shadow on the sand, I understood that this was the closest I could come to honest self-documentation, the researcher present in the frame without the researcher having to manage the frame. Donna Haraway (1988) argues that all knowledge is situated, that every act of seeing comes from somewhere, from a body standing in a specific place, casting a shadow in a particular direction. The shadow studies that emerged throughout the retreat arose from intentional positioning rather than camera shyness. They were a methodological commitment: I am here, I am looking, and here is the proof of my location.
By the final days, when colour arrived and the visual practice began to admit warmth, the subject matter had shifted alongside my relationship to it. The ordinary remained ordinary. The shore was still the shore. But I was looking at it differently: more slowly, more steadily, with less urgency to make it mean something before I had finished seeing it. This is what ver lentamente, seeing slowly, requires: more sustained attention to the subjects already present rather than more interesting subjects. It is, I believe, both the most humble and the most demanding photographic practice I know. And it turns out to be the same practice as healing. You cannot rush either. You can only remain.
References
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ACADEMIC LENS
As the concluding creative thesis, this post performs the synthesis that Moustakas (1961) identifies as the final phase of heuristic inquiry: gathering the month’s accumulated understanding into a statement of what has been found, made, and carried forward. Audre Lorde’s (1988) argument that self-care is political resistance rather than private luxury provides the overarching ethical frame: the thirty days of rest, attention, and creative inquiry constitute an act of social justice as well as personal recovery. The land acknowledgment situates the research within Indigenous sovereignty, a gesture that Anzaldúa’s (1987) borderlands theory contextualizes: the Third Shore is a particular territory far from neutral, whose deep history precedes and exceeds the researcher’s presence. Nash’s (2004) Scholarly Personal Narrative framework asks that the researcher account for what was found alongside how the inquiry changed the researcher herself, which is what this synthesis undertakes. Van der Kolk (2014), Menakem (2017), and Levine (2010) together constitute the somatic theoretical ground from which the research conclusions are drawn: that the body is a legitimate site of knowledge, that healing is possible, and that the right to alonetude is both a personal need and a structural claim.
A Note on Returning
I have been home in Canada for several weeks now, and I find myself sitting with something I had failed to anticipate. I have solitude here. I have hours alone, mornings to myself, quiet rooms and familiar landscapes. And yet alonetude, that particular quality of expansive, inwardly accompanied presence I discovered beside the Sea of Cortez, remains elusive. It arrives in glimpses and then recedes. I am learning that alonetude resists being summoned on demand. Solitude is a condition I can create by closing a door. Being alone is simply a circumstance. Alonetude, I am beginning to understand, is a state that requires something more interior and more patient, a quality of willingness I am still practising. La búsqueda continúa. The search continues. What the retreat gave me was proof that alonetude is real and that I am capable of it. What returning has given me is the harder and perhaps more essential lesson: that cultivating it within ordinary life, amid the noise and obligation and accumulated history of home, is the actual work. I am at the beginning of that work. I am trying to show up for it with honesty rather than expectation.
There is a phrase I keep returning to, one of those expressions so familiar it risks losing its meaning through repetition: lonely in a crowd. I want to slow it down. I want to sit with what it actually describes, because I think it points toward something true and underexamined about the texture of modern life.
We have all experienced it, or something close to it. A room full of conversation. Laughter moves around the edges of a gathering. Colleagues, friends, people we have known for years, and yet, beneath all of that, a quiet distance from everything happening. Something essential feels just out of reach. The room is full. The self feels invisible.
I have been in those rooms. I have smiled at the right moments, contributed to conversations, and driven home afterward, carrying a strange, wordless weight. For a long time, I thought the feeling was a personal failing, evidence of some lack in me. It took considerably longer to understand that what I was experiencing was structural, something the research has since confirmed in ways that are both clarifying and sobering.
What the Data Says
The Harvard Study of Adult Development, initiated in 1938 and now one of the longest-running investigations of human well-being in the social sciences, has followed participants across more than eight decades, gathering medical records, psychological assessments, and life histories to ask a single, deceptively simple question: what makes a human life go well? The study began as two parallel projects: the Grant Study, which followed 268 Harvard undergraduates, and the Glueck Study, which tracked 456 boys from disadvantaged Boston neighbourhoods. The two cohorts were later studied together under the directorship of psychiatrist George Vaillant (Vaillant, 2012). Today, under the direction of Robert Waldinger at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, the study continues into its second generation (Waldinger & Schulz, 2023).
The answer the data returned was deeply relational. The quality of our close relationships is among the strongest predictors of happiness, health, and longevity (Waldinger & Schulz, 2023). Wealth, career achievement, and social status, the things our culture tends to reward most visibly, offer far less protection over a lifetime than the presence of people who genuinely see us. Because this study tracked the same individuals over decades rather than capturing a single moment, its findings carry particular weight and authority. Waldinger (2015), in his widely viewed TED Talk summarizing the study’s central lessons, described the critical distinction the data kept returning to: it is the quality of our relationships, and how deeply we allow ourselves to be seen within them, rather than their sheer number, that shapes our health and happiness over time.
Title: Painting Memory: Loreto Bay at Dusk
Artist Statement I painted this from memory rather than from a photograph, and I think that distinction matters. Memory renders a scene emotionally rather than accurately. This bay, this light, this particular quality of sky as the afternoon turned toward evening, I carried them inside me long before I thought to put them on paper. The painting came later, when I was trying to locate something I had felt in Loreto that I had struggled to name in words. The sea here is the wrong colour, and that is exactly the point. The water I remember was green and teal and almost luminous at certain hours, as though the light were coming from underneath rather than above. Painting it forced me to ask: what do I actually remember? What has feeling kept, and what has it transformed?
The mountains in the background are darker than they appeared in daylight, more brooding. In memory, they were always waiting, always present, always framing whatever small human drama was unfolding at the water's edge. The terracotta and rust of the shoreline, the way the rocks hold warmth even as the light shifts, this is what I kept returning to during my months of field research. The shore as threshold. The place where the known meets the vast. I was looking, in those thirty days beside the Sea of Cortez, for what happens to the self when it is asked to be simply present, without agenda or audience. This painting is my attempt to hold that question in colour rather than in argument. Painting Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The Loneliness Hidden in Plain Sight
And yet we are living in an era of unprecedented communicative abundance and epidemic loneliness simultaneously. The paradox is real and unmistakable. Loneliness, as the Harvard researchers understand it, is less about physical isolation than about the subjective experience of feeling unseen and emotionally unreached (Waldinger & Schulz, 2023). This is why loneliness hides so effectively in plain sight. Many people who appear socially fluent, who attend every gathering, fill their calendars, and maintain active digital lives, carry that quiet interior distance without anyone around them knowing. Being surrounded carries no guarantee of being met. This matters because we tend to treat social withdrawal as the symptom to address, when the more precise issue is emotional distance, a condition that can persist regardless of how many bodies share the room.
Being surrounded carries no guarantee of being met.
Finding a Third Word: Alonetude
Sitting with all of this over the past several years, I found myself reaching for distinctions the existing language struggled to hold. The word “loneliness” captured the ache but carried an implication of isolation that I wanted to examine more carefully. The word solitude pointed toward something more intentional, the chosen quiet that writers, artists, and scholars have long sought as a condition for thinking and creating. Anthony Storr (1988), the British psychiatrist and author of Solitude: A Return to the Self, argued that the capacity for solitude is as central to human flourishing as the capacity for relationship, a claim that sits in productive tension with the Harvard Study’s emphasis on relational connection. Solitude allows the mind to settle, ideas to surface, and creative work to unfold without the interruption of social performance.
But I kept encountering a third experience, one that fit neither category with any precision. I began calling it alonetude.
Alonetude is the state where being alone feels expansive rather than empty. Physically solitary, yes, and yet inwardly accompanied by memory, by the particular quality of light at a given hour, by creative work, by a felt sense of belonging to something larger than the immediate moment. It is distinct from loneliness because the ache is absent. It is distinct from solitude in its ordinary sense because it arose, in my own life, precisely from circumstances I would never have chosen, from rupture and institutional loss rather than peaceful, voluntary retreat. Alonetude names the labour of transforming imposed aloneness into something generative, which I have come to understand as both a healing practice and a form of resistance.
Title: Painting Memory: The Shore at Nightfall
Artist Statement This painting came from a different hour than the first. If the other painting belongs to the late afternoon, to the long golden light before sunset, this one belongs to the threshold between day and night, that brief interval when the sky deepens toward violet and the mountains lose their detail and become only shape and presence. I painted birds into the sky because I kept seeing them during that hour, pelicans mostly, moving low and purposeful across the water's surface, indifferent to whether anyone was watching. The surf here is white and heavy, almost opaque. I wanted to capture the sound of it as much as the sight, the persistent rhythmic breaking that I came to rely on during my thirty days beside the Sea of Cortez as a kind of company.
When you are alone for long stretches, sound becomes texture. The waves were always arriving, always completing something, always beginning again. The shoreline in the foreground is painted in rust and dark brown, the same volcanic rock that edged every walk I took. I was drawn to that rock because it was ancient in a way that made my own concerns feel appropriately small. I came to Loreto seeking something beyond escape. I came to find a scale in which the self could rest without dominating the frame. I think this painting is what that felt like: the self as one small thing in a large, indifferent, generous world. Painting Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The Capacity to Be Alone
For me, these moments of alonetude tend to arrive in quiet, specific places. Walking beside water before the day has fully opened. Writing in a journal in the blue hour before dawn. Watching light move across a landscape and feeling, in that movement, something that resembles being witnessed. Donald Winnicott (1958), the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, described what he called the capacity to be alone, arguing that the ability to feel secure within oneself, held by an internalized sense of presence rather than requiring constant external validation, reflects a particular kind of emotional maturity. Alonetude, as I understand it, is something closely related: the discovery that the self can be genuinely accompanied from within, that connection is available even in the absence of another person.
This is where I want to return to the phrase that opened this reflection. Loneliness in a crowd is a diagnosis of a very particular condition: being physically proximate to others while remaining emotionally unreachable. What it reveals is that the remedy for loneliness is presence and authenticity rather than mere proximity. We can fill a room and still be strangers to one another. We can text constantly and remain fundamentally unseen. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has been tracking this truth since 1938, and what eight decades of data confirm is that the architecture of a well-lived life is built from something far more demanding than adjacency (Vaillant, 2012; Waldinger & Schulz, 2023).
Title: Painting Memory: Crescent Moon Over the Sierra de la Giganta
Artist Statement I painted the mountains at night because that is when they became something else entirely. During the day, the Sierra de la Giganta were backdrop, context, the frame that held the sea in place. At night they lost their practicality and became pure presence. Purple and lavender and something close to blue, their ridgeline dissolving into the dark sky so that it was difficult to say where mountain ended and atmosphere began. I found myself standing outside my casita on more than one evening, just watching them hold the dark.
The crescent moon I painted small and precise because it was small and precise. It offered only faint illumination, just enough light to make the darkness visible, to give the eye a point of reference in all that immensity. I think that is what I was learning to do in Loreto: rather than flooding the dark with light, to find the small, reliable point from which to orient. To stop needing the whole sky to be bright in order to feel safe.
There is something this painting knows that I am still learning: that the mountains have no need of our attention. They perform for no one. They were there long before I arrived and will remain long after I have gone, carrying their particular shade of purple into night after night, indifferent to whether anyone names what they are. I painted them anyway. It felt like a form of witnessing, and witnessing, I have come to understand, is one of the quietest and most necessary forms of connection. Painting Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Presence Over Proximity
The Harvard Study is right that relationships are essential, perhaps the most essential thing. And I want to add something alongside that finding: the quality of our relationship with ourselves shapes the quality of what we can offer and receive in our relationships with others. When I have learned to sit within my own alonetude, to be genuinely present with my own interior life rather than fleeing it into noise or distraction, I find that I arrive at my connections with other people from a place of relative steadiness rather than depletion. I am looking for company rather than a rescue. That is a different kind of showing up.
The phrase lonely in a crowd has always carried a tone of lament, and rightly so. The experience it names is genuinely painful and genuinely common. And yet I wonder if it also holds an invitation to ask what kind of presence we are bringing into the rooms we enter, and whether we have yet learned to be present enough with ourselves to be fully present with anyone else.
A veces la soledad más profunda no es la que vivimos solos, sino la que vivimos rodeados. Sometimes the deepest solitude is the one we live in, surrounded by others. And sometimes, learning to inhabit our own company with grace is where the long work of genuine connection begins.
References
Storr, A. (1988). Solitude: A return to the self. Free Press.
Vaillant, G. E. (2012). Triumphs of experience: The men of the Harvard Grant Study. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Waldinger, R. J. (2015, November). What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happiness
Waldinger, R. J., & Schulz, M. S. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster.
Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The capacity to be alone. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, 416–420.
Translation Note
Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
ACADEMIC LENS
The phenomenon described here, having solitude without alonetude, having physical aloneness without the quality of inwardly accompanied presence, confirms what Moustakas (1961) distinguishes as the difference between structural solitude (being alone) and existential alonetude (being at home with oneself). The failure of alonetude to transfer automatically into a different context also illuminates what van der Kolk (2014) identifies as context-dependent emotional learning: the nervous system’s regulated state is partly cued by the environment in which it was established. Levine (2010) would describe what is needed as the deliberate “evoking” of the somatic resource: the conscious calling-up of the bodily felt sense associated with the Sea of Cortez, to use it as an internal anchor in a less supportive environment. Cacioppo and Patrick (2008) distinguish loneliness as the perceived absence of meaningful connection rather than the absence of people meaningful connection, and this post captures precisely that distinction: surrounded by familiar people and places, yet without the quality of presence-with-oneself that alonetude names. Winnicott’s (1971) developmental frame suggests that this is the harder work: building the capacity to be alone while present in the world, rather than alone from it.
Trauma scholar Bessel van der Kolk articulates that trauma represents far more than a discrete event from the past; it is an enduring imprint on mind, brain, and body that continues shaping how we navigate the present (2014, p. 21).
Keywords: childhood hypervigilance, trauma, nervous system, body memory, fear, safety, body-based experience, scholarly personal narrative, vignette
States of Being Rather Than Events
Content Warning: This vignette contains discussion of childhood exposure to parental alcoholism and domestic violence. While free of graphic detail, the material addresses trauma, fear, and hypervigilance that some readers may find distressing.
There are childhood memories constructed from discrete events, moments with clear beginnings and endings. And then there are memories that exist as states of being rather than as events, atmospheric conditions that pervaded entire years. This vignette attempts to capture one such state: the pervasive fear that characterized my childhood from approximately ages three through twelve, the years when my father’s alcoholism and violence made our home a place of constant threat. This is the texture of hypervigilance itself rather than the memory of a single incident, the embodied experience of a nervous system locked in perpetual defensive mobilization.
Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (2014) has demonstrated that trauma represents far more than a discrete past event; it is an enduring imprint on mind, brain, and body that continues shaping how we survive in the present. For children living in homes characterized by unpredictable violence, the imprint forms through chronic activation rather than through isolated traumatic events of threat-response systems.
Neuroscientist Stephen Porges (2011), developer of the polyvagal theory, explained that the autonomic nervous system continuously evaluates environmental cues for safety or danger through a process he termed the body’s instinct to scan for safety, an unconscious detection of threat that occurs beneath conscious awareness. In homes where violence erupts unpredictably, children’s nervous systems become calibrated to constant danger, their bodies’ instinct to scan for safety tuned to detect the subtlest indicators of impending harm.
I return to this material now because I cannot understand what thirty days by the sea gave me without understanding what had been taken first. The capacity for alonetude, I have come to believe, requires a nervous system that was once allowed to learn that stillness is safe. Mine learned something else entirely. What I am doing in Loreto is less a discovery than a reclamation.
The Architecture of Chronic Threat
What I am attempting to document here defies conventional narrative structure. There is no rising action, no climax, no resolution. There is only the ongoing state of estar alerta, being alert, a way of inhabiting the world that became so normalized I forgot there was any other way to be. The challenge in writing about this lies in conveying the atmospheric quality of constant vigilance, the way fear became the background hum against which all other experiences played out.
Robert Nash (2004) calls this Scholarly Personal Narrative: the practice of using one’s own experience as scholarly data, rigorously examined and theoretically grounded. My childhood hypervigilance is far more than personal history; it is a case study in how developing nervous systems adapt to chronic threat, how children organize their entire beings around the imperative of survival, and how early experiences of danger foreclose later capacities for rest and solitude.
Psychiatrist Judith Herman observes that children living in chronically threatening environments organize their entire existence around preventing further harm, shaping every aspect of their development and behaviour (1992).
Complex Trauma and Deformation of Personality
Before the narrative, the science. Because what I carried in my body has a name. Psychiatrist Judith Herman (1992) introduced the concept of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (complex PTSD) to describe prolonged, repeated trauma occurring in contexts where escape is impossible, particularly during developmental years. Herman distinguished complex PTSD from single-incident trauma, noting that repeated trauma in adult life erodes the structure of an already-formed personality, but repeated trauma in childhood fundamentally shapes and deforms the personality as it develops. Children exposed to ongoing domestic violence develop far more than memories of specific frightening events; they develop an altered baseline state characterized by constant vigilance, disrupted attachment, and a compromised sense of safety.
This distinction matters profoundly. Single-incident trauma, while devastating, occurs against a backdrop of relative safety. The person knows what normal felt like before the trauma and can potentially return to that baseline. But for children in chronically threatening environments, a safe baseline is absent. The threat is the baseline. Safety, when it occurs, feels like an aberration.
How the nervous system responds to safety and threat, and the Hierarchy of Survival Responses
How the Nervous System Responds to Safety and Threat, developed by Stephen Porges (2011), provides a crucial understanding of how chronic threat shapes the nervous system. Porges described three hierarchically organized subsystems of the autonomic nervous system: the genuine safety system, which supports social engagement and feelings of safety; the sympathetic nervous system, which mobilizes fight-or-flight responses; and the dorsal vagal system, which produces freeze, collapse, and shutdown responses. In safe environments, the nervous system flexibly moves between these states as situations require. However, in chronically threatening environments, the system becomes biased toward defensive states, with the genuine safety social engagement system chronically inhibited (Porges, 2011).
For children in violent homes, this means the nervous system rarely experiences the regulation that comes from safe, attuned relationships. Instead, as van der Kolk (2014) documented, traumatized individuals carry fundamentally different bodily experiences than those who have felt safe and welcome in the world. The chronic activation of threat-detection systems creates what trauma researcher Janina Fisher (2017) termed structural dissociation, the fragmentation of the personality into parts that carry different survival strategies. Children develop what Fisher described as trauma-related action systems, including fight, flight, freeze, submit, and attach-cry-for-help responses, each associated with specific bodily states and relational patterns.
Hypervigilance as an Adaptive Strategy
Hypervigilance, which van der Kolk (2014) characterized as the persistent expectation of danger that keeps the body in a state of high alert, becomes a chronic state rather than an acute response. Clinical psychologist Christine Courtois (2008) noted that children in abusive homes develop what she termed anticipatory anxiety, constantly scanning environments and monitoring adult moods to predict and potentially avoid danger. This anticipatory stance, while adaptive in the moment, creates lasting alterations in how the nervous system processes safety cues even in genuinely safe environments.
Hypervigilance is best understood as an intelligent adaptation rather than a pathology. The child who learns to read micro-expressions, to detect shifts in vocal tone, to map escape routes through the house, that child is surviving rather than malfunctioning. The problem arises from the persistence of the adaptation long after the threat has ended, in the way the nervous system continues to signal danger even in contexts of genuine safety.
Betrayal Trauma and the Violation of Reality
The specific experience of being falsely accused connects to what trauma researchers call betrayal trauma, a concept articulated by psychologist Jennifer Freyd and summarized in Freyd (2008). Freyd argued that when those who should protect us instead harm us, or when we are blamed for harm done to us, the violation cuts deeper than the harm itself because it undermines our basic capacity to trust our own perceptions. For children, false accusations by abusive parents create a double bind: the child knows they were innocent of the accused act, yet the parents’ power requires submission to the false narrative, creating a fundamental rupture in the child’s sense of reality and worth.
Freyd (2008) distinguished betrayal trauma from other forms of trauma by emphasizing that it occurs when the people or institutions on which a person depends for survival violate that trust. For a child, there is no one more dependent upon for survival than parents. When parents both harm and deny the child’s reality, they commit what might be understood as epistemic violence, an assault on the child’s capacity to know what they know.
Parentification and the Burden of Protection
Finally, the pattern of attempting to protect younger siblings represents what family therapist Salvador Minuchin (1974) termed parentification, a developmental distortion in which children assume caretaking roles beyond their capacity. Jurkovic (1997) further described how parentification places the child in an impossible position, simultaneously serving as both a caretaker and a dependent. The child becomes hypervigilant for their own safety as well as their siblings’, exponentially increasing the burden on their developing nervous system.
Most relevant for the current inquiry into alonetude, parentified children often struggle with solitude because their nervous systems learned early that constant vigilance is required for self-protection as well as for the protection of others. Rest feels like a dereliction of duty. Solitude feels like abandonment of the post.
van der Kolk (2014) demonstrates that the body continues to register and respond to danger signals even when conscious memory holds no record of the original trauma.
The Vignette: The Feeling in My Stomach
The Constant Companion
I am seven. Or eight. Or nine. The specific age matters less than the constancy: from my earliest memories until approximately age twelve, I lived inside a particular sensation. It sits in my stomach, a tight ball of readiness. Neither quite nausea, though sometimes it tips that way, nor quite pain, though it aches. It is the feeling of waiting. Esperando (waiting). Always listening and waiting for the sound that will tell me whether this evening will be safe.
The sound is the garage door. My father’s car is pulling in at the end of the day. My body knows before my mind processes: the particular rhythm of his footsteps tells me everything I need to know. Heavy, deliberate steps mean danger. Lighter, quicker steps might mean safety, though guarantees are absent. The ball in my stomach tightens, and my breathing changes without my choosing. I am listening with my whole body, with every sense.
By the time I hear the garage door, I have already assessed multiple variables. What day of the week is it? Fridays are more dangerous. How late is he? Later means more drinking. Did my mother seem tense at dinner? Her tension means she has already sensed something. Is my younger sister being too loud? Noise draws attention, and attention is dangerous. The youngest is seven years younger than me, still small enough that sometimes she cries in ways I cannot quiet, and this terrifies me more than my own danger.
Reading Atmospheres
I develop a hyperawareness of atmospheres. I can feel the charge in the air before anything visible changes. My mother’s shoulders tighten in a particular way. The house itself seems to hold its breath. By age eight or nine, I had learned to read micro-expressions, shifts in vocal tone, and the precise degree of door-closing force that indicates anger. I am fluent in the language of approaching violence in ways that children should never need to be fluent.
The worst moments arrive before violence, during the hours of waiting, the ball in my stomach wound so tight I think it might tear something open. During these hours of waiting, I strategize. Where are my sisters? If something happens, can I get to them? Are there obstacles between me and their rooms? I map the house in my mind like a battlefield, planning routes and refuges. The hall closet has been my hiding place before. The space under my younger sister’s bed. The corner behind the living room chair, where I can pull my knees to my chest and make myself small. Pequeña. Invisible. (Small. Invisible.)
The Geography of Hiding
The house has its own geography of fear. Certain rooms are more dangerous than others. The kitchen, where my father drinks after work, where the counter holds the evidence of how many bottles have been opened. The living room, where he sits in his chair and calls us to him. The hallway between my room and my sisters’ rooms, which I must cross to reach them if they need me, feels impossibly long and exposed.
I learn to move through the house silently. I learn which floorboards creak, which doors squeak, and how to open cabinets without sound. I learn to make myself unnoticeable, to exist without creating disturbance, to breathe so shallowly that even my breath draws no attention. This skill, this ability to minimize my presence, will follow me for decades, will manifest in adult relationships as difficulty taking up space, as apologizing for existing, as constantly making myself smaller to accommodate others’ needs.
But in childhood, this skill kept me alive. Or at least, it keeps me safer than I would otherwise be. Which is something entirely different from safe. Genuine safety was absent there. There are only degrees of threat, gradations of danger that I learn to navigate with the precision of a cartographer mapping treacherous terrain.
The Sound of My Name
Sometimes my father calls my name. This sound, my own name spoken in his voice when he has been drinking, produces a physical response I have no control over. My heart accelerates. My vision narrows. The ball in my stomach clenches. I freeze, completely still, as if stillness might make me invisible. But I must answer. Silence is worse. I force my legs to move, force my voice to work, force my face into neutrality. The walk down the hallway to wherever he is calling from feels like walking to execution. Caminar hacia el miedo (walking toward fear).
“Did you do this?” His voice, accusing.
The meaning of “this” remains unclear. A glass was left on the counter. A door left ajar. A light was left on. The television is too loud. The offence varies and often makes no logical sense. But the pattern is always the same: I am accused of actions I never committed, actions I would avoid because I am so careful, so hypervigilant about avoiding any reason for attention, for anger, for danger.
“No,” I say, my voice small. This is true. I was innocent of whatever he accuses me of. But truth carries no power here.
Freyd (2008) explains that betrayal trauma occurs when those we depend upon for survival violate our trust, creating wounds that extend beyond the traumatic event itself to undermine our capacity to trust our own reality (Freyd, 2008).
The Fracturing of Reality
The moment stretches. He decides whether to believe me. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he refuses to. When he refuses to believe me, when he insists I am lying even though I am telling the truth, something breaks inside me each time. Beyond the fear of punishment, though that fear is real, something deeper: the understanding that reality itself can be overwritten by someone else’s version, that my knowing what is true offers no protection, that I can be blamed for actions I never committed simply because someone with power over me decides I am guilty.
This lesson embeds itself deeply. Decades later, I will struggle to trust my own judgment, will defer excessively to others’ interpretations of events, will doubt my own memory and experience even when I have clear evidence of their accuracy.
The Leaving
During these moments, I split. Some part of me goes away to a place where his words cannot reach. My face remains neutral. My body stands still. But I am elsewhere entirely. Years later, I will learn this is called dissociation, a survival strategy my nervous system deployed to protect me from unbearable psychological pain. In the moment, I only know that I must conceal my tears, restrain my defence, and hide how afraid I am. Any emotional response increases danger.
Where do I go when I leave? The answer eludes me. It is an automatic response rather than a conscious choice, my body’s wisdom protecting me in the only way available when fight-or-flight is both impossible and dangerous. I exist in some internal space that feels grey and distant, muffled, as if I am underwater and the sounds are reaching me from far away. This internal refuge keeps me functioning, but at a cost: I lose pieces of my experience, cannot fully remember what happened during these dissociated moments, and carry gaps in my memory that will later make me doubt whether events occurred as I recall them.
The Weight of Protection
After these confrontations, after he has yelled or grabbed or made his point through whatever means he chooses, I go to check on my sisters. My younger sister, only one year younger than me, has often heard everything through the walls. I find her frozen in her bed, eyes wide, her own body locked in the same alert state that grips mine. “It is okay,” I tell her, though we both know the reality is far from okay. “He is calmer now.” Ya pasó. (It has passed.) Though we both know the calm is temporary, that it will come again, that this is merely an intermission.
I smooth her hair the way our mother does, or used to do before exhaustion made all gestures mechanical. I try to absorb her fear into my own body, try to create a buffer between her and the violence, try to convince both of us that I can keep her safe when in reality I am just another child, just as powerless, just as frightened.
The youngest, still small, often sleeps through these episodes. When she wakes, confused by the atmosphere, by the tension that lingers in the house like smoke, I make up reasons. “Dad was just talking loud about work.” Anything to preserve her innocence a little longer, though I suspect she absorbs the fear even when its source lies beyond her conscious awareness. Babies know. Children know. Bodies know what minds try to deny.
The Vigil
I lie awake long after the house has gone silent. The ball in my stomach slowly, slowly begins to unclench, though it never fully releases. My body remains ready, vigilant. Sleep comes late and lightly. I will wake at any unfamiliar sound, my heart already racing before I am fully conscious. Tomorrow I will move through school in a fog of exhaustion, but I have become skilled at hiding this, too. At appearing normal. At performing the role of a child who is fine when everything inside me is wound tight as a wire.
The Normalization of Terror
This is hundreds of memories rather than a single memory; thousands of moments of fear spread across years. This is the texture of my childhood, the baseline state against which any moments of safety appear as aberrations. The ball in my stomach becomes so constant that I forget there was ever a time I existed without it. It becomes my normal, the lens through which I perceive the entire world: dangerous, unpredictable, requiring constant vigilance.
Even in moments that should be safe, the fear persists. At school, I scan constantly for social threats, for signs that peers might reject or exclude me. During rare family outings when my father is sober, I remain tense, waiting for the mood to shift. The nervous system, once calibrated to a constant state of threat, cannot easily recalibrate, even when external circumstances temporarily improve. Safety feels temporary, fragile, a gift that can be revoked at any moment.
What I lacked understanding of then but comprehend now through trauma neuroscience is that my body is accurately responding to chronic threat by remaining in a state of mobilized defence. The hypervigilance is entirely rational, a genuine response to genuine danger. The problem emerges later, when the danger has ended, but the defensive mobilization persists, when my adult nervous system continues responding as if I am still that child in that house, still needing to monitor constantly for threats that no longer exist.
Analytical Reflection: How Chronic Fear Shapes the Developing Self
The Colonization of the Body by Trauma
The experiences documented above illustrate what van der Kolk (2014) described as the colonization of children’s bodies by trauma, the way threat becomes inscribed in their nervous systems at the most fundamental level (van der Kolk, 2014). There are several things happening at once here. The constant monitoring of environmental cues for safety represents Porges’s (2011) concept of the faulty body’s instinct to scan for safety, in which the nervous system becomes so calibrated to threat detection that it perceives danger even in neutral or safe situations (Porges, 2011). For children in chronically dangerous environments, however, the body’s instinct to scan for safety is accurately attuned to real threat rather than to a truly faulty one. The problem emerges later, when the nervous system maintains this threat-detection bias long after the environment has changed.
The ball in my stomach described in the vignette represents what trauma therapist Peter Levine (2010) identified as chronic sympathetic nervous system activation combined with freeze response. Levine (2010) explained that when fight or flight responses are impossible, as they often are for children in abusive homes, the nervous system enters a state he termed frozen flight, in which mobilization energy remains trapped in the body, creating sensations of constriction, tightness, and readiness that never discharge (Levine, 2010). This trapped activation, maintained over years, creates lasting alterations in how the body experiences and responds to stress.
Disorganized Attachment and the Impossible Bind
Second, the hypervigilant monitoring of my father’s moods and movements exemplifies what attachment researcher Mary Main (1991) termed disorganized attachment, the attachment pattern that develops when caregivers are simultaneously sources of comfort and fear. Main (1991) noted that children with disorganized attachment display contradictory behaviours, alternately approaching and withdrawing from caregivers, because their attachment and defence systems are simultaneously activated. The child needs the parent for survival, but also needs to protect themselves from the parent, creating an irresolvable paradox that fragments their sense of self and safety.
Adults with histories of disorganized attachment often experience relationships as simultaneously compelling and dangerous. They crave intimacy while fearing engulfment. They seek closeness while maintaining defensive distance. The nervous system never learns to distinguish between connections that nourish and those that harm, because in childhood, they came from the same source.
Epistemic Violence and the Undermining of Reality
Third, the experience of false accusation illuminates what Freyd (2008) termed institutional betrayal, extended here to familial betrayal. When authority figures who should protect us instead harm us and then blame us for the harm, they violate both our physical safety and our cognitive integrity. The child knows themselves innocent of the accused act, yet the parent’s insistence creates what psychologist Albert Biderman (1957) identified in his study of prisoners of war as forced compliance with false narratives, a form of psychological torture that undermines the victim’s grip on reality itself.
Freyd (2008) argued that betrayal trauma is particularly damaging because it involves violations by those on whom we depend for survival. For a child, parental accusations of wrongdoing against an innocent child create a double trauma: the initial experience of being blamed, and the deeper violation of having their reality denied. Over time, this pattern erodes the child’s capacity to trust their own perceptions, creating what trauma therapist Alice Miller (1981) described as a dynamic in which children learn to doubt their own experiences and instead adopt the abuser’s version of reality as a protective strategy.
Parentification and the Foreclosure of Childhood
Fourth, my role as protector of my younger sisters represents destructive parentification. Jurkovic (1997) distinguished between instrumental parentification, taking on practical household tasks, and emotional parentification, providing emotional support and regulation to family members. My hypervigilance extended beyond self-protection to constant monitoring of my sisters’ safety, effectively requiring me to function as parent, protector, and threat-assessor simultaneously. Jurkovic (1997) documented how this impossible burden reshapes identity in ways that persist long into adulthood.
The long-term consequences of parentification include difficulty accepting care from others in adulthood, a persistent sense of responsibility for others’ emotional states, and a compromised capacity to recognize and communicate one’s own needs (Hooper, 2007). Most relevantly for the current inquiry into alonetude, parentified children often struggle with solitude because their nervous systems learned early that constant vigilance is required for survival. True rest, true solitude, true letting go of protective vigilance can feel dangerous even decades after the original threat has ended.
Dissociation as Survival and Its Lasting Costs
Fifth, the dissociative response I described, the sense of going away during unbearable moments, represents what van der Kolk (2014) termed the last resort of the organism when fight, flight, and freeze are all impossible (van der Kolk, 2014). Trauma researcher Ellert Nijenhuis (2004) explained structural dissociation as the division of the personality into parts: an apparently normal part that attempts to function in daily life, and emotional parts that remain stuck in traumatic states. For children in chronically abusive environments, dissociation serves a crucial protective function, allowing them to continue functioning while parts of themselves remain frozen in moments of overwhelming threat.
However, as psychiatrist Frank Putnam (1997) documented, chronic childhood dissociation creates lasting alterations in consciousness, memory, and the sense of self. The capacity to leave one’s body during threat, while adaptive in the moment, can become an automatic response triggered by even minor stressors in adulthood. This creates a fragmented relationship to embodiment, making it difficult to remain fully present in one’s body even when genuinely safe.
Table 1
Neurobiological and Psychological Impacts of Chronic Childhood Fear
Domain
Childhood Manifestation
Neurobiological Mechanism
Adult Legacy
Threat Detection
Hypervigilance, constant monitoring of environments and people
Amygdala hyperactivation; sensitized stress response systems (van der Kolk, 2014)
Difficulty distinguishing safe from unsafe situations; chronic anxiety in neutral contexts
Autonomic Regulation
“Ball in stomach,” chronic tension, shallow breathing
Sympathetic nervous system dominance; vagal brake inhibition (Porges, 2011)
Overdeveloped responsibility for others; underdeveloped self-care
Capacity for Rest
Sleep disturbances; inability to fully relax
Chronic the body’s alert state; fear conditioning
Solitude feels unsafe; difficulty with unstructured time
Note. This table synthesizes neurobiological and developmental impacts of chronic childhood exposure to domestic violence. The mechanisms and legacies interact in complex ways; separating them into discrete categories oversimplifies their interconnected nature.
Critical Interrogation: Limitations, Risks, and Ethical Considerations
Academic integrity requires examining what this vignette might distort or what ethical concerns it raises. First, writing about childhood trauma risks what trauma studies scholar Roger Luckhurst (2008) called wound culture, the commodification of suffering for narrative purposes. By making my childhood fear into scholarly material, I risk flattening its complexity, turning lived anguish into theoretical illustration. Luckhurst (2008) cautioned against trauma narratives that serve primarily to elicit sympathy rather than advance understanding.
However, feminist scholar Wendy Brown (1995) argued that the strategic deployment of injury narratives can serve political and epistemic purposes when done critically. Brown (1995) distinguished between wounded attachments, identities organized entirely around injury, and critical injury discourse, which examines structures of power that produce suffering. My intention here aligns with the latter: using personal experience to illuminate how chronic childhood threat shapes lifelong patterns of embodiment, relationship, and capacity for rest.
Second, this vignette focuses on my experience as the oldest sibling and temporary protector, potentially obscuring my sisters’ distinct experiences. They lived in the same house but occupied different positions in the family system, different ages and therefore different developmental impacts, different strategies and different injuries. My narrative must resist the temptation to presume to speak for them or to represent the definitive truth of our shared childhood. Philosopher Linda Alcoff (1991) cautioned about the problem of speaking for others, noting that even well-intentioned representation can silence those whose experiences differ from the narrator’s.
Third, by focusing on my father’s alcoholism and violence, this vignette might appear to pathologize addiction or to reduce complex family dynamics to simple perpetrator/victim categories. Addiction medicine recognizes alcoholism as a disease requiring treatment rather than moral failure. My father’s violence and my fear are both real, and neither negates the other’s reality. Trauma-informed practice requires holding multiple truths simultaneously: that my father likely experienced his own traumas, that addiction reflects neurobiological changes in the nervous system thrown off balance, and that none of this erases the harm caused or reduces my right to name my experience honestly.
Fourth, the emphasis on hypervigilance as a survival strategy risks romanticizing trauma’s adaptations. While it is true that children develop remarkable capacities for threat detection and self-protection, these deserve recognition as costly adaptations rather than gifts that trauma provides. What psychologist Mary Sykes Wylie (2004) called the myth of resilience obscures the profound costs of surviving chronic trauma. I did survive, but at an enormous developmental, neurobiological, and relational cost. The hypervigilance that kept me alive also kept me from experiencing a protected childhood, from developing secure attachment, and from knowing my body as a safe space.
Finally, memory’s limitations apply here as powerfully as in any autobiographical narrative. The experiences I describe occurred decades ago, filtered through a child’s understanding and shaped by adult sense-making processes. As Schacter (2001) documented, memory is inherently reconstructive rather than reproductive. I cannot know with certainty which details are accurate recall and which are narrative elaboration. What I can attest to with confidence is the affective truth, the emotional and body-based resonance of these memories, the way my body still responds to certain triggers in ways that suggest deep encoding of threat.
My stomach still clenches in ways. My breath still catches when I hear certain vocal tones. My shoulders still rise toward my ears when doors close with force. These body-based responses suggest that, whatever the precise accuracy of my narrative recollection, something real was encoded, something that continues to live in my nervous system.
Porges (2011) demonstrates that when a nervous system has been shaped by chronic danger, safety itself can feel foreign and unfamiliar, requiring conscious relearning of what secure states feel like.
Where I Land: From Hypervigilance to Alonetude
The Legacy of Chronic Threat
This vignette matters to the larger Alonetude project because it illuminates why solitude, rest, and the very idea of letting down my guard feel so dangerous, even five decades after the original threat ended. Trauma researcher Pat Ogden (2006) explained that traumatized individuals often experience solitude as threatening rather than restorative because their nervous systems learned that constant vigilance is required for survival. The capacity to be alone, truly alone without hypervigilance, requires what Porges (2011) termed safety signals, environmental and relational cues that allow the genuine safety system to inhibit defensive mobilization.
The thirty days in Loreto represent an attempt to provide my nervous system with sustained safety signals: predictable routine, the absence of threat, permission to rest, and solitude chosen rather than imposed. This is about healing rather than getting over childhood trauma or transcending its effects through willpower. Rather, as van der Kolk (2014) argued, healing from trauma requires finding a way to become calm and focused while remaining in connection with one’s body and emotions. The retreat offers conditions for what trauma therapist Janina Fisher (2017) described as healing the fragmented self, the gradual integration of dissociated parts through experiences of sustained safety.
Retraining the Nervous System
The ball in my stomach, that childhood sensation of perpetual readiness, still activates under stress. My nervous system still scans the environment for threats more vigilantly than necessary. I still experience difficulty with unstructured time, with true rest, with letting my guard down. These are accurate indicators of deep fear encoding rather than failures of character, signs of how profoundly threat became inscribed in my body during formative years. Understanding this through trauma neuroscience helps me recognize that my struggles with solitude reflect nervous system adaptations to real threat rather than characterological weakness to real threat.
What the Loreto retreat offers is gradual, patient retraining rather than erasure of these patterns. Porges (2011) explained that the nervous system can learn new responses through sustained exposure to genuine safety combined with therapeutic relationships. While I am alone physically in Loreto, I carry with me the relational safety of chosen connections, including therapeutic relationships that have helped me begin to recognize safety cues. Each morning when I wake without the ball in my stomach, each hour I spend in my body without dissociating, each moment of genuine rest represents a small victory in retraining a nervous system calibrated long ago for perpetual threat.
Honouring the Child Who Survived
The child who learned to make herself small, to anticipate danger, to protect her sisters at cost to her own development, that child still lives in my nervous system. Todavía está aquí. (She is still here.) This retreat offers her, at last, what she needed then and never received: sustained safety, permission to rest, and recognition that the hypervigilance that kept her alive is no longer required. This is alonetude’s deepest promise: solitude as sacred space rather than isolation in which I can finally, slowly, begin to put down vigilance’s exhausting burden.
In moments of particular stillness here in Loreto, I sometimes feel her presence, that vigilant child-self. She is always scanning, always alert, always ready. “You can rest now,” I tell her, speaking internally in the way therapy has taught me. “Puedes descansar.” You can rest. The fight is over. The danger has passed. You kept us alive, and now you can rest.
She struggles to believe me. Decades of hypervigilance dissolve slowly, and thirty days by the sea brings only beginnings. But sometimes, in the early morning light when the pelicans glide past my window, when the only sound is the gentle pulse of waves against shore, I feel her soften slightly. The ball in the stomach unclenches, just a degree. The breath deepens, just a fraction. The shoulders drop away from the ears, just momentarily.
These are quiet healing moments rather than dramatic ones. They are quiet, incremental, and easily missed. But they matter. They represent the slow work of teaching a nervous system calibrated to danger that safety is possible, that rest is permitted, that solitude can be restorative rather than threatening. This is the work of alonetude: integrating rather than transcending the past, honouring rather than erasing the hypervigilant child, but finally giving her what she always needed and deserved.
The Ongoing Nature of Healing
Healing from complex childhood trauma follows a winding course, achieved through ongoing effort rather than once and maintained. It requires ongoing, patient attention to the body’s responses, compassionate curiosity about triggers and patterns, and a willingness to remain present even when every instinct says to flee, freeze, or fight. It requires what van der Kolk (2014) called befriending the body, learning to listen to its signals as information rather than threat.
The thirty days in Loreto are practice rather than a cure. Practice staying present. Practice in recognizing safety. Practice in allowing rest. Practice in trusting that perpetual vigilance is no longer required for survival. The hypervigilant patterns will persist for some time. But perhaps, with sustained attention and compassionate patience, they can soften. Perhaps the nervous system can learn, slowly, that safety is genuinely possible, genuinely sustainable rather than merely temporary.
This is what brings me here, to this casita by the sea, to these thirty days of chosen solitude. Engagement with the past rather than escape from it. Acknowledgment of trauma’s impacts rather than denial. Honouring her intelligence, her survival, her fierce protection of those she loved, while gently teaching her that the time for such fierce protection has passed, that she can finally rest, that she is safe now, que está segura ahora (that she is safe now), that alonetude offers refuge rather than threat, possibility rather than danger, peace at long last.
References
Alcoff, L. (1991). The problem of speaking for others. Cultural Critique, 20, 5–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354221
Biderman, A. D. (1957). Communist attempts to elicit false confessions from Air Force prisoners of war. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 33(9), 616–625.
Brown, W. (1995). States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton University Press.
Courtois, C. A. (2008). Complex trauma, complex reactions: Assessment and treatment. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, S(1), 86–100. https://doi.org/10.1037/1942-9681.S.1.86
Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.
Freyd, J. J. (2008). Betrayal trauma. In G. Reyes, J. D. Elhai, & J. D. Ford (Eds.), The encyclopedia of psychological trauma (pp. 76–77). John Wiley & Sons.
Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence: From domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
Hooper, L. M. (2007). The application of attachment theory and family systems theory to the phenomena of parentification. The Family Journal, 15(3), 217–223. https://doi.org/10.1177/1066480707301290
Jurkovic, G. J. (1997). Lost childhoods: The plight of the parentified child. Brunner/Mazel.
Levine, P. A. (2010). In an unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness. North Atlantic Books.
Luckhurst, R. (2008). The trauma question. Routledge.
Main, M. (1991). Metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive monitoring, and singular (coherent) vs. multiple (incoherent) models of attachment: Findings and directions for future research. In C. M. Parkes, J. Stevenson-Hinde, & P. Marris (Eds.), Attachment across the life cycle (pp. 127–159). Routledge.
Miller, A. (1981). The drama of the gifted child: The search for the true self. Basic Books.
Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and family therapy. Harvard University Press.
Nash, R. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Nijenhuis, E. R. S. (2004). Somatoform dissociation: Phenomena, measurement, and theoretical issues. W. W. Norton & Company.
Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
Putnam, F. W. (1997). Dissociation in children and adolescents: A developmental perspective. Guilford Press.
Schacter, D. L. (2001). The seven sins of memory: How the mind forgets and remembers. Houghton Mifflin.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Wylie, M. S. (2004). The limits of talk: Bessel van der Kolk wants to transform the treatment of trauma. Psychotherapy Networker, 28(1), 30–41.
Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
ACADEMIC LENS
This vignette explicitly foregrounds van der Kolk’s (2014) argument as its theoretical frame: trauma is an enduring somatic impression rather than simply a past event, imprint that continues to shape present experience. The vignette form chosen here is methodologically appropriate: van der Kolk himself documents how traumatic memory surfaces in sensory fragments, images, and scenes rather than continuous narrative, and the vignette honours this structure rather than imposing a false coherence. Menakem (2017) extends the analysis generationally: childhood hypervigilance extends beyond the child’s individual response to threat but the nervous system’s uptake of patterns transmitted from caregivers who were themselves shaped by their histories. Porges’s (2011) Polyvagal Theory contextualizes hypervigilance physiologically: the child’s nervous system, unable to establish the “safe and social” state that co-regulation with a regulated caregiver would provide, settles into chronic sympathetic activation as a survival default. Levine’s (2010) somatic experiencing model suggests that recovery from this early patterning requires, above all, new repeated experiences of safety: beyond understanding alone: the body’s gradual revision of its baseline expectations about what environments and relationships hold.
I stood at the podium with three minutes to explain thirty days, nineteen years, and the question that has been living in my body for longer than I can name.
The 3 Minute Thesis competition at Thompson Rivers University, March 2, 2026. Secwépemc territory. One slide. One photograph I took beside the Sea of Cortez. One question on the screen behind me:
What happens when we stop running from silence and let it teach us how to heal?
Photo: Deiveek | Thompson Rivers University Photography | 3MT, March 2, 2026
I had three minutes. I had the whole project behind me: thirty days, eighty-one blog entries, thousands of kilometres of nervous system regulation, grief held and released, stones collected, pelicans watched, tears cried into salt water. I had a methodology grounded in the body. I had a word I invented, alonetude, and the conviction that it names something real.
Three minutes to say: precarious academic labour goes beyond economics. It lives in the body. It reshapes the nervous system. It forecloses the capacity for rest. And rest, genuine rest, embodied and unhurried, is a human right under international law, a matter of human dignity.
Three minutes to say: I went to Loreto, México, for thirty days alone. I brought my research questions, my sixty-year-old body, and one orange suitcase. I stayed until the sea taught me something a desk could never have offered.
I have no distance on how it went, exactly. I was inside it. I could feel the room listening. I could feel myself steady in a way I was unsteady a year ago, or six months ago, or even four months ago when I sat alone in the casita watching the sun set over the Sea of Cortez, wondering if any of this would ever be finished.
It is finished. And it is being heard.
Alonetude: The Healing Practice of Chosen Solitude.
Three minutes. Nineteen years. Thirty days by the sea. One breath before I spoke.
Thompson Rivers University | 3 Minute Thesis | March 2, 2026 | Kamloops, BC | Secwépemc Territory
Content Warning: This post contains reflections on body shame, institutional harm, and the experience of exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
I am taking my body back from systems that treat endurance as a virtue and exhaustion as a personal flaw.
I gave years to work without limits, to teaching, care, and constant availability, to building futures while postponing my own. I called this commitment. My body called it extraction.
When my body withdrew consent, It was information, never weakness. It was a boundary where dignity begins.
Burnout is structural evidence, never individual failure.
I am taking my body back from productivity as worth, from unpaid labour dressed as passion, from the idea that rest must be earned.
This is reclamation, rather than withdrawal.
My body carries the record that policies ignore. It remembers what institutions forget.
Taking my body back is a human rights practice. The right to health. The right to rest. The right to work without erasure.
I move more slowly now. I listen longer. I stop when stopping is required.
This is alonetude. This is consent. This is a refusal.
My body is no longer extractable.
Image: When the Body Withdraws Consent
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Note. A single running shoe rests on volcanic sand, emptied of the body that once relied on it for endurance and escape. The shoe functions as an embodied artifact rather than a symbol, registering a moment of refusal. Its stillness marks the point at which movement ceased to be restorative and became extractive. In this inquiry, the object is treated as data within a Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology, documenting how prolonged institutional demands inscribe themselves onto the body and how withdrawal becomes a protective, rights-bearing response. The absence of motion here is evidence, never failure.
Shoe as Witness
I had no plan to photograph meaning. I noticed the shoe because it felt familiar.
It was worn, emptied, left behind without ceremony. No drama. No collapse staged for recognition. Just an object that had reached the end of what it could give. Standing there, I felt a quiet recognition settle in my body. This is what it looks like when consent is withdrawn.
There is vulnerability in admitting that stopping arrived beyond my choosing. For years, I believed endurance was a moral good. I learned to equate commitment with overextension, capacity with worth. That belief was reinforced daily by academic life, where staying available, absorbing uncertainty, and carrying invisible labour were treated as evidence of professionalism. When my body finally refused, I read it as failure. I had yet to understand that collapse can be a form of protection.
With some distance, perspective begins to shift. Burnout is never solitary in its emergence. It accumulates. It settles into muscle, breath, gait. What I once framed as personal weakness now appears as a predictable response to prolonged insecurity and unrelenting demand. The shoe holds this point without argument. It records stopping as fact, without apology.
The action, small as it seems, was noticing. Pausing long enough to see the shoe as more than debris. Photographing it. Allowing it to stand as data rather than decoration. This is how my research is unfolding now, through attention rather than acceleration. Objects speak when I stop trying to outrun them.
Scholarly engagement lives quietly inside this moment. Trauma-informed scholarship reminds us that the body remembers what environments require us to override. Labour research names how systems normalize depletion while individualizing its consequences. Human rights frameworks affirm the right to rest, to health, to work that requires no self-erasure. No summoning of those texts was needed while standing there. They were already present, carried in my body, waiting to be acknowledged.
This image belongs to the same counter-archive as the stones, the shadows, the painted surfaces, the early mornings by the water. Together, they document something institutions rarely record: the moment a body stops agreeing to conditions that diminish it. They track fatigue, refusal, and the slow work of recovery.
In this work, taking the body back is understood as a human rights practice.
I am no longer interested in proving resilience. I am interested in listening to what the body says when it is finally allowed to speak.
This shoe tells that story better than I ever could.
ACADEMIC LENS
The declarative act of “taking my body back” names what van der Kolk (2014) identifies as the central task of trauma recovery: re-establishing the embodied self’s sovereignty over its own experience, after prolonged periods in which institutional demands have overridden the body’s own signals of need, limit, and preference. Hochschild’s (2012) concept of emotional labour provides the structural analysis: the body was instrumentalized rather than simply used, its endurance treated as a renewable resource rather than a finite one with real costs. Nixon’s (2011) framework of slow violence names the mechanism: each individual demand seemed reasonable in isolation, while their cumulative effect constituted a sustained violation of the right to bodily integrity and rest. Menakem (2017) argues that recovery requires the intellectual understanding of harm alongside but the somatic reclamation of the body’s authority: learning to listen to, trust, and act on the body’s signals rather than overriding them in service of institutional legibility. The statement “I am taking my body back” is thus both personal and political: it refuses the institutional definition of the body as a tool for productivity and insists on its dignity as a site of knowledge, feeling, and inherent worth.
Reading Time: 4minutesPoem: They Lied, a reckoning with the stories that institutions tell about labour, worth, and endurance. A poem of grief and clarity, written from the body of someone who believed them for too long.
Reading Time: 4minutes
Content Warning: This post contains reflections on trauma, grief, and broken trust. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
Note. Thompson Rivers University, Faculty Council Award, 2025
They lied. They lied and called it mentorship. They lied and called it an opportunity. They lied and called it a calling.
They told me the academy was a sanctuary. They told me knowledge was sacred. They told me my voice mattered.
So I gave them everything.
My mornings. My nights. My body, bent over screens until my eyes burned and my hands ached. My stories, trimmed into acceptable methods. My grief, formatted into theory. My hope, footnoted into legitimacy.
They told me, Just one more course. Just one more publication. Just one more credential.
Sacrifice became the job description.
They dangled permanence like a mirage. They called precarity “experience.” They called overwork “passion.” They called exploitation “professional growth.”
They told me belonging was coming. Belonging never came.
They took my heart and turned it into service metrics. They took my mind and turned it into deliverables. They took my soul and turned it into outputs, grants, citations, and student evaluations that never saw me.
They smiled while doing it. They thanked me while extracting me. They called me resilient while grinding me down.
I am angry because they knew. They knew the system was built on unpaid labour, on feminised care work, on racialised and precarious bodies that teach, grade, counsel, and disappear.
They knew, and they kept recruiting.
They sold me the myth of the scholar as a free thinker while chaining my thinking to funding cycles, metrics, and institutional branding.
They called it education. I call it extraction.
They stole nineteen years of my life and told me I should be grateful.
They stole my weekends, my sleep, my joy, and told me I was lucky to be here.
Lucky.
No. I was useful.
But here is what remained beyond their reach:
My anger is clarity, It is the sound of a system being named.
They cannot have the part of me that walks into the sea and remembers herself. They cannot have the part of me that writes without permission. They cannot have the part of me that refuses to confuse suffering with virtue.
They stole my labour. They stole my trust. They stole my youth.
They told me I was lucky. Lucky to be underpaid. Lucky to be temporary. Lucky to be invisible until they needed my labour.
Lucky.
I was convenient. Lucky had nothing to do with it.
They knew this system runs on people who care too much. They knew women, racialised scholars, Indigenous scholars, contract faculty, and graduate students carry the weight of the institution on their backs. They knew.
And they kept recruiting us anyway.
They told me I was a scholar. Then chained my scholarship to funding cycles, productivity dashboards, and institutional branding strategies.
They told me teaching was sacred. Then reduced it to enrolment numbers and student satisfaction scores.
They told me my voice mattered. Then edited it until it fit their journals, their grants, their safe narratives.
They stole years of my life. They stole sleep, relationships, health, and creativity. They stole the wild parts of thinking and replaced them with templates.
And they had the audacity to call this a career.
I am angry because I see the architecture now. I see how the academy consumes people and calls it mentorship. I see how it extracts love and calls it professionalism. I see how it eats souls and publishes the findings.
They took my labour. They took my trust. They took my youth.
My future is mine to keep.
My anger has direction. It is a theory. It is a method. It is evidence.
It is the moment I stop confusing suffering with virtue. It is the moment I stop calling harm an opportunity. It is the moment I take my mind, my body, and my soul back from an institution that never planned to hold them.
They lied. I believed. Now I refuse.
Author’s Note
In this poem, they refer to the neoliberal academy: a system of higher education shaped by market logics, metrics-driven governance, academic capitalism, and precarious labour structures. The term names the institutional architectures and policies, and political-economic conditions that extract emotional, intellectual, and affective labour while promising belonging, security, and scholarly freedom that are rarely delivered. The poem is written as a critique of structural and symbolic violence within contemporary universities, and as a reclamation of agency, voice, and scholarly selfhood.
Above the Smoke of What They Called a Career Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Artist Statement: I took this photograph from a window seat, ascending through the smoke and cloud of everything I was leaving behind. Below me, mountains I had not chosen; above me, a sky that had no record of my service. This image sits beside the poem because both of them refuse the ground floor. The poem names the extraction. The photograph holds the moment the body finally rose above it, not arrived, not saved, but airborne. Still moving. Still here.
Translation Note: Where Spanish appears in this collection, it was assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
Keywords: alonetude, human right to rest, solitude, social justice, loneliness epidemic, scholarly personal narrative, precarious labour, embodied rest
If loneliness is a public health crisis, is the capacity for solitude a human right?
Title: Finding Space to be Alone
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
An empty chair. I kept looking at it, how different it felt from a chair that has been left, or a chair waiting for someone. This one felt like a choice.
Loneliness, Solitude, and the Philosophical Distinction
Tillich extended this distinction beyond description to practice, arguing that loneliness can only be transformed by those who learn to bear solitude. He wrote that humans seek to feel their aloneness “not in pain and horror, but with joy and courage,” and that solitude itself can be understood as a form of spiritual or existential practice (Tillich, 1963). This idea points toward contemporary understandings of solitude as an active practice of meaning-making rather than a passive state, and provides a philosophical grounding for the concept of alonetude as the labour of transforming imposed isolation into chosen presence
There is a difference between loneliness and solitude. Philosophers have known this for centuries.
Title: The Liminal Threshold
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Note. A shoreline marking the in-between space where loneliness becomes alonetude.
Paul Tillich (1963) named it simply: loneliness expresses the pain of being alone, while solitude expresses its glory. Psychologist Anthony Storr (1988) challenged the assumption that intimate relationships are the only source of human happiness, arguing that solitude ranks alongside connection in sustaining well-being. Contemporary research confirms what contemplatives long understood: loneliness arises from perceived inadequacy of connection, while solitude emerges through chosen, meaningful engagement with oneself (Perlman & Peplau, 1981; Nguyen et al., 2018).
Loneliness is inflicted; solitude is chosen. Loneliness is the pain of being alone; solitude is the peace of it. To be lonely is to desire an absent want, to feel an emptiness that remains unsatisfied. To be solitary is to retreat into oneself and find, there, good company.
This framing resonates with, yet extends, existing scholarship on solitude (Storr, 1988), relational autonomy (Mackenzie & Stoljar, 2000), and affective infrastructures of belonging (Ahmed, 2017). However, alonetude departs from romanticized accounts of solitude by foregrounding structural constraint and political economy. It insists that the capacity to be alone generatively is unevenly distributed and socially produced. This study extends Tillich’s existential framing by situating being-alone within colonial, institutional, and political-economic architectures that unevenly distribute the capacity for solitude.
Tillich’s existential theology offers an early philosophical distinction between loneliness, the suffering of being alone, and solitude, a generative form of being alone, situating solitude as an existential practice rather than a passive condition. His work frames solitude as a site of encounter, creativity, and ethical reflection, providing a conceptual genealogy for understanding being-alone as both refuge and critique. Building on this lineage, aloneness is theorized here as the labour of transforming imposed isolation into chosen presence within structurally produced conditions of separation (Tillich, 1963).
Tillich’s distinction provides a philosophical grounding for alonetude as the labour of transforming imposed isolation into chosen presence. By defining loneliness as the pain of being alone and solitude as its glory, Tillich establishes solitude as an existential achievement rather than a passive state. His framing implies that solitude must be borne, cultivated, and enacted, thereby opening conceptual space for alonetude as the intentional work of sense-making within structurally imposed aloneness. While Tillich locates this transformation within existential theology, this study extends his genealogy into political economy and human rights, conceptualising aloneness as both refuge and critique within institutional architectures that produce separation.
But what happens in between?
Alonetude: The Space Between Loneliness and Solitude
Paul Tillich (1963) drew a defining distinction between loneliness and solitude: where loneliness names the suffering of unwanted isolation, solitude describes the enriching quality that chosen aloneness can carry.
What do we call the space where loneliness has been imposed by circumstance, yet something in us begins to transform it into something generative? Where isolation, uninvited, slowly becomes a place we learn to inhabit?
I have started calling this alonetude: the liminal space between loneliness and solitude, where we do the quiet work of reclaiming our being-alone from the systems that made it a punishment.
I think of alonetude as what happens when imposed aloneness meets the refusal to disappear into it. Unlike loneliness, which is the pain of unwanted isolation, and solitude, which implies the luxury of choice, alonetude is the active labour of sense-making from within circumstances of your own choosing. It is relational. It is political. And it begins in the body.
Alonetude is the active, intentional work of sense-making within imposed aloneness.
Epidemic Loneliness and Institutional Responsibility
In May 2023, United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy declared loneliness an epidemic, issuing an 82-page advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community (Office of the Surgeon General, 2023). By November of that year, the World Health Organization had launched a Commission on Social Connection, naming loneliness a pressing global health priority requiring urgent intervention (World Health Organization, 2023). The Commission’s 2025 flagship report revealed that loneliness accounts for approximately 871,000 deaths annually, equivalent to 100 deaths per hour (World Health Organization, 2025).
We are beginning to understand that chronic loneliness carries health risks comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes daily (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010). Social isolation increases the risk of premature death by nearly thirty percent, elevates stroke risk by thirty-two percent, and raises heart disease risk by twenty-nine percent (Office of the Surgeon General, 2023).
Yet the harder question remains unasked.
If loneliness is a public health crisis, is the capacity for solitude a human right?
I think it might be. And I think the distinction matters enormously for how we understand social justice.
Belonging, Solitude, and the Politics of Human Rights
Consider who has access to solitude and who is forced into loneliness.
Image: The Privilege of Passage
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
This walkway, shaded and fragrant, made me think about who gets to walk somewhere like this. Solitude is a protected, beautiful thing that remains unavailable to everyone.
The elite retreat to cabins in the woods, meditation centres, and silent spas. They pay for the privilege of being beautifully alone. Meanwhile, the precarious are isolated by design: by shift work that fails to align with anyone else’s schedule, by housing too expensive to afford near community, by immigration policies that separate families across oceans, by institutions that count bodies yet fail to learn names.
Their aloneness is uninvited. It is inflicted.
And then I wonder why I struggle.
I write this from a bench behind an institutional building, between meetings that require presence and systems that rarely offer belonging. My solitude is partially chosen and partially imposed, shaped by precarity, digital tethering, and institutional expectations of constant availability. Alonetude becomes both a refuge and a critique, a way of surviving while refusing to normalize the conditions that make refuge necessary.
Belonging, Isolation, and Rights-Based Frameworks
Contemplative teachers have long pointed toward this transformative potential.
Pema Chödrön (2000) teaches that we must learn to befriend our loneliness rather than flee it, to sit with discomfort until it reveals what it has to teach. Wendell Berry (2012) writes that in wild places, where we are without human obligation, our inner voices become audible, and the more coherent we become within ourselves, the more fully we enter into communion with all creatures. Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) braids Indigenous wisdom with scientific attention, showing how presence to place can root us even when we have been displaced.
Viktor Frankl (1959), writing from the concentration camps, insisted that meaning could be made even in extremity, that the last human freedom is the ability to choose one’s attitude toward suffering.
Title: Learning to Be With
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Note. Paths and landscapes evoke contemplative traditions and relational presence to land. These teachers point toward alonetude as a practice of survival.
When loneliness is imposed, solitude must be cultivated. When isolation is structural, transforming it into something generative becomes an act of resistance.
I know what makes solitude impossible, because I lived it for nineteen years. The learning management system that logged when I last responded to a student. The email that arrived at 11 p.m. on a Friday with the implicit expectation of an answer before Monday. The performance review that measured visibility, presence, and throughput. These are systems that colonise the threshold between working and resting, making withdrawal feel like abandonment and stillness feel like failure. A right to solitude is, among other things, a right to be unreachable without consequence.
Should We Have to Be So Resilient?
This is what troubles me.
Should the capacity to transmute loneliness into solitude be a survival skill that the marginalized must develop because institutions refuse to stop producing isolation?
A human rights framework asks different questions.
It asks what conditions would make the choice between loneliness and solitude genuinely available, rather than asking how individuals can cope with loneliness after it has been inflicted. It asks what structures produce isolation and who benefits from that production. It asks whether belonging is offered as a right or withheld as a privilege. It asks whether the architecture of our institutions is designed to connect or to extract.
The Political Economy of Being Alone
The right to solitude would mean the right to be alone without being abandoned.
The right to withdraw without being punished.
The right to rest without being surveilled.
The right to enough economic security so that being alone carries no threat of danger.
The right to enough social infrastructure means that being with others remains possible when we want it.
These are human rights claims, even if they rarely appear in declarations. While international human rights instruments rarely articulate a right to solitude, related protections appear in rights to privacy, dignity, rest, housing, social security, and family life (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948; International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1966). A right to solitude without abandonment can be understood as an emergent synthesis of these rights, grounded in the principle that human dignity requires both connection and the capacity for withdrawal without harm.
Solitude Without Abandonment: Toward a Human Rights Framework for Alonetude
Alonetude names the in-between.
The place where we do the work of turning imposed isolation into chosen presence. It honours the agency of those who find ways to be well even when systems are designed to make them unwell.
Yet it also refuses to let those systems escape accountability.
The goal is to become so skilled at alonetude that we forget we deserve justice. The goal is a world where solitude is available to everyone, and loneliness is inflicted on no one.
Until then, we practise.
We find our benches behind old buildings. We learn the names of the birds outside our windows. We sit with what is, until it becomes bearable, and then, sometimes, beautiful.
This is survival while we work to end what makes survival necessary.
If alonetude is a human right, then its conditions are a matter of structural justice. The woman working three part-time jobs cannot lie under a spruce tree in the snow. The contract instructor whose rent depends on this semester’s enrolment cannot put her phone away. The immigrant living in a single room cannot choose solitude; it is imposed on her, severed from belonging. What I had in Loreto was thirty days that I could afford, in a body that could manage the travel, in a life that had, finally, space to be still. I am aware of that. The question alonetude asks is what would need to change for that stillness to be available to everyone, as a baseline condition rather than a luxury of a dignified life.
Alonetude is both a practice and a demand.
A way of being and a horizon of justice.
The quiet place where, alone, we remember that we deserve to be.
Title: The Quiet Place Where We Deserve to Be
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Note. Bare feet at the water’s edge, where land meets sea, mark a moment of grounded presence. The image evokes solitude as an embodied encounter rather than absence, being alone while held by place, rhythm, and movement. It gestures toward alonetude as a practice of standing with oneself at the threshold between isolation and connection, presence and belonging, survival and becoming.
Alonetude thus operates as both method and mandate: a practice of surviving within unjust architectures and a theoretical lens for imagining their transformation.
References
Berry, W. (2012). It all turns on affection: The Jefferson lecture and other essays. Counterpoint.
Chödrön, P. (2000). When things fall apart: Heart advice for difficult times. Shambhala.
Frankl, V. E. (1959). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press.
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7), Article e1000316. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
World Health Organization. (2025). From loneliness to social connection: Charting a path to healthier societies. Report of the WHO Commission on Social Connection. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/978240112360
The quiet place where, alone, we remember that we deserve to be.
Note: Tillich’s distinction between loneliness and solitude emerges from Western Christian existential theology and reflects Euro-American philosophical traditions that centre individual subjectivity and spiritual interiority. While this study draws on Tillich to establish a conceptual genealogy for being-alone, the concept of alonetude extends beyond this tradition by foregrounding colonial, institutional, and political-economic structures that differentially produce isolation. Rather than treating solitude as a universal existential condition, alonetude situates being-alone within histories of dispossession, migration, academic precarity, and governance, aligning with decolonial and relational epistemologies that understand solitude as socially and materially mediated.1
Translation note. Spanish language passages in this post were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Translations are intended to convey general meaning and are intended as guides to meaning rather than certified linguistic interpretations.
ACADEMIC LENS
This essay makes an explicitly normative claim: that the capacity for alonetude, for a positive, integrated relationship with one’s own company, constitutes a human right in the tradition of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Cacioppo and Patrick’s (2008) documentation of the loneliness epidemic, and Murthy’s (2023) designation of loneliness as a public health crisis, provide the epidemiological foundation for taking solitude seriously as a social justice concern. Tillich’s (1963) philosophical distinction between loneliness, which is suffered, and solitude, which is chosen and practised, establishes the conceptual ground on which alonetude is defined: as a third state, neither isolation nor withdrawal, but a cultivated capacity for presence-with-oneself. Nixon’s (2011) framework of slow violence is relevant here in an unexpected direction: just as environmental harm accumulates gradually on vulnerable communities, so does the chronic understimulation of the self-in-relation that hyper-connected, performative cultures impose. The right to alonetude is therefore inseparable from broader rights to rest, to interiority, and to freedom from the demand for constant availability that precarious labour conditions enforce.
Reading Time: 4minutesPoem: I Did Everything You Asked Me, a poem of exhaustion, grief, and the moment of recognizing that full compliance is not protection. Written in the voice of someone who gave everything and was given nothing back.
Reading Time: 4minutes
Content Warning: This post contains reflections on trauma, grief, and broken trust. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
I did everything you told me to do. Every checkbox. Every whispered rule was passed down like gospel.
I went back to school When I was already carrying too much, when sleep felt like a luxury, When my body kept asking for mercy And I kept answering with more work.
Seven years for a doctorate, because I was teaching ten courses a year.
Thousands of students. Hundreds of names passing through my inbox, my gradebook, and my care.
My days were never mine. They belonged to the timetable. To institutional clocks that paused for nothing: no thinking, no healing, no depth.
Morning to night, grading until my eyes burned, answering emails in the dark, hands moving long after my body asked to stop.
I learned to read exhaustion as responsibility. To mistake depletion for commitment. To call survival professionalism.
I built other people’s futures carefully, credit by credit, feedback by feedback, while mine stalled in drafts and deadlines, always almost ready, always postponed.
The work held me. The pace did.
And my body kept the record long before my CV did.
I collected debt like proof of devotion. Eighty-five thousand dollars for the right to keep chasing permanence. For the privilege of becoming more hireable. For the fantasy that if I sacrificed enough, You would finally choose me.
I published. I turned my life into citations, my grief into theory, my trauma into methods sections that made pain legible and respectable.
I presented at conferences, stood behind podiums with trembling hands, smiling through exhaustion while strangers called me “inspiring.”
I served. Committees, reviews, mentoring, equity work, invisible work, the work that keeps institutions alive and leaves women depleted.
I won awards. Teaching awards. Service awards. Letters saying I was exceptional, that I mattered, that I was indispensable.
And still, when I asked for permanence, you chose someone fresher. You chose someone younger. You chose someone who had yet to spend decades making themselves indispensable to survive.
You told me I was impressive, never quite permanent. Important never quite institutional. Valuable never quite worth keeping.
They said, Get more PD. So I did.
Publish more. So I did.
Go back to grad school. So I did.
Be visible. So I was.
Be excellent. So I burned myself into excellence.
And still, I remained temporary.
I am tired. Tired in my bones, tired in the marrow of credentials, tired of translating exhaustion into professionalism.
I am tired of being a provisional life, a renewable clause, a syllabus name that disappears.
I did everything you told me to do. And you taught me, quietly, structurally, that the rules were never designed for someone like me to win.
I did everything you told me to do. I paid with my body, mind and soul, for the privilege of believing you. I gave you nineteen years of nights, weekends, and ten courses a year on your schedule. You gave me exhaustion, and called it opportunity.
I did everything you told me to do. You kept me temporarily. And I am tired.
I did everything you told me to do. My mind earned the doctorate. My body paid the debt. And you still called me replaceable.
I did everything you told me to do. You rewarded me with precarity, debt, and silence. This is how institutions harvest women and call it mentorship.
I did everything you told me to do. It was never about excellence. It was about how long you could use me before I broke.
I did everything you told me to do. You taught me that merit is a story institutions tell to justify who they discard.
I did everything you told me to do. It was never enough, and that was the point.
Notation: This poem reflects the embodied costs of academic precarity, where institutional narratives of merit and excellence intersect with structural disposability, cumulative educational debt, and chronic overwork.
Written from the body that carried the labour, the teaching loads, the doctoral training, and the exhaustion, it critiques meritocratic promises that mask the extraction of precarious academic labour within neoliberal higher education systems.
This reflection also situates precarity as an embodied form of structural trauma that informs my doctoral research on alonetude as a healing, resistant, and relational practice, an intentional reclaiming of rest, presence, and self-worth beyond institutional validation.
In this closing, “You” refers to the academy as an institution and system, its hiring committees, evaluation metrics, productivity imperatives, and meritocratic narratives that promise stability while structurally producing precarity.
This reflection speaks back to academic systems that demand relentless credentialing, publication, service, and teaching while offering disposability in return.
It situates my embodied experience of denial, debt, overwork, and exhaustion within broader structures of neoliberal higher education, where excellence is extracted from precarious bodies.
This narrative also connects directly to my research on alonetude as a relational, decolonial, and trauma-informed practice of refusal and restoration, a way of reclaiming worth, rest, and presence beyond institutional validation.
I am enough.
Title: Always on the Outside
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker 2026
She Bought the Ticket Herself Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Artist Statement: I took this photograph somewhere over a frozen landscape, mid-flight, somewhere between the institution and whatever comes after. I am smiling. I want to remember that. Not because everything was resolved, but because the window was mine, and the seat was mine, and no one had assigned me a schedule for the next three hours. The exhaustion in this poem is real. So is this moment. Both are true. I took the picture so I would not forget that the body that carried all of that weight also eventually looked out a window and smiled.
Translation Note: Where Spanish appears in this collection, it was assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
How do I love myself when everyone else taught me to withhold it?
Title: Layered Histories
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The house remembers What no one else did.
The sharpness of screams caught in the drywall, the broomstick’s shadow stretching too long across the kitchen tile.
Glass breaking, again and again, until silence learned to brace itself.
inhale The closet lock clicked shut. hold The darkness welcomed me like routine. exhale Stillness was my only shield.
Words thrown harder than hands. Worthless. Useless. Piece of…
(I refuse to repeat them. I refuse to belong to them.)
I became so small I forgot I was still breathing. I folded myself behind chairs, beneath beds, inside my own skin.
inhale Is this love? hold Why does love feel like danger? exhale Why does kindness now make me flinch?
They taught me I was unlovable. That my body was wrong, my voice too loud, my being too much.
So tell me: How do I love myself when everyone else taught me to withhold it?
Still, I remember because my body does. Beyond revenge, returning to the girl who survived and wind in her lungs.
She breathed through fear. She whispered through fists. She lived when no one wanted her to.
She is still here. And maybe, just maybe, She is worthy of the love They never gave.
Title: Return to the Girl Who Survived
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Translation Note: Where Spanish appears in this collection, it was assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
