Day 23: Remembering How to Play

Black and White Experiments and the Serious Work of Being Silly

What surprised me was how natural all of this felt. None of it required effort, productivity, or justification. It simply required remembering that curiosity, play, and wonder were never meant to be outgrown.

What I Did Today

Today, I tried to remember what it felt like to be a child. I tried to do, without explanation or permission, the things I once imagined adulthood would allow.

When I was young, I thought being a grown-up meant freedom. I thought it meant staying up as late as I wanted, eating what I wanted, and going where I wanted. I thought adulthood was permission. I had yet to understand that adulthood, particularly adulthood shaped by precarious labour and chronic responsibility, would become its own kind of cage. I had no way of knowing that the freedoms I imagined would be traded for obligations I never explicitly agreed to.

Today, I took some of those freedoms back.

Here is what I did:

I danced with my shadow, curious about how it moved when I moved.

I ordered dessert for dinner, because pleasure requires no earning first.

I painted seashells slowly, letting colour decide where it wanted to land.

I hunted for treasure simply to practise looking.

I drew in the sand, knowing the tide would erase it and trusting that was part of the point.

My room went uncleaned, and nothing terrible happened.

I made funny poses for photographs, laughing at myself instead of correcting myself.

I experimented with black-and-white photography, noticing how light and absence speak to one another.

I snuck onto the golf course after dark to walk across the elegant bridges, feeling both brave and gentle at the same time.

And I talked to dogs, which, if I am honest, has always felt like the most sensible thing to do.

Title: Shadow Dance

Artist Statement

I photographed my shadow because shadows are honest. They perform nothing. They simply follow, stretching and shrinking with the angle of the light, revealing the body's position in space. Dancing with my shadow felt ridiculous at first. I am sixty years old. I am a scholar.

What am I doing, waving my arms at the ground? But that voice, the one that says act your age, the one that says someone might see, is the voice of a culture that has forgotten what play is for. Play researcher Stuart Brown (2009) argues that play stands opposite depression, never work. It is the opposite of depression. Play is how mammals learn, bond, and regulate their nervous systems. My shadow cares nothing about my credentials. It just wants to dance.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

The Science of Play

I want to take play seriously, which is perhaps a contradiction, but stay with me.

Play is far from frivolous. Far from a waste of time. Far from something we are supposed to outgrow as adults. Play is a biological necessity. It is wired into our nervous systems. It is how we learn, how we connect, how we heal.

Psychiatrist Stuart Brown (2009), founder of the National Institute for Play, has spent decades studying play across species. Brown argues that play is essential for brain development, emotional regulation, and social bonding. In his research with everyone from Nobel laureates to murderers, Brown found a consistent pattern: those who had been deprived of play in childhood showed significant deficits in empathy, problem-solving, and emotional resilience. Play, Brown concludes, is necessary for healthy human development and remains so throughout life.

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp (1998), who studied the neuroscience of emotion, identified play as one of the seven primary emotional systems in the mammalian brain. Panksepp discovered that rats laugh when they play, emitting ultrasonic chirps that function like human giggles. Play, Panksepp argued, is hardwired from the start, beyond learned behaviour. It emerges spontaneously when safety conditions are met.

This connects to Stephen Porges’s (2011) polyvagal theory, which I have discussed throughout this blog. Porges emphasises that play requires a sense of felt safety. The social engagement system, which enables play and connection, only comes online when the nervous system perceives safety. When we are in survival mode, when we are anxious or hypervigilant or exhausted, play becomes impossible. The body shuts down the play circuits and redirects resources toward defence.

For years, my nervous system has been in survival mode. Play has been inaccessible to me. I have been too tired, too worried, too busy bracing for the next threat. Today, doing these small, silly things, I felt something shift. My body remembered what play feels like. My nervous system, sensing the absence of threat, allowed the play circuits to come back online.

“Play is not the opposite of work. It is the opposite of depression.” (Brown, 2009, p. 126)

Black and White Experiments

Among today’s plays, the black-and-white photography stood out.

I have been photographing in colour throughout this residency, drawn to the vivid blues of the sea, the warm ochres of the desert, and the bright tiles I found in the empty field. Colour has felt like medicine, like my eyes were starved for saturation after years of grey institutional spaces.

But today I wanted to see differently. I wanted to strip away colour and notice what remained. I wanted to understand how light and shadow speak to one another when hue is removed from the conversation.

Black-and-white photography has a long history as a medium for seeing the essential. Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1952), who helped establish photography as an art form, worked almost exclusively in black and white. He spoke of the decisive moment, the instant when form, gesture, and meaning align. Black and white, Cartier-Bresson believed, revealed the bones of an image, the underlying structure that colour sometimes obscured.

Photographer Minor White (1969) wrote about photography as a contemplative practice. White encouraged photographers to approach their subjects with what he called camera vision, a state of heightened awareness in which the photographer becomes fully present to what is before them. White’s black-and-white images have a meditative quality, inviting slow looking rather than quick consumption.

Today, I tried to approach my playful subjects with a camera’s eye. I photographed my shadow, my sandy drawings, and the bridges on the golf course. I photographed without worrying about whether the images were good. I was experimenting, which is another word for playing.

Title: Witnessing

Artist Statement

I took this photograph while walking on the shore, attentive to how the ground carries memory. The pattern in the sand felt like a living diagram, a temporary archive of movement, water, and touch. The central circle drew my attention as a small void, a receptive space where something had been and where something else could form. The branching lines reminded me of roots, veins, and pathways, evoking how land and body mirror one another in their capacity to hold experience.

Including my shoes in the frame was a deliberate choice. My presence is partial, grounded, and relational rather than dominant. I stand with the land rather than over it. This image becomes a record of encounter, where my body meets the earth in a moment of pause. In trauma-informed and arts-based research, such moments matter. They mark when attention shifts from analysis to embodied witnessing.

This photograph extends my inquiry into how land teaches through traces. The sand speaks beyond words, yet offers patterns, marks, and impressions that invite interpretation. In Photovoice and Scholarly Personal Narrative, images function as prompts for reflection, memory, and relational meaning-making. Here, the land becomes both collaborator and teacher, offering a visual metaphor for connection, healing, and continuity.

I understand this image as a quiet mapping of relationality. The centre suggests a gathering place, while the lines reaching outward suggest connection across time, body, and place. Standing there, I felt both held and called outward. The photograph is an invitation to notice what remains after movement, after presence, after touch. It is a small practice of ethical witnessing, where attention becomes a form of care.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

What Play Requires

Play requires specific conditions. It cannot be forced. It cannot be scheduled. It cannot be made productive. The moment we try to instrumentalise play, to make it serve some other purpose, it stops being play.

Philosopher Johan Huizinga (1971), in his foundational work Homo Ludens (which translates to “playing human”), argued that play is a primary category of life, as fundamental as reasoning or making. Huizinga defined play as a voluntary activity that takes place within certain limits of time and space, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding. Play, Huizinga insisted, is a stepping outside of ordinary life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all its own.

This helps me understand why play has been so difficult during my years of precarious labour. Precarity erodes the conditions that play requires. When you are constantly uncertain about your employment, when you are hypervigilant about institutional politics, when your nervous system is stuck in chronic activation, you cannot step outside ordinary life. Ordinary life is too threatening. The temporary sphere of play cannot form.

Today, I had what play requires: safety, time, and permission.

Safety: no one was watching, no one was judging, no one needed anything from me.

Time: the day stretched out with nothing scheduled, nothing required, nothing pressing against its edges.

Permission: I gave myself permission to be silly, to be unproductive, to do things that served no purpose except the pleasure of doing them.

These conditions are necessities, never luxuries. And they have been systematically denied to me by the conditions of precarious academic labour.

Precarity erodes the conditions play requires. When your nervous system is stuck in chronic activation, the temporary sphere of play cannot form.

Dessert for Dinner

I want to say something about dessert for dinner, because it was such a small thing, and it felt so large.

For years, I have eaten responsibly. I have eaten in ways that fuelled productivity, that supported training, that kept my body functioning as a machine that could work and work and work. I have thought of food as fuel, as an obligation, as something to manage rather than enjoy.

Today, I went to a small restaurant by the water and ordered only dessert. Flan. A cup of coffee. Nothing else.

The waiter looked at me with mild confusion. I smiled and said, Solo postre, por favour. Just dessert, please.

It arrived: creamy, caramel-topped, beautiful. I ate it slowly, savouring each bite. The sweetness was almost overwhelming. Allowing myself sweetness without first earning it.

This is what food researcher and therapist Ellyn Satter (2007) calls eating competence: the ability to eat with joy, flexibility, and attunement to one’s own body. Eating competence is the opposite of rigid dietary rules. It involves trusting the body to know what it needs, allowing pleasure without guilt, and approaching food with curiosity rather than control.

Dessert for dinner was a small act of eating competence. It was me saying to my body: your pleasure matters. What you want matters. Sweetness requires no earning through suffering first.

Title: Dessert for Dinner

Artist Statement

I photographed my dessert to document this small rebellion. The black-and-white treatment makes it feel timeless, like a memory, like something that could have happened yesterday or decades ago. Pleasure is often the first thing we sacrifice when we are in survival mode. We tell ourselves we will enjoy things later, after the work is done and we have earned them. But later keeps receding. The work is never done. Pleasure deferred indefinitely becomes pleasure denied. This photograph says: today I held nothing back. Today I allowed myself sweetness in the middle of everything, as a statement of worth rather than reward.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

The Golf Course Bridges

After dark, I walked to the golf course at the edge of town. The gates were closed, but a gap in the fence remained. I slipped through.

This is the kind of thing I used to do as a teenager. Sneaking into places I was told were off-limits. The thrill of mild transgression. The feeling of getting away with something.

The golf course was beautiful in the dark. The grass was soft under my feet. The stars were bright overhead. And there were bridges, elegant wooden bridges crossing over water features and sand traps. During the day, these bridges are for golfers. At night, they were for me.

I walked across each bridge slowly, feeling the wood beneath my feet, looking up at the sky. I was trespassing, technically. But the trespass felt gentle, victimless. I damaged nothing. I was just walking across beautiful bridges because I wanted to.

Philosopher Michel de Certeau (1984), in his book The Practice of Everyday Life, writes about the ways ordinary people subvert the structures of power through small acts of resistance. De Certeau calls these acts tactics, as opposed to the strategies employed by those in power. Walking across the golf course bridges at night is a tactic. It is a small refusal of the rules that say certain beautiful spaces are only for certain people at certain times.

Title: Night Bridge

Artist Statement

I nearly let this photograph pass untaken, nervous about being caught. But that nervousness was part of the play. Risk, within safe limits, is part of what makes play exhilarating. Brian Sutton-Smith (1997), a leading play theorist, argues that play always involves some element of uncertainty and a negotiation between order and chaos. Walking across this bridge in the dark, I was negotiating. I was playing with boundaries. I was remembering what it felt like to be young and bold and willing to break small rules for the sake of beauty.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

The Right to Play

I want to connect today’s activities to the human rights framework that grounds this project.

Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) affirms the right to rest and leisure. Article 27 affirms the right to participate in cultural life and to enjoy the arts. These rights extend beyond children. They belong to adults, too. They are part of a group of 60-year-old women recovering from burnout. They are precarious workers denied the conditions the play requires.

Play researcher René Proyer (2017) has studied playfulness in adults and found that it correlates with psychological well-being, creativity, and life satisfaction. Playful adults, Proyer found, are flexible, curious, and resilient, free of immaturity or irresponsibility. Playfulness is something to cultivate throughout life, beyond outgrowing.

But the conditions of contemporary work make adult play difficult. The expectation of constant availability, the erosion of boundaries between work and leisure, the chronic stress of economic precarity: all of these work against the conditions that play requires. Play becomes something we schedule, something we optimise, something we do for its health benefits rather than for its own sake. And when play becomes instrumental, it stops being play.

Today, I played without instrumentalising it. I danced with my shadow because of joy, never because it would reduce my cortisol levels. I ordered dessert for dinner purely because I wanted it. I snuck onto the golf course purely for the thrill, never because trespassing builds character. I did these things because I wanted to. Because they were fun. Because my body, finally sensing safety, remembered what it felt like to play.

Playfulness is something to cultivate throughout life, beyond outgrowing.

Talking to Dogs

I should say something about talking to dogs.

This behaviour is entirely familiar to me. I have always talked to dogs. I greet them on the street. I ask them about their days. I tell them they are beautiful and good. Their owners can think what they like.

Dogs understand something that adult humans often forget. They live in the present moment. They experience joy without complication. They defer no pleasure. They earn no treats through suffering first. When a dog sees someone it loves, it refuses to pretend to be cool. It wags its entire body.

I aspire to be more like a dog.

Today, I met a small brown dog on the beach. It was digging in the sand with complete focus, searching for something only it could smell. I sat down nearby and watched. The dog glanced at me, decided I was acceptable, and returned to its digging.

“Hola, perrito,” I said. “¿Qué buscas?” Hello, little dog. What are you looking for?

The dog offered a wagging tail as answer. That was answer enough.

Animal studies scholar Donna Haraway (2008), in her book When Species Meet, writes about the relationships between humans and companion animals. Haraway argues that we become who we are through our interactions with other species. Dogs are far more than pets. They are companion species, beings with whom we share our lives and who shape us as much as we shape them.

My conversation with the beach dog was a moment of interspecies play. Neither of us needed anything from the other. We were just sharing space, sharing curiosity, sharing the pleasure of being alive on a warm evening by the sea.

Title: Playmate

Artist Statement

Dogs remain entirely unaware they are being photographed. They perform nothing. They simply are. This is what I am trying to learn from them: how to be without performing, how to experience joy without complicating it, how to greet each moment with full-body enthusiasm. The black-and-white treatment of this image strips away distractions and lets me focus on the dog's essential dog-ness: the alert ears, the curious eyes, the readiness for whatever comes next. If I could bottle what dogs have and sell it, I would be rich. But it cannot be bottled. It can only be practised, moment by moment, in the company of beings who have never forgotten how to play.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

What Play Teaches

Today taught me several things.

First: play is still available to me. I thought precarity and burnout had broken something essential, had severed my connection to joy, silliness, and spontaneity. But that connection was buried, never broken. Under exhaustion. Under obligation. Under the weight of seventeen years of chronic stress. Today, with safety, time, and permission, it emerged.

Second: play requires no expensive equipment or exotic locations. It requires only willingness. A shadow to dance with. A piece of flan. A dog to talk to. A golf course bridge to walk across in the dark. Play is available everywhere, all the time, to anyone willing to receive it.

Third: play requires no earning. This was the hardest lesson. I have been trained to believe that pleasure must be earned, that rest must be earned, that fun is a reward for productivity rather than a right of existence. Today I practiced a different logic: play first, simply because I am alive, and play is part of being alive.

Fourth: black-and-white photography is its own kind of play. Removing colour changes how I see. It invites experimentation, curiosity, willingness to fail. The images I made today are experiments, far from masterpieces. Some are blurry. Some are badly composed. All of them are evidence that I was playing, trying something new, and willing to look silly in the name of learning.

Curiosity, play, and wonder were never meant to be outgrown. They were meant to be carried forward, quietly, into a life that knows when to loosen its grip.

What Remains

The day is ending. My room remains a glorious mess. I have sand in my shoes, caramel on my shirt, and images of shadows and bridges stored on my camera.

I feel lighter than I have felt in a very long time.

Tomorrow I will likely do something responsible. I will write, or walk, or continue the quieter practices of this residency. But today I played. Today I remembered what my body knew before precarity taught it to forget. Today I was a child in a sixty-year-old body, and it was exactly right.

van der Kolk (2014) writes that trauma recovery requires the restoration of play and imagination. Processing difficult experiences through talk alone falls short. We must also rebuild our capacity for joy, for spontaneity, for uncomplicated pleasure. Play is medicine. It is as necessary for healing as rest and reflection.

Today I took my medicine. I danced, ate dessert, talked to dogs, and snuck across bridges in the dark. I experimented with my camera, laughed at my own shadow, and refused to clean my room because someone once told me that adults have to keep things tidy.

No one is grading this. No one is watching. No one needs me to justify how I spent my day.

I played. That is enough.

An Invitation

If you have forgotten how to play, I would like to extend a small invitation.

Think of something you wanted to do when you were a child, something that seemed like it would be possible when you were finally a grown-up.

Now do it.

Dance with your shadow. Order dessert for dinner. Talk to a dog. Walk across something beautiful in the dark. Make funny faces. Draw something that will be erased. Experiment with something unfamiliar.

Permission is yours already. No earning required. No justification needed.

You just need to remember that you were once a child who knew how to play, and that child is still in there, waiting for you to remember.

Hoy jugué. Hoy recordé.

Today I played. Today I remembered.

References

Adams, T. D. (2000). Light writing & life writing: Photography in autobiography. UNC Press Books.

Brown, S. (2009). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. Avery.

Cartier-Bresson, H. (1952). The decisive moment. Simon & Schuster.

de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). University of California Press.

Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. University of Minnesota Press.

Huizinga, J. (1971). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Beacon press.

Panksepp, J. (2004). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford University Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Proyer, R. T. (2017). A new structural model for the study of adult playfulness: Assessment and exploration of an understudied individual differences variable. Personality and Individual Differences, 108, 113–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.12.011

Satter, E. (2007). Eating competence: Definition and evidence for the Satter Eating Competence Model. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behaviour, 39(5), S142–S153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneb.2007.01.006

Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The ambiguity of play. Harvard University Press.

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

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

White, M. (1969). Mirrors messages manifestations. Aperture.

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.

Taking My Body Back

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 normalise depletion while individualising 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.

This photograph documents a single running shoe resting on volcanic sand. The object is encountered rather than staged. It is worn, emptied, and left behind without spectacle. As an art object, the shoe functions as a material record of endurance reached and consent withdrawn.

Within a human rights and social justice frame, this image resists dominant narratives that treat exhaustion as a personal flaw and endurance as moral virtue. The shoe refuses to dramatise collapse. It quietly records it. Its stillness marks the point where movement ceased to be restorative and became extractive. In this sense, the object carries evidentiary weight. It documents a boundary.

The shoe operates as embodied data within a Scholarly Personal Narrative and arts-based methodology. Rather than symbolising failure, it registers information. It holds the trace of years of labour performed without limits, of care and availability normalised as professionalism, of commitment rewarded through depletion. The absence of the body is refusal, never erasure.

Burnout scholarship and trauma-informed research affirm that prolonged insecurity and unrelenting demand reorganise the nervous system and settle into the body. Human rights frameworks affirm the right to health, rest, and work that requires no self-erasure. This object sits at the intersection of those literatures without needing to cite them. The knowledge is already inscribed.

As part of a counter-archive, this photograph records what institutional systems rarely acknowledge: the moment a body stops agreeing to conditions that diminish dignity. The shoe witnesses, without argument. It insists that withdrawal can be protective, that stopping can be ethical, and that reclamation can be quiet.

This is an image of consent,
of strength reclaimed.
It is an assertion that the body resists endless extraction.

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.

Day 22: The Body Remembers Its Own Abandonment

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on body abandonment, trauma, and the nervous system’s response to harm. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

Alonetude operates as far more than a personal retreat; it is a refusal of extractive temporalities that demand constant productivity.

Title: Please Honour This Boundary

Artist Statement

I stopped because the request was gentle.

The sign carries no threat. It carries no scolding. It asks. Please. It marks a boundary in soft language, inviting care rather than compliance. Behind it, the dunes rise slowly, grasses holding sand in place, doing the quiet work of restoration. Beyond that, the water moves, and the mountains remain steady, indifferent to whether I step forward or hold still.

This image brought my relationship with boundaries to the forefront. For a long time, I understood boundaries as exclusion or denial, something imposed from outside. Here, the boundary exists in service of recovery. It protects what is fragile and still becoming. It honours a process that cannot be rushed.

I stood there longer than necessary, noticing how restraint can be an act of respect. Remaining outside is a form of presence. It is participation through care. The land is witnessed without requiring my footsteps. It needs space. It needs time. It needs people willing to stop at the edge and let healing happen without interruption.

This sign speaks to a lesson I am learning in my own life. Restored spaces require protection. Emerging strength requires limits. There is dignity in stepping back when something is growing.

I took this photograph as a reminder that care often looks like a pause. That listening sometimes means remaining at the threshold. That asking permission of land, of body, of self, is a way of staying in right relationship.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The running shoes sat in the corner of my room for three weeks before I touched them. I had packed them with intention, tucked between journals and watercolours, believing that here, in this place of alonetude beside the Sea of Cortez, I might find my way back to my body. This morning, I finally laced them on.

Alonetude operates as far more than a personal retreat; it is a refusal of extractive temporalities that demand constant productivity. In this sense, solitude becomes a micro-practice of justice, reclaiming time, body, and attention from institutional regimes that normalise depletion.

The soles felt strange against my feet. Foreign. As if they belonged to someone I used to know.

Where universities track contracts, outputs, and enrolments, these artifacts track fatigue, healing, consent, and refusal.

Image: Waiting to Move

Artist Statement

These running shoes exist for return, never speed.

They have carried me through early mornings and late afternoons, through streets that asked nothing of me and paths that asked me to pay attention. They hold the imprint of repetition, of breath finding rhythm, of the body remembering that it knows how to move without explanation.

What these shoes remind me of is how care can be practical. They absorb impact quietly. They meet the ground again and again without complaint. They do the work they were made to do, and in doing so, they allow me to keep going. There is something deeply grounding in that kind of reliability.

Running, for me, has become a practice of listening rather than pushing. I notice how my feet land. I notice when my stride shortens, when my body asks for gentleness rather than distance. These shoes have learned my pace. They hold evidence of effort and rest equally.

I have spent many years moving through systems that rewarded endurance without regard for wear. These shoes offer a different lesson. Support matters. Cushioning matters. Fit matters. Progress happens when the body feels held rather than driven.

This image belongs to my ongoing inquiry into recovery, embodiment, and the ethics of care. Forward motion asks for presence over urgency. Sometimes it simply requires something steady beneath you and the willingness to take the next step.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

My body withdrew consent, choosing for me what I lacked the capacity to choose for myself.

My body withdrew consent, choosing for me what I lacked the capacity to choose for myself. After fifteen years of marathons and morning miles, it reached a threshold where endurance ceased to be virtuous and became extractive. This withdrawal can be read as a rights-bearing refusal, a somatic assertion of dignity when institutional structures failed to uphold the right to safe and secure work. Precarious academic labour extends far beyond an employment condition; it is a human rights issue. International frameworks recognise the right to decent work, rest, and health, yet contingent academic systems routinely undermine these rights through chronic insecurity, unpaid labour, and performance surveillance.

For years, running functioned as infrastructure, a way to metabolise contract uncertainty, wildfire seasons, pandemic isolation, and the quiet violence of academic self-exploitation. My body was both coping and complying. The shoes, therefore, archive institutional extraction, marking how academic capitalism extends into muscle, breath, and gait.

Title: Move

Artist Statement

I made this in layers, letting colour arrive slowly and remain where it landed. Blue first, wide and enclosing. Then darker forms that suggested land without insisting on it. Beneath that, a band of violet and indigo where things began to blur, where certainty softened into atmosphere. Nothing here was outlined. Nothing was corrected.

What this image holds for me is the feeling that comes after effort has passed. The time when the body exhales and the landscape, internal and external, returns to itself. The colours move into one another without resistance. Boundaries exist, but they are permeable. This feels true to how I am learning to live right now, allowing edges to be present without hardening them.

As I worked, my attention stayed low and steady. My aim was to respond rather than describe. I was attending to a state. The surface carries the evidence of pauses, of hands lifting and returning, of pigment settling as it chose. The darker shapes hold their place without dominating the lighter ones. They coexist, layered rather than resolved.

This piece belongs to my ongoing practice of slowing down and letting meaning emerge through accumulation rather than declaration. It reflects a trust in process and in rest, in what becomes visible when nothing is being demanded. What settles here is a condition, held open. One that feels inhabitable.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Vulnerability: A Body Returns to Motion

I stopped running last August. The word stopped implies a decision, a deliberate cessation. That framing feels too clean. What happened was more like a surrender: the moment a body simply refuses to keep pretending it has anything left to give. I chose to stop only in the sense that my body made the choice for me, and I had no capacity left to argue. I attempted to start running in October, then in November, and, well, today.

For years, running had been my anchor. Through the relentless cycles of precarious academic labour (contract after contract, never knowing if the next semester would bring employment), my morning runs held the chaos at bay. I ran through smoke seasons when Kamloops air turned orange with wildfire haze. I ran through pandemic isolation when the world contracted to screens and uncertainty. I ran through the accumulating weight of what Han (2010/2015) calls the burnout society: that particular form of exhaustion that emerges when self-exploitation becomes indistinguishable from self-improvement.

Until I could run no more.

Title: Discarded Shelter: A Small Artifact of Passage

Artist Statement

This photograph captures a worn cap resting on dry soil and creeping groundcover, an object displaced yet held by the landscape. As a personal artifact, the cap signals exposure and release, something once worn for protection, now relinquished to the elements. It functions as a micro archive of movement and passage, marking a moment where containment gives way to vulnerability.

The surrounding textures of dust, stone, and persistent vegetation speak to resilience within aridity. These materials carry their own histories of endurance and adaptation. Placed together, they form a quiet record of how presence fades without disappearing entirely.

Positioned at the threshold between human trace and ecological continuity, the cap holds tension between what is left behind and what endures. As with other artifacts in this inquiry, the object functions as embodied data. It documents departure, rest, and the ethics of letting go through material evidence rather than narrative explanation.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Running on Empty

The language of “stopping” is too orderly for what actually happened. It suggests a managerial decision, a tidy life choice, a rational pivot. Bodies rarely follow rational life plans, and exhaustion rarely arrives that way. What happened was more like surrender: the moment when a body simply refuses to continue performing a capacity it no longer possesses.

For fifteen years, running was far more than a hobby. It was infrastructure. It was how I metabolised stress, uncertainty, grief, ambition, and institutional precarity. I ran through contract cycles, through wildfire smoke, through pandemic isolation, through the quiet violence of academic self-exploitation. Running functioned as a regulator, a refuge, and an identity. It was both a coping mechanism and a performance of resilience.

That framing feels too clean, almost managerial. What happened was more like a surrender: the moment a body simply refuses to keep pretending it has anything left to give. I chose to stop only in the sense that my body made the choice for me, and I had no capacity left to argue.

Running has been a huge part of my life. It structured my mornings and offered a sense of coherence in a life shaped by academic precarity, seasonal contracts, and the constant uncertainty of whether the next semester would bring work. I ran through wildfire seasons when Kamloops air turned orange and thick with ash. I ran through pandemic isolation when the world contracted to screens and anxiety. I ran through the accumulation of what Han (2010/2015) describes as the burnout society, where self-exploitation becomes indistinguishable from self-care, and productivity masquerades as virtue.

My body withdrew consent.

Title: Vulnerability: A Body Returns to Motion

Artist Statement

This photograph depicts a single running shoe resting on volcanic sand, functioning as a quiet ethnographic artifact. It holds the quiet rather than staging crisis or spectacle. Instead, it holds the ordinary materiality of stopping.

The shoe operates as an extension of the body, a prosthetic of movement shaped by repetition, impact, and endurance. Set down on the ground, it marks a pause rather than a failure. It bears witness to exhaustion as an embodied state and to the moment when motion, once necessary for survival, is interrupted.

What emerges here is a material trace of rupture in an identity long organised around forward movement. The shoe records effort without explanation. It carries the imprint of kilometres travelled and the weight of what it has absorbed. In resting, it shifts function from propulsion to evidence.

As with other artifacts in this inquiry, the object functions as embodied data. It documents the ethics of stopping, the legitimacy of rest, and the quiet knowledge held by materials once devoted to endurance.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

In qualitative terms, this image functions as data. It documents a threshold moment in which the body asserted its limits against institutional, psychological, and cultural demands. The shoe, half-buried, speaks to sedimentation, the layering of fatigue, trauma, ambition, and discipline that eventually accumulates into refusal. In this sense, stopping is a form of information rather than failure.

There is vulnerability in this artifact, but also a possibility. The shoe holds both cessation and return. It sits on the edge of movement, implying that motion may re-emerge on different terms. Returning to running now feels less like reclaiming a former self and more like negotiating a new relationship with embodiment, one that privileges consent, slowness, and care over endurance and performance.

If loneliness is the pain of being alone, solitude is its glory. Similarly, if exhaustion is the pain of productivity, rest may be its quiet counterpart. The body’s refusal becomes a form of wisdom, a boundary that resists the neoliberal logic of infinite capacity.

Title: Shadow at the Threshold

Artist Statement

This image records my shadow elongated across water and shore, a body doubled by reflection and light. I am present twice here and fully in neither place. The shadow stretches into the lake while my feet remain on land, marking a quiet division between where the body stands and where the self extends.

What this moment holds for me is a sense of suspension. The water is still enough to reflect sky and mountain, yet shallow enough to reveal the ground beneath. The shadow moves across both states at once. It belongs to surface and depth simultaneously. I held still. I resisted pulling back. I stayed exactly where I was and let the image form around that decision.

The length of the shadow speaks to timing rather than identity. It records the angle of the sun, the hour of the day, the season of light. My form is stretched thin by circumstance, shaped by forces beyond my control. This feels honest. It mirrors a period in my life where identity is extended, reworked, and softened by context rather than fixed by definition.

As visual data, the photograph captures an embodied moment of orientation. The shoreline becomes a site where body, environment, and time co-produce meaning. The self appears as trace rather than subject, relational and temporary. The shadow is evidence of presence. It is evidence of standing still long enough to be shaped by what surrounds me.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The shadow also gestures toward institutional surveillance, in which the academic self is often experienced as an object observed and measured rather than as a sovereign subject. Such surveillance practices implicate academic freedom and the right to dignity at work, where bodies become sites of audit and governance rather than care.

This section demonstrates vulnerability as epistemic data, revealing how institutional precarity inscribes itself on the nervous system and how embodied refusal constitutes knowledge.

Scholarly Engagement: The Archive of Exhaustion

Understanding what happens when a body collapses from prolonged occupational stress requires theoretical frameworks that honour embodied knowledge. Polyvagal Theory, developed by Stephen Porges (2011), offers essential language for what I experienced. Porges describes three distinct states of the autonomic nervous system: the ventral vagal state (social engagement, safety, connection), the sympathetic state (fight-or-flight, mobilization), and the dorsal vagal state (shutdown, collapse, conservation).

Title: Learning to Shuffle: Safety as Relational Practice

Artist Statement

This photo centres on a warning sign for manta rays that instructs walkers to shuffle their feet as they enter the sea. The directive is practical, grounded in ecological care and mutual vulnerability. Shuffling helps alert manta rays to human presence, reducing the risk of harm to both. Yet the instruction also operates symbolically, asking the human body to slow down, to signal itself, and to move with awareness rather than entitlement.

What interests me here is how movement becomes ethical practice. The body is asked to alter its habitual patterns in recognition of another being’s habitat and dignity. Shuffling becomes a pedagogy of relational care, a way of learning through the feet that the shoreline is shared space. This is an ecosystem beyond empty leisure where human and more-than-human lives intersect continuously.

The manta ray remains unseen beneath the surface, yet it is central to the instruction. Its invisibility matters. Ethical movement depends on attention to what cannot always be perceived directly. The sign makes visible an obligation to those who are present without being immediately legible, reminding the walker that care often begins before encounter.

As visual data, this artifact extends my inquiry into alonetude and embodied ethics. Movement here is framed neither as conquest nor extraction, but as negotiated presence. The directive to shuffle offers a quiet counterpoint to productivity culture. Slow down. Sense the ground. Acknowledge others. Move in ways that minimise harm. In this sense, the sign functions as both ecological instruction and philosophical metaphor for ethical being-in-place.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The sign offers a counter-epistemology to academic capitalism: a movement guided by relational accountability rather than speed, competition, and extraction.

For years, my nervous system oscillated between sympathetic activation and desperate attempts to reach ventral vagal safety. The constant hypervigilance of precarious employment (Will there be a contract next term? Am I performing well enough to be renewed? What happens if I speak too honestly about institutional failures?) kept my body in a state Porges calls neuroception of chronic threat. My nervous system read danger everywhere, even when my conscious mind insisted everything was fine.

By August, my body had shifted into dorsal vagal shutdown. This is the state of last resort: what happens when fight-or-flight fails, when mobilization depletes beyond recovery. The system conserves by collapsing. Energy withdraws. Movement becomes effortful. The world flattens into grey.

Running became impossible because running requires mobilization energy. When the tank is truly empty, even self-care becomes another demand the body simply cannot meet.

Table 1

Polyvagal States and Physical Activity: A Personal Cartography

Movement ceases; body refuses mobilisation; exhaustion is pervasive	Physical Activity Capacity	Workplace Conditions	Somatic Markers
Movement ceases; body refuses mobilization; exhaustion is pervasive	Full capacity; movement feels enjoyable and restorative	Secure employment; collegial support; clear expectations	Relaxed jaw; deep breathing; warm hands; open posture
Sympathetic (Mobilisation/Fight-Flight)	Running becomes escape; high intensity masking anxiety	Contract uncertainty; performance surveillance; workload intensification	Clenched jaw; shallow breathing; cold extremities; muscle tension
Dorsal Vagal (Shutdown/Collapse)	Movement ceases; body refuses mobilisation; exhaustion pervasive	Termination or nonrenewal; institutional betrayal; cumulative harm	Flattened affect; leaden fatigue; dissociation; slowed digestion
Emerging Ventral (Day 21, Loreto)	Tentative return; fifteen minutes of gentle running; body-led pacing	Aloneness retreat; absence of institutional demands; environmental safety cues	Tentative return; gentle movement; body-led pacing; renewed energy Alonetude retreat; environmental safety cues; absence of institutional demand Softened posture; deeper breath; emotional release; felt safety

Note. This table integrates Porges’s (2011) Polyvagal Theory with personal experience during the transition from occupational burnout to healing retreat. The nervous system states are mapped to physical activity capacity, workplace conditions, and somatic markers, as documented over the research period. Adapted for SPN methodology where lived experience constitutes primary data.

Perspective: This Morning’s Run

I walked to the waterfront before dawn. The air held that particular softness that exists only in the hours before the desert sun asserts its dominance. My body felt tentative, as if asking permission to inhabit space differently than it has for months.

Image Before the Sun

Artist Statement

The pre-dawn hour offers what Porges (2011) describes as environmental safety cues: low stimulation, softened light, and the absence of social demand. This temporal threshold between night and day mirrors a physiological transition, as the body begins to move from dorsal vagal shutdown toward ventral vagal engagement.

In this moment, the environment participates actively in regulation. Still water reflects rather than interrupts. Sound is muted. Movement is minimal. Nothing asks for response. The scene supports a gradual return to relational capacity without forcing alertness or productivity. Safety is communicated through quiet continuity rather than reassurance.

What draws my attention here is how regulation emerges through context rather than effort. The body requires no instruction to calm itself. It responds to cues offered by light, temperature, and space. The landscape becomes co-regulator, holding the nervous system in a state of readiness without demand.

As visual data, this image documents a condition of becoming. The water gestures toward possibility rather than outcome. Regulation is present as potential rather than performance. This pre-dawn interval holds the ethics of alonetude, a chosen presence that allows the body to re-enter connection on its own terms.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The Pace of Care

I began slowly. Pace itself became a form of care. My feet found rhythm on the packed sand near the water’s edge, where the surface offered just enough cushion to absorb impact.

For the first few minutes, my body resisted. Muscles complained. The lungs protested the unfamiliar demand for deeper oxygen exchange. This is what Levine (1997) describes in Waking the Tiger: the body’s natural protective response to resuming activities associated with periods of distress. My nervous system remembered that running used to accompany exhaustion, anxiety, and the desperate attempt to outpace institutional harm.

I kept moving anyway. I let the complaints arise without trying to silence them. I noticed the tightness in my shoulders, the guarding in my jaw, the way my breath wanted to stay shallow.

Title: Sands of Time

Artist Statement

Faint footprints along the shoreline mark movement, presence, and impermanence. They are somatic traces of a body in motion, briefly impressed into wet sand and already in the process of being taken back by the tide. The marks exist within a narrow window of visibility, held only until water returns.

What this image holds for me is the relationship between embodiment and erasure. Presence here is real, yet provisional. The body leaves evidence, but it releases any insistence on permanence. The shoreline registers contact and then releases it, responding through its own rhythm rather than human intention.

The tide functions as collaborator rather than force. It participates in making and unmaking the trace, reminding me that movement always occurs within relational systems. No step exists in isolation. Each imprint is shaped by timing, pressure, moisture, and return.

As visual data, the photograph documents how presence is enacted and dissolved through the shared rhythms of body and sea. The footprints carry no intention of enduring. They mark a moment of passage, offering a quiet lesson in how to move through the world while allowing what follows to take its course.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The Shift

And then something shifted.

Porges (2011) describes this shift as the nervous system receiving cues of safety from the environment. The rhythm of waves. The cool air on my skin. The absence of screens, notifications, and institutional surveillance. The steadiness of my own footfalls established a new relationship with this body, this moment, this place.

My shoulders dropped. My jaw softened. My breath deepened of its own accord, without instruction or force. The ventral vagal state, that place of safety and connection, emerged. For the first time in months, I felt my body organising itself around presence rather than threat.

Here I am.

Theory: Bodies as Archives of Structural Harm

The exhaustion that brought my running practice to a halt was never merely personal. Academic capitalism, the systematic transformation of higher education into a market-driven enterprise prioritising revenue generation, productivity metrics, and competitive positioning (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), creates bodies like mine with systematic precision. The precarious labour conditions that define contemporary university employment produce specific physiological consequences: chronic stress activation, disrupted sleep architecture, inflammatory cascades, and metabolic dysregulation.

Al Serhan and Houjeir (2020) found significant correlations between the intensification of academic capitalism and faculty burnout, documenting how market-driven educational environments create unsustainable demands that erode well-being and professional capacity. Their research validates what my body already knew: this exhaustion is structural, produced by systems designed to extract maximum labour from minimally compensated workers.

Precarious academic labour extends beyond a labour-market condition; it is also a human rights concern. These rights are articulated in Article 7 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (United Nations, 1966), which affirms the right to just and favourable conditions of work, including rest and reasonable limitation of working hours.

The right to decent work, security of employment, and safe working conditions is recognised in international human rights frameworks, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. My body’s collapse thus reflects more than personal vulnerability; it indexes institutional arrangements that systematically violate the right to dignified, secure, and health-sustaining work.

My body’s collapse is thus beyond the simply anecdotal; it is indicative of systemic rights erosion in contemporary higher education.

Title: Strata of the Third Shore: Sea as Memory, Land as Archive

Artist Statement

This painted stone renders the sea as layered strata, with bands of blue, rust, green, and sand-toned pigment evoking shoreline, sediment, and water in dialogue. The rock functions as both canvas and collaborator, carrying its own geological history while receiving contemporary marks of experience. In this sense, the piece becomes a micro archive where land and memory meet.

The horizontal bands suggest temporal and emotional layers. Surface calm gives way to deeper currents, sedimented grief, and emergent healing. The luminous blue at the base gestures toward movement and continuity, while warmer earth tones recall land-based memory and embodied history. The stone resists smoothness, insisting on texture and unevenness. This resistance mirrors the non linear nature of recovery and becoming.

As an arts-based research artifact, this work operates as multimodal data within Scholarly Personal Narrative and humanities inquiry. Painting the sea onto land material enacts a relational methodology in which body, pigment, stone, and place co-produce knowledge. The object becomes a tactile record of alonetude, presence, and the ethics of witnessing landscape as teacher.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The Labour That Depletes

Hochschild (1983) named this phenomenon emotional labour, the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display. For contingent academics, emotional labour extends beyond classroom performance to include the constant performance of enthusiasm, the manufactured gratitude for unstable employment, and the suppression of legitimate grievances. This labour is invisible, uncompensated, and ultimately depleting.

My body stopped running because it had nothing left. The collapse was honest. The collapse was necessary.

Title: Bleached Architecture: Coral as Witness and Afterlife

Artist Statement

A bleached coral fragment rests on volcanic sand, marking presence, loss, and ecological time. Its porous structure carries traces of former life, openings where relation once flowed. The surface records exposure. What remains is delicate, weight-bearing, and altered by conditions beyond its control.

This fragment brings my attention to fragility as a shared condition. Coral lives through interdependence, relying on temperature, chemistry, and rhythm held in balance. When that balance shifts, the body changes. What appears inert is, in fact, a record of relation strained beyond capacity.

Encountering this piece, I felt my own exhaustion placed within a wider field of precarity. The fragment situates bodily depletion alongside ecological harm, linking labour extraction and environmental degradation as intersecting justice concerns. Both operate through systems that normalise overuse, accelerate demand, and treat depletion as acceptable cost.

Here, coral functions as ecological witness and material archive. It indexes how patterns of strain reverberate across bodies, institutions, and environments, leaving evidence that is quiet yet enduring. The fragment holds no accusation. It remains. In doing so, it asks for attention, care, and a recalibration of how value, labour, and life are held.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Table 2

Theoretical Integration: Physical Activity Cessation and Return

Theoretical Framework	Key Concept	Application to Day 21 Experience
Alonetude (Author Framework) Chosen solitude as relational and ethical practice Removal of performance gaze enables embodied truth-telling and healing	Neuroception: the body’s unconscious detection of safety or threat through environmental cues	Management of feeling to create a publicly observable display; invisible labour that depletes
Somatic Trauma Theory (van der Kolk, 2014)	The body keeps the score: trauma is stored somatically and must be addressed through body-based approaches	Movement becomes both evidence of stored harm (initial resistance) and pathway to healing (emerging ease)
Movement becomes both evidence of stored harm (initial resistance) and a pathway to healing (emerging ease)	Self-exploitation through achievement discourse; exhaustion as structural outcome of neoliberal subjectivity	Previous running was self-exploitation; current running is reclamation, movement without achievement metrics
Emotional Labour (Hochschild, 1983)	Management of feeling to create publicly observable display; invisible labour that depletes	Alonetude eliminates audience for performance; body can express authentic states without management
Academic Capitalism (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004)	Alonetude eliminates the audience for performance; the body can express authentic states without management	Exhaustion is structural, produced by systems; individual recovery must be understood within systemic critique
Trauma-Informed Movement (Levine, 1997)	Healing requires completing interrupted defensive responses; movement releases trapped survival energy	Body-led pacing allows completion of protective responses; running becomes discharge rather than demand

Note. This table synthesises trauma theory, organizational psychology, and embodiment scholarship to contextualise the cessation and resumption of physical activity following occupational burnout. Sources verified through institutional databases. Framework aligned with Nash’s (2004) SPN requirement that personal narrative engage substantively with scholarly literature.

Action: Movement as Reclamation

I ran for perhaps fifteen minutes this morning. By any previous standard of mine (when I could cover ten kilometres before breakfast, when running was discipline and distance and doing), fifteen minutes would have felt inadequate. A failure.

This morning, those fifteen minutes felt like a revolution.

Title: Daybreak at the Cliff

Artist Statement

Pelicans rest on volcanic rock as dawn light opens the horizon, holding stillness, tide, and geological time in quiet relation. The birds are present without urgency, bodies folded into rest as the ocean continues its steady rhythm. The rock beneath them carries a deeper temporality, shaped by forces that long predate both tide and wing.

What this scene brings into focus is co-presence across scales. Avian life, ocean movement, and volcanic strata occupy the same frame without hierarchy. Dawn holds each rhythm without favouring one over another. It simply reveals them together. The pelicans remain part of the landscape rather than interrupting it. They belong to it, momentarily aligned with processes that exceed any single lifespan.

The image situates time as layered rather than linear. The immediate softness of morning light sits alongside the slow pulse of the sea and the vast duration held in stone. This convergence invites attention to continuity rather than event, to relationship rather than action.

As visual data, the photograph documents a moment where species, elements, and temporalities meet without demand. It foregrounds an ethics of shared presence, reminding me that rest, movement, and endurance can coexist within the same horizon, each holding space for the others.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

With the Body, In Relationship

The difference lies in how I returned. Previously, my running was extraction, demanding performance from a body that had already given everything. The running that happened this morning was related. I moved with my body rather than at it.

Sunderland et al. (2022) describe how trauma-informed movement practices differ fundamentally from conventional exercise frameworks. Rather than imposing external goals on the body, trauma-informed movement invites the body to lead, to set pace, to determine duration, to signal completion. The practitioner’s role shifts from taskmaster to listener.

This morning, I listened. When my body asked to slow down, I slowed down. When it wanted to stop and watch pelicans dive for fish, I stopped. When it asked to walk the final stretch, I walked. Each choice was a conversation rather than a command.

Title: The Pause That Teaches

Artist Statement

The pelicans offered an unplanned lesson in embodied presence. Their hunting unfolds through complete attentiveness to the moment. Hovering. Assessing. Committing fully to the dive. There is no excess movement, no rehearsal. Each action arises from readiness rather than force.

Watching them, I felt my own body slow. The run paused without ending. Breath settled. Attention sharpened. The act of observing became a parallel practice, one that allowed stillness to exist inside motion rather than in opposition to it. The pelicans approached the water without rushing. They waited until the moment was right, and then they moved without hesitation.

This experience reframed how I understand interruption. Within trauma-informed movement, pauses are often misread as failure or loss of discipline. Here, the pause functioned as information. It carried data about safety, timing, and attunement. The body knew when to stop watching and when to move again.

As visual and somatic data, this moment documents a shift in relationship to movement. Attention becomes a form of care. Stillness becomes part of momentum. The pelicans model a way of being that honours precision over speed and presence over persistence, offering permission to pause without abandoning forward motion.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Without Witnesses

Alonetude made this possible. In solitude, there is no audience for performance. No fitness tracker is demanding improvement. No institutional gaze measuring productivity. There is only the body, the breath, the sea, the slowly brightening sky.

Without witnesses, the body can tell the truth.

Title: Step into the Tide

Artist Statement

A bare foot meets the shoreline, marking contact, return, and the body’s quiet consent to re-enter the sea. The gesture is small, almost unremarkable, yet it carries weight. Skin touches water without armour or urgency. The body chooses proximity rather than distance.

What this moment holds for me is the ethics of consent in movement. The foot pauses before fully entering, allowing sensation to arrive first. Temperature, texture, resistance. The sea is met slowly, on equal terms. This is a return that requires no immersion. It honours readiness.

The shoreline becomes a threshold where the body negotiates trust. Years of holding tension and bracing against impact have taught my body to hesitate. Here, hesitation is attentiveness. It is listening. The foot lowers when the nervous system agrees. Contact becomes collaboration rather than conquest.

As visual data, this image documents an embodied decision point. Re-entry is framed as relational, shaped by timing, sensation, and choice. The body resists rushing to belong. It waits until belonging feels possible.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Reflection: What the Body Knows

van der Kolk (2014) writes that the body keeps the score, that our tissues, organs, and nervous systems hold the memory of what we have survived. If this is true, then my body has been keeping meticulous records of twenty-five years of precarious labour. The chronic tension. The interrupted sleep. The constant calibration of self-presentation to meet institutional expectations. The grief of contracts that ended, relationships that frayed under unsustainable demands, and dreams deferred and deferred again.

Yet if the body keeps the score of harm, perhaps it can also keep the score of healing. Perhaps these fifteen minutes by the sea, this small, trembling, imperfect return to movement, registers in my tissues as evidence that safety is possible. That rest can be trusted. That the body, given sufficient care and time and solitude, remembers how to feel alive.

Little by Little

This is what alonetude offers: the space to let the body lead. To stop performing wellness and actually experience it. To run slowly along a shoreline at dawn, asking nothing of the moment except presence, and to feel something inside slowly, tentatively, begin to heal.

Little by little, the body finds its way back.

Image: Shadow Self

Artist Statement

This image captures my self-shadow at the water’s edge, marking a liminal encounter between body and sea, presence and erasure. Rendered only as a silhouette, the figure allows for self-observation without the self-consciousness of direct gaze. The body appears indirectly, shaped by light rather than asserted through form.

The advancing foam operates as both boundary and invitation. It traces a shifting line where land, body, and ocean negotiate contact. In this moment, the tide functions as a temporal and relational force, advancing and retreating without urgency. I stand at the threshold, neither immersed nor withdrawn, embodying what I understand as alonetude, a chosen presence within a larger ecological field.

The shadow stretches and softens across wet sand, signalling a body in transition. It reflects a state that has moved beyond contraction and exhaustion, yet is still reassembling itself into certainty. The image holds that in-between condition with care.

As visual data, this photograph documents an embodied epistemic moment. The shoreline becomes a research site where identity, nervous system state, and environment co-produce experience. The self emerges here as relational rather than fixed, a silhouette shaped by water, light, and ground rather than by narrative or performance.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Visual Element

Title: Watercolour Study: The Return to Movement

Artist Statement

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Closing the Day

Tonight, as the sun sets over the Sierra de la Giganta, I feel the pleasant ache of muscles reawakening. It is a different ache than the chronic tension I carried for months. This one speaks of use rather than depletion, of a body asked to participate in its own life rather than merely endure.

Tomorrow I may run again or walk. Or I may simply sit by the water and breathe. The point is no longer the activity itself but the relationship, the ongoing conversation between intention and capacity, between what the mind desires and what the body can sustain.

The body knows. And finally, I am learning to listen.

Title: Day’s End

Artist Statement

Carmen emerges as a dark silhouette across the Sea of Cortez, anchoring the horizon and holding the quiet of distance, water, and sky. The landmass withholds assertion through detail or texture. It remains intact through outline alone, a steady presence shaped by light rather than proximity.

What this image offers me is a sense of orientation without demand. Carmen holds the horizon gently, giving the eye a place to rest while allowing the surrounding space to remain open. Water and sky expand around it, and time seems to slow in response. The distance matters. It preserves separation while sustaining relationship.

As visual data, the silhouette functions as a stabilising reference point within a wide field of stillness. It reflects how grounding can occur without closeness, how connection can be maintained through recognition rather than arrival. Carmen remains where it is, and that is enough to hold the scene together.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Methodological Reflection: SPN as Healing Practice

I understand Scholarly Personal Narrative as both a method and a practice. Nash and Bradley (2011) describe SPN as a way of transforming lived experience into scholarly knowledge through theory-informed reflection and an honest engagement with vulnerability. In writing this entry, This entry reaches beyond reporting on experience; it inhabits the methodology. My morning run becomes data. The subtle shift in my nervous system becomes evident. My body’s responses become a legitimate site of knowledge production.

The VPAS framework helps me organise this inquiry. Vulnerability appears in my account of collapse, in the moment my body withdrew consent to continue running. Perspective emerges as I trace the movement from depletion toward tentative return, noticing how hope arrives quietly, almost imperceptibly. Action is present in the fifteen minutes of running, but also in the choices to slow down, to stop, to breathe, and to listen. Scholarly engagement threads through this narrative as I situate my embodied experience within Polyvagal Theory, trauma scholarship, and critiques of academic capitalism.

I extend Scholarly Personal Narrative through multimodal, artifact-based inquiry. The shoes, stones, shadows, and watercolours serve as more than decoration. They are co-researchers. They hold memory, affect, and institutional inscription. By treating these objects as data, I am expanding what counts as evidence in organizational, educational, and human rights research. Framing embodied exhaustion as a human rights issue allows me to move beyond personal narrative and into structural critique, linking my body to policy, labour conditions, and institutional design.

I no longer understand chronic dorsal vagal shutdown as a personal pathology. I understand it as an institutional outcome. My nervous system collapsed beyond isolationtion. It was shaped by contingent contracts, constant performance evaluation, and the quiet pressure to be endlessly available. In this sense, my body becomes diagnostic. It registers what policy documents and strategic plans cannot: the physiological cost of precarious academic labour.

Alonetude has become a methodological condition for this work. In solitude, I hear my body more clearly. Without students, emails, metrics, or surveillance, my body speaks in sensation, breath, and fatigue. Here, data emerges somatically rather than performatively. I am practising scholarship from the inside out, allowing embodiment to guide analysis rather than treating it as an object to be analysed.

Learning to listen to my body feels both intimate and political. It is a healing practice and also a refusal. It interrupts the logic of extraction that shaped my academic life. It challenges the primacy of productivity as a measure of worth. It insists that limits are forms of knowledge, but forms of knowledge and ethical boundaries.

I believe that if higher education institutions are serious about equity, inclusion, and well-being, they must confront the embodied consequences of precarious labour. Secure employment, reasonable workloads, and psychological safety are human rights obligations rather than luxuriesgations. Without structural change, universities will continue to produce bodies calibrated for collapse and then misrecognise that collapse as individual weakness rather than as a failure of institutional design.

Writing this section is therefore both research and resistance. It is an act of counter-archiving, inserting the body back into institutional memory and insisting that embodied experience counts as knowledge.

References

Al Serhan, O., & Houjeir, R. (2020). Academic capitalism and faculty burnout: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates. Cypriot Journal of Educational Sciences, 15(5), 1368–1393. https://doi.org/10.18844/cjes.v15i5.5350

Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press.

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

International Labour Organization. (1999). Decent work. International Labour Office. https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/decent-work/lang–en/index.htm

Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.

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

Nash, R. J., & Bradley, D. L. (2011). Me-search and re-search: A guide for writing scholarly personal narrative manuscripts. Information Age Publishing.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Sunderland, N., Graham, P., & Lorenz, D. (2022). Trauma-informed dance/movement therapy: Considerations for practice. In S. L. Brooke & C. E. Myers (Eds.), The use of creative arts therapies in trauma and recovery (pp. 15–32). Charles C Thomas Publisher.

United Nations. (1966). International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. United Nations Treaty Series, 993, 3.

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

Writing this section is itself an act of counter-archive. The academy often records productivity metrics while erasing bodily cost. This narrative inserts the body back into institutional memory, challenging what counts as legitimate knowledge.

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.

Day 21: The End of Escape: I am Tired

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

I kept my discipline. I shed my need to escape.

Disruption as Data

Loreto has changed the way I read, though it would be more accurate to say that it has revealed the function reading has played in my life. For most of my adulthood, reading structured my days and anchored periods of transition. Books offered coherence during times of professional intensity and emotional uncertainty. Reading felt nourishing and intellectually generative, and it was. Yet its sudden absence created a rupture that demanded attention.

The absence of reading revealed a movement toward presence.

Since arriving in Loreto, I noticed that I had barely read at all. I continued to listen to podcasts, but the habitual reaching for books had quieted. When I eventually opened Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the disruption became analytically meaningful. In qualitative terms, this pause became data. It signalled a shift in how I was regulating attention, emotion, and solitude. The absence of reading revealed a movement toward presence rather than any loss of discipline.

The disruption became data.

Image: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Cover image sourced from Amazon for reference purposes.

Note. This image is a commercially available book cover sourced from Amazon and is included for contextual reference only. It is ancillary visual data, neither generated by the author nor analysed as part of the visual inquiry. The image is used to situate the reflective narrative in relation to Csikszentmihalyi’s work on attention, engagement, and presence.

Why Flow: Attention, Choice, and the Ethics of Engagement

I am no longer interested in productivity for its own sake.

I chose to read Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience at this moment because I am no longer interested in productivity for its own sake. After years of equating movement with meaning and busyness with worth, I wanted to return to a text that speaks directly to the quality of attention rather than the quantity of output. Csikszentmihalyi’s work has long been associated with peak performance and optimal functioning, but what drew me back to it now was a quieter question: what does it mean to be fully engaged without being consumed?

My relationship to flow has shifted over time. Earlier in my career, I understood flow primarily through achievement, moments of intense focus that accompanied teaching, writing, training, or creative production. These states felt generative and affirming, particularly within institutional cultures that reward visible engagement and constant contribution. Yet, in hindsight, I can see how easily flow was absorbed into the broader machinery of busyness. What began as deep engagement sometimes became another way to justify overextension, another reason to remain in motion.

Reading Flow in the context of alonetude invites a different interpretation. Csikszentmihalyi emphasises that flow emerges when attention is voluntarily invested, when action is chosen rather than compelled, and when the self holds together rather than fragmenting under competing demands. This distinction matters. In Loreto, where external pressures have softened, I am learning to distinguish between immersive engagement and compulsive activity. Flow, in this sense, is no longer about intensity or output, but about alignment.

Flow, for me, is no longer about intensity or output, but alignment.

What I hope to learn from this book now is how to discern, rather than how to do more, and when engagement becomes avoidance. Csikszentmihalyi writes about cultivating inner order, the capacity to shape consciousness intentionally rather than reactively. This resonates deeply with my current inquiry. Alonetude has stripped away many of the external structures that once organised my time, leaving me face to face with my own patterns of attention. Flow offers a language for examining whether my engagement with work, creativity, and even rest arises from choice or from habit.

I am also drawn to the ethical implications of flow. In academic and professional cultures that normalise exhaustion, the language of optimal experience can easily be co-opted to sustain overwork. Reading Flow now, I am holding the text in tension with critiques of productivity and speed. I am less interested in flow as a performance enhancer and more interested in flow as a form of presence requiring no self-erasure.

Ultimately, I chose this book because it asks a question that aligns with the heart of alonetude: how do we live in ways that are attentive, meaningful, and self-directed, without needing to escape ourselves in the process? What I hope to learn is how to engage more sustainably rather than simply returning to my former pace, and how to engage deeply while staying grounded enough to stop.

Reading as Regulated Escape

Image: Travelling Library

Note. These books are no longer a task list. They sit here as companions rather than demands, reminding me that learning can be slow, embodied, and unfinished. Alonetude is teaching me that I need no compulsion to consume knowledge to remain in conversation with it.

These books arrived together through design. Each one has marked a different moment in my learning: how to think, how to feel, how to move, how to rest, how to heal, how to listen to the body, how to trust experience, how to let meaning emerge rather than be forced. For years, reading was another form of striving, a way to stay productive even in moments meant for rest. Now, this small library feels less like a syllabus and more like a permission structure. I read some of these texts slowly. Some I return to. Some I simply keep close, beyond answers, for companionship. Alonetude is teaching me that learning rarely moves forward in a straight line. Sometimes it gathers, waits, and rearranges itself quietly until the body is ready to receive what the mind once rushed past.

Reading is rarely problematised in academic or popular discourse. It is framed as restorative, virtuous, and intellectually productive. However, psychological research on coping and emotion regulation suggests that even adaptive behaviours can function as avoidance when used to manage prolonged stress or emotional overload (Gross, 2015; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). In my own life, reading had quietly joined a constellation of practices that allowed me to remain productive while avoiding stillness.

Over the past fifteen years, reading existed alongside other socially sanctioned escapes: work, achievement, training, travel, and service. I inhabited roles that were meaningful yet relentless: educator, writer, committee member, volunteer, athlete, artist, and caregiver. Beneath these visible performances were quieter coping strategies, including depression, stress-related illness, overconsumption, emotional numbing, and cycles of avoidance. Together, these practices formed a system of self-regulation oriented toward functioning rather than presence.

Image: Between Shelter and the Sky

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. This morning light is filtered, softened by the curtain that both protects and reveals. I hover between inside and outside, fully committed to neither. For much of my life, I lived at the extremes, either exposed through constant engagement or hidden behind busyness and distraction. Alonetude is teaching me to rest in this in-between space, where I can see the world without rushing toward it, and feel held without withdrawing. Presence, I am learning, asks something between full openness and full retreat. It asks only that I remain.

This image poses the question that Flow ultimately asks of me: where does my attention rest when nothing demands it? Csikszentmihalyi writes about optimal experience as a state of voluntary focus, yet alonetude has taught me that focus also requires restraint. The curtain reminds me that clarity rarely comes from constant exposure or relentless engagement. For years, busyness trained my attention outward, keeping me in motion, responsive, and productive. Here, attention settles instead. I am neither striving for immersion nor fleeing into distraction. I am simply present, allowing meaning to arise without forcing it. This, I am learning, is a different kind of flow: one rooted in choice rather than urgency, and in staying rather than escape.

Performance, Identity, and Misnaming Eccentricity

Image: Multiplicity Beyond Fracture

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. I have often described myself as eccentric, as though my many interests required explanation. This rock reminds me that complexity carries no implication of instability. It is composed of many elements held together over time, shaped by pressure rather than performance. What I once misnamed as excess was, in fact, accumulation. Each layer remains visible, yet none are required to justify their presence. Alonetude is teaching me that identity, like this stone, requires no constant shaping or display. It only needs time, contact, and the permission to remain whole.

For many years, I explained this pattern in terms of personality. I described myself as eccentric, curious, and driven to become many things at once. Yet scholarship on performativity and emotional labour suggests that sustained role performance can obscure the gradual erosion of the self beneath it (Butler, 1990; Hochschild, 2012). What Loreto revealed was that mediation, rather than multiplicity itself, was the issue.

I was aspiring to be something beyond the categories of scholar, philosopher, traveller, an artist, or a spiritual seeker. I already had those things. What I had avoided was inhabiting them without output, recognition, or distraction. Each role had become a buffer between me and my own interior life.

Alonetude as Ethical and Embodied Practice

Image: Setting Down What Once Carried Me

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. This image marks a pause rather than an ending. The boot, worn and emptied of the body that once depended on it, rests without urgency or direction. For years, movement, endurance, and productivity served as measures of worth. Alonetude invites a different ethic: the willingness to stop without apology and to remain without distraction. What is set down here is compulsion rather than capacity. What remains is presence, grounded and unperformed.

Alonetude, as I am coming to understand it, is neither isolation nor withdrawal. It is the ethical practice of staying. Philosophical and psychological literature draws a careful distinction between loneliness as imposed absence and solitude as chosen presence (Tillich, 1952; Storr, 1988). Alonetude resides within this distinction, yet it demands more than preference or temperament. It requires discipline, restraint, and an embodied willingness to remain without substitution.

In Loreto, alonetude has meant stepping out of familiar patterns of movement and productivity. It has meant sitting without a book in my hands and resisting the impulse to translate quiet into knowledge consumption. It has meant allowing boredom, restlessness, and sensory awareness to surface without resolution. This practice aligns with contemplative and trauma-informed scholarship that understands learning as embodied and regulatory, rather than exclusively cognitive (Kabat-Zinn, 1994; Porges, 2011). Insight, I am learning, arrives beyond analysis alone. Sometimes it arrives through waiting long enough for the body to register what the mind has learned to bypass.

Alonetude asks me to sit without filling the silence.

The discarded boot makes this visible. Once designed for movement, protection, and endurance, it now rests unused, emptied of the body that animated it. For years, I treated motion as virtue and endurance as evidence of worth. Stillness felt like failure. Alonetude asks something different. It invites me to set down the habits that carried me forward but also carried me away from myself. This is discernment, never abandonment. The body pauses, the role loosens, and what remains is presence, grounded and unperformed.

This is discernment. It is beyond burnout.

Lessons Learned: Reading as Presence Rather Than Escape

Image: Stillness, with a Pen in Hand

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. I came here with a notebook, assuming I would write my way into understanding. Instead, I found myself sitting quietly, the pen resting more often than moving. For years, travel and writing were part of my busyness, a way of staying productive even in beautiful places. This moment feels different. The notebook is no longer an instrument of urgency or output. It is simply a companion, waiting while I learn to be present without needing to capture, explain, or perform the experience.

The central lesson of this experience is less that reading is harmful than that its function matters. Alonetude has taught me to ask a different question of my practices: does this activity draw me toward myself, or does it allow me to disappear? This reframing reflects broader calls within qualitative inquiry to treat the researcher’s emotional and embodied presence as integral to knowledge production rather than as noise to be managed (Ellis et al., 2011; Nash, 2004).

By staying rather than escaping, I am learning to read myself with the same attentiveness I once reserved for texts. This deepens scholarship rather than diminishing it. Alonetude becomes both method and meaning, a way of inhabiting inquiry rather than performing it. The most demanding text I have avoided for years has been my own interior life. The lesson is relationship rather than abandonment. I am learning to meet books, roles, and ambition from a place of presence rather than flight.

What would it take to stay?

Title: Grounded Enough to Stay

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. There was a time when even standing still felt unproductive. I would have filled this moment with movement, planning, or interpretation. Here, I am learning something different. My feet in the water remind me that presence begins in the body before the mind. Alonetude is teaching me that staying requires no justification, and that learning can occur without busyness, without capture, and without escape. This is grounding, beyond any arrival.

The most challenging text I avoided for years was my own interior life.

References

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1), Article 10. https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-12.1.1589

Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2014.940781

Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling (30th anniversary ed.). University of California Press.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. Hyperion.

Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer.

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

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Storr, A. (1988). Solitude: A return to the self. Free Press.

Tillich, P. (1952). The courage to be. Yale University Press.

Poem: They Lied.

Poem: 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.

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 17 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.

Alonetude as a Human Right

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?

Image: Finding Space to be Alone

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. An empty chair symbolises the threshold between imposed isolation and chosen presence.

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, chap. 1). This framing anticipates contemporary understandings of solitude as an active, meaning-making process 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.

Image: 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 serve as the only source of human happiness, arguing that solitude ranks alongside connection in its capacity to sustain 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 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 romanticised 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 solitu

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 theorised 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 agentic work of meaning-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

“Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone; solitude expresses the glory of being alone.” (Tillich, 1963, chap. 1)

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.

In this work, alonetude is conceptualised as a relational, ethical, and political practice of being alone that emerges within structural conditions of isolation. Unlike solitude, which is typically framed as voluntary retreat, and loneliness, which is framed as social deficit, alonetude names the agentic labour of meaning-making within imposed aloneness. It is both an embodied practice and a critical analytic lens, situating individual experience within institutional and political architectures that produce separation.

Alonetude is the agentic labour of meaning-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

Note. A shaded walkway framed by flowering vines and cultivated desert plants, symbolising solitude as a curated and protected passage. The image evokes how access to quiet, beauty, and withdrawal is often architected, maintained, and unevenly distributed, highlighting solitude as a spatial and political privilege rather than a universally available condition.

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.

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.

My solitude is partially chosen and partially imposed, shaped by precarity, digital tethering, and institutional expectations of constant availability.

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 normalise 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.

Image: 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.

In digital academic and organizational contexts, solitude is increasingly rendered impossible by surveillance infrastructures: learning analytics, productivity metrics, email expectations, and algorithmic visibility regimes. These systems blur the boundary between connection and extraction, making withdrawal appear as deviance rather than necessity. A right to solitude, therefore, intersects with critiques of surveillance capitalism and institutional time extraction.

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 marginalised 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.

Reframing solitude as a human rights concern invites institutional redesign: policies that protect digital disconnection, labour structures that align schedules with community rhythms, housing and immigration policies that reduce forced separation, and pedagogical architectures that prioritise relationality over throughput. Justice, in this sense, is infrastructural.

The goal is a world where solitude is available to everyone, and loneliness is inflicted on no one.

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.

Image: 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

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.

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.

Office of the Surgeon General. (2023). Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.

Mackenzie, C., & Stoljar, N. (Eds.). (2000). Relational autonomy: Feminist perspectives on autonomy, agency, and the social self. Oxford University Press.

Nguyen, T. T., Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2018). Solitude as an approach to affective self-regulation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(1), 92–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217733073

Perlman, D., & Peplau, L. A. (1981). Toward a social psychology of loneliness. In S. Duck & R. Gilmour (Eds.), Personal relationships 3: Personal relationships in disorder (pp. 31–56). Academic Press.

Storr, A. (1988). Solitude: A return to the self. Free Press.

Tillich, P. (1963). The eternal now. Charles Scribner’s Sons.

World Health Organization. (2023, November 15). WHO launches commission to foster social connection. https://www.who.int/news/item/15-11-2023-who-launches-commission-to-foster-social-connection

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/9789240112360

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.

Poem: I Did Everything You Asked Me

Poem: I Did Everything You Asked Me, a poem of exhaustion, grief, and the moment of recognising that full compliance is not protection. Written in the voice of someone who gave everything and was given nothing back.

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 17 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.

Image: Always on the Outside

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker 2026

Day 20: The Weight of Always Almost

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on trauma, childhood experiences, and the body’s memory of harm. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

“Precarity lives in my body still.”

A Reflection on Precarity, Burnout, Mental Health, and Stress

I have been trying to write about precarity for three days now. Trying to find language for what it does to a body, to a nervous system, to a sense of self. But every time I sit down to write, my shoulders rise toward my ears. My jaw clenches. The ball in my stomach, that old childhood companion, tightens.

Mi cuerpo recuerda. My body remembers.

This tells me something important.

Precarity lives in my body still. Even here, even now, even after the contract ended months ago. The chronic stress of seven years shaped my nervous system in ways that persist, that compound the childhood trauma I have been exploring in this retreat.

I am writing this to remember. To document how my body still carries the exhaustion, the hypervigilance, the impossibility of rest. Para no olvidar. (So I may always remember.) I write it down.

“The hypervigilance I learned as a child translated seamlessly into scanning for signs of danger in institutional politics.”

When Temporary Becomes Permanent

Seven years of contract renewals. Seven years of wondering, each spring, whether I would have employment in the fall. Seven years of performing gratitude for the opportunity to teach, for the chance to serve, for the privilege of another year.

Siempre agradecida. Always grateful.

Even now, sitting by the sea in Loreto, my body remembers what this felt like. The constant low-level activation. The shoulders that stayed tense for months. The jaw that ached from clenching. The stomach that churned with cortisol.

Never quite safe. Never quite secure.

Siempre casi. Always almost.

Almost permanent. Almost secure. Almost valued. The “almost” became the water I swam in, so constant I forgot there had ever been another way to breathe.

Gill (2010) writes about the psychological costs of academic precarity: anxiety, insecurity, and a persistent sense of disposability. But what she describes intellectually, I carried somatically. My body learned to live in a state of constant mobilization.

Stewart (2014) describes precarity as a mode of keeping people at the edge of their capacity, always managing, always coping, always one crisis away from collapse. This is the architecture of contemporary academic labour. Designed to keep us grateful. Compliant. Useful.

Designed to extract everything we have to give while offering nothing we can count on.

My body still knows this architecture. Still responds to it. Still carries the exhaustion of seven years spent always almost secure enough to rest.

When Old Trauma Meets New Precarity

Here is what I am only now beginning to understand: precarity does different things to different bodies.

For those of us who grew up in environments of chronic threat, where safety was provisional, where love was conditional, where our value was measured by our usefulness, academic precarity does more than create stress. It reactivates every old survival pattern.

Reactiva todo. It reactivates everything.

The hypervigilance I learned as a child, scanning for signs of danger in my father’s footsteps, translated seamlessly into scanning for signs of danger in institutional politics. The compulsive caretaking that kept my sisters safer became the compulsive service that kept me employed. The inability to rest, because rest meant someone might get hurt, became the inability to rest because rest might signal insufficient commitment.

Precarity became the professional equivalent of my childhood home. Uncertain. Threatening. Requiring constant vigilance to survive.

van der Kolk (2014) describes how trauma survivors often find themselves in situations that unconsciously recreate the dynamics of their original trauma. Their nervous systems are calibrated to those conditions. They know how to function under threat. Safety feels foreign, suspicious, temporary.

La seguridad me asusta. Safety frightens me.

I excelled at precarity precisely because I had trained for it my entire childhood.

And this excellence made me exploitable.

Even now, my body remembers this pattern. Remembers how well it learned to function under chronic threat. Remembers the cost of that functioning.

When Exhaustion Becomes Architecture

My body still carries the exhaustion of those seven years. Carries it in ways I am only now beginning to recognise.

El cansancio vive en mis huesos. The tiredness lives in my bones.

Han (2010/2015) writes about burnout as the defining condition of achievement society, a society that exhausts us through internalised demands for optimization. We are tired because we have internalised the imperative to always be productive, always be useful, always be improving.

But for those of us in precarious employment, burnout operates differently.

We could never afford to burn out. Could never afford to slow down. Could never afford to admit exhaustion because exhaustion might mean we were insufficiently resilient, insufficiently committed, insufficiently grateful for the opportunity.

So we performed wellness. We performed work-life balance. We pursued sustainability while working 60-hour weeks on contracts that pretended we only worked 37.

Actuamos como si todo estuviera bien. We acted as if everything was fine.

Hochschild (1983) calls this emotional labour, the management of feeling to create a publicly observable display. But in precarious academic labour, the emotional labour extends beyond managing student interactions or maintaining professionalism in meetings. It includes managing our own awareness of exhaustion, our own recognition of exploitation, our own rage at systems that treat us as disposable.

We learn to smile while drowning.

Aprendemos a sonreír mientras nos ahogamos. (We learn to smile while we drown.)

I became so skilled at this performance that I stopped recognising it as performance. The exhaustion became my baseline. The stress became my normal. The constant activation of my nervous system became just how bodies feel when you are working.

Except bodies are meant to rest. Bodies are meant to cycle between activation and recovery. Bodies are meant to feel safe sometimes.

Los cuerpos necesitan descansar. Bodies need to rest.

My body forgot this. Or perhaps it never knew.

Even now, even here in Loreto, where I am explicitly practicing rest, my body resists. Resists stillness. Resists the absence of productivity. Resists the possibility that rest might be permitted.

This is what seven years of precarity did. Trained my body to believe that rest equals danger. That stopping means being seen as disposable. That value comes only through constant output.

When Individual Therapy Meets Structural Violence

The institution offered an Employee Assistance Program. Six free counselling sessions per year, they said. As if the structural conditions producing our distress could be resolved through individual therapy. As if six sessions could address years of precarity, exploitation, and the constant message that we are valuable only insofar as we remain useful.

Como si la terapia pudiera arreglar el sistema. As if therapy could fix the system.

Ahmed (2017) writes about how institutions manage complaints by pathologising individuals. When we say the working conditions are harmful, they offer us therapy. When we say the system is broken, they suggest we work on our resilience. When we name exploitation, they recommend mindfulness.

This is malperformative care. It expresses concern while refusing to address the conditions producing harm.

My body remembers this, too. Remembers going to therapy, practicing mindfulness, and working on boundaries. And remembers that none of it changed the fact that I wondered, each spring, whether I would have employment in the fall. None of it changed the fact that my value was always provisional. None of it changed the structure, producing my distress.

Nada cambió la estructura. Nothing changed the structure.

Individual solutions cannot address structural problems.

But under precarity, we could never afford to acknowledge this publicly. Could never afford to appear ungrateful. Could never afford to bite the hand that feeds us, even when that hand feeds us only enough to keep us grateful for the next feeding.

So we suffered privately. We broke down quietly. We medicalised structural violence as individual pathology.

And the system continues unchanged.

My body still carries this particular exhaustion. The exhaustion of trying to heal individually from wounds produced collectively. The exhaustion of managing awareness that the problem is structural while pretending the solution is personal.

El agotamiento de fingir. The exhaustion of pretending.

When Your Body Keeps the Score

There is a particular kind of stress that comes from never knowing. The stress of constant uncertainty. Of always waiting. Of living perpetually in the conditional tense.

Si me renuevan… If they renew me… Si consigo otra posición… If I get another position… Si sobrevivo hasta la permanencia… If I survive until tenure…

My body still lives in this conditional tense. Still scans for threat. Still cannot quite believe that the immediate precarity has ended.

“Rest felt like vulnerability.”

Porges (2011) describes how chronic stress dysregulates the autonomic nervous system. When the threat is constant but never quite acute enough to fight or flee, the body gets stuck in a state of mobilization without resolution. The sympathetic nervous system stays activated. The social engagement system shuts down. We become hypervigilant, reactive, and unable to rest even when circumstances temporarily permit it.

Incluso cuando las circunstancias lo permiten. Even when circumstances permit it.

This is what seven years of contract renewals did to my nervous system.

Even when the contract was renewed, I could never relax. Because renewal meant only another year of uncertainty. Another year of proving my value. Another year of being grateful for the opportunity to prove my value again next year.

The stress accumulated. On my shoulders. In my jaw. In the ball in my stomach that never fully unclenched. In the insomnia that became chronic. In the way, I startled at sudden sounds. In the way, I could tolerate zero rest because rest felt like vulnerability.

El descanso se sentía como una vulnerabilidad. Rest felt like vulnerability.

My body was keeping score. And the score said: you are under threat.

Even now, even here, my body keeps this score. Keeps the tally of years spent in chronic activation. Keeps the memory of what it felt like to never be quite secure enough to let down my guard.

This is why I came to Loreto. To teach my body a different score. To practice, in small doses, what it feels like when rest might be permitted.

But the old score persists. Lives in my tissues. Activates when I sit too still for too long.

Todavía vive en mi cuerpo. It still lives in my body.

When Loss Creates Space for Feeling

On May 2nd, the logic of precarity arrived in my inbox. After seven years of contract renewals, the eighth year would be missing entirely.

I had been terminated.

Me despidieron. They fired me.

The ball in my stomach, that old childhood companion, returned with an intensity I had forgotten was possible. Every childhood fear was activated at once. The disposability. The message that my value was conditional. The understanding that I had been useful until I ceased being useful, and then I would be discarded.

I spent weeks in a fog of shame and grief.

Semanas en la niebla. Weeks in the fog.

But underneath the grief, something else was happening. Something I am only now, here in Loreto on Day 22 of my retreat, beginning to recognise.

The termination released something.

I could stop performing gratitude for conditions that were harming me. I could stop managing my awareness of exploitation. I could stop carrying the cognitive load of constant uncertainty, the emotional labour of appearing fine, the somatic burden of chronic activation.

The precarity had ended. Through loss, yes. Through termination, yes. But it had ended.

And I survived it.

Y sobreviví. And I survived.

This created space. Physical space, psychological space, somatic space. The space to finally stop performing and start feeling.

The space to come to Loreto and practice rest.

The space to write this reflection and acknowledge how my body still carries the exhaustion, the hypervigilance, the chronic stress of seven years spent always almost secure.

What My Body Needs Now

I could never have done this retreat while still precariously employed. My nervous system could never have tolerated it.

Rest requires safety. Real rest, the kind where your nervous system actually downregulates, where your body stops scanning for threats, where you can simply be, this requires the felt sense that you are currently free from immediate threat.

El descanso requiere seguridad. Rest requires safety.

Precarity makes rest impossible.

Even when we are actively working, we are planning, strategising, managing, and monitoring. Our nervous systems stay activated because the threat is real. We might be without employment next year. We might be unable to pay rent. We might be valued insufficiently to keep.

These are accurate assessments of structural conditions rather than irrational fears.

What I am learning here in Loreto is that healing from precarity requires first acknowledging what precarity does. In the body. In the nervous system. In the persistent sense that we are always almost but never quite secure.

Siempre casi, pero nunca completamente. Always almost but never completely.

I am learning that the hypervigilance I developed in childhood and refined through academic precarity does remain even after the precarious employment has ended. The patterns persist. The scanning continues. The inability to rest remains.

But I am also learning that these patterns can be worked with. Gently. Slowly. Through sustained exposure to actual safety, through practices that teach my nervous system that rest is permitted, through the radical act of simply being without having to prove my value through productivity.

Sin tener que demostrar mi valor. Without having to prove my value.

This is what alonetude offers. Capacity, as opposed to escape from precarity. The capacity to recognise when my nervous system is responding to past threat rather than present reality. The capacity to choose rest even when some old part of me insists that rest is dangerous.

The capacity to know my worth exists independent of my usefulness.

Mi valor existe independientemente de mi utilidad.

The Ongoing Practice of Recognition

My body still remembers the exhaustion of those seven years. Remembers it in the shoulders that rise when I sit at my laptop. Remembers it in the jaw that clenches when I think about job searching. Remembers it in the ball in my stomach that activates when I imagine another contract position.

Mi cuerpo todavía recuerda. My body still remembers.

And this remembering matters.

Because I will have to return to job searching. I will have to navigate an academic market that treats scholars as disposable. I will likely have to accept another precarious position because stable positions are rare, and I need to eat.

The structural conditions persist. The precarity continues. The threat remains real.

But what I am practicing here is recognition. The ability to recognise when my body is responding to a genuine present threat versus responding to past trauma. The ability to take the rest I can, when I can. The ability to know that my exhaustion is structural rather than a personal failing.

El agotamiento es estructural. The exhaustion is structural.

This matters. Because when I return to precarity, as I likely will, I want to remember that my stress response is accurate. That my hypervigilance is intelligent. That my exhaustion is a collective rather than an individual pathology.

I want to remember so I can fight for structural change while also surviving the present.

I want to remember that my body keeps the score because the score is real. Because precarity produces real harm. Because exhaustion is the appropriate response to conditions designed to extract everything while offering nothing secure in return.

Porque el cuerpo dice la verdad. Because the body tells the truth.

Beyond Individual Resilience

Let me be clear: individual healing is the wrong solution to structural exploitation.

What happened to me, seven years of precarious employment followed by termination, was a systemic issue requiring structural change, as opposed to an individual failing that therapy can fix.

Universities benefit from precarious labour. It is cheaper. It is more flexible. It is easier to manage and easier to discard. The precarity is the design, rather than an accident or an unfortunate side effect.

La precariedad es el diseño. Precarity is the design.

And as long as the design remains unchanged, more scholars will experience what I experienced. More bodies will carry the stress of chronic uncertainty. More nervous systems will be dysregulated by conditions that make safety impossible.

We need structural change. We need stable employment. We need labour protections. We need institutions to stop treating scholars as disposable resources to be exploited until they break.

But structural change is slow. And in the meantime, we survive.

This reflection is about naming what precarity does so we can recognise it, stop pathologising our responses to harmful conditions, and understand that our exhaustion is structural violence rather than personal failing.

Para que podamos entender. So we can understand.

And so we can fight for better while also learning to survive the present.

Why I Write This

I am writing this on Day 22 of my retreat because I need to remember.

Necesito recordar. I need to remember.

I need to remember what precarity felt like in my body so I avoid mistaking its absence for personal weakness. I need to remember that my nervous system was responding accurately to a genuine threat, so I refuse to shame myself for vigilance that kept me employed. I need to remember that the stress, the burnout, the mental health struggles were a collective response to collective conditions, as opposed to individual pathology.

I need to remember so I resist gaslighting myself when I return to job searching and hypervigilance returns.

Because it will return. Because precarity is real. The threat is structural. And my nervous system is responding intelligently, rather than irrationally, to recognising this.

Mi sistema nervioso responde inteligentemente. My nervous system responds intelligently.

What I hope to carry with me from these thirty days is recognition rather than elimination of stress response. The capacity to recognise it, to work with it, to know that I am responding to a genuine threat with appropriate vigilance, as opposed to being broken.

Como en lugar de estar rota. Rather than being broken.

I am responding intelligently to conditions designed to break me.

And I am slowly learning to practice rest in the spaces between threats. To recognise when safety is actually present, even if only temporarily. To allow my nervous system moments of genuine downregulation, even knowing that vigilance will be required again soon.

These small practices matter. They allow us to survive precarity with some part of ourselves intact, rather than solving it.

Nos permiten sobrevivir. They allow us to survive.

What My Body Wants You to Know

If you are reading this from inside precarious employment, if your contract renewal is uncertain, if you are managing chronic stress while performing wellness, if you are exhausted but cannot afford to admit it:

No estás fallando. You are failing at nothing.

Your stress is structural rather than personal weakness. Your exhaustion is collective rather than an individual lack of resilience. Your body is responding accurately to genuinely threatening conditions.

The hypervigilance makes sense. The inability to rest makes sense. The persistent sense of being always almost but never quite secure, this makes sense.

Todo tiene sentido. It all makes sense.

Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: keeping you alert to genuine threat.

“The system is broken. You are whole.”

The system is broken. You are whole. What is broken is the structure that treats you as disposable while demanding you be grateful for the opportunity to prove your value again next year.

El sistema está roto. The system is broken.

I have zero solutions. I know neither how to dismantle precarity from within, nor how to survive it without cost.

But I know this: we survive better when we name what is happening. When we refuse to pathologise structural violence as individual pathology. When we recognise that our collective exhaustion indicates collective conditions that need changing.

And we survive better when we take the rest we can, when we can. Small moments. Brief windows. Ten minutes lying still before your body insists you get up and be productive.

These moments matter.

They solve nothing. But they allow us to survive.

Nos permiten seguir adelante. They allow us to continue forward.

My body still remembers the exhaustion. Still carries the stress. Still activates the hypervigilance.

And my body is telling the truth.

Y mi cuerpo dice la verdad. And my body tells the truth.

Note: This reflection draws from my lived experience of precarious academic employment and connects to theoretical frameworks from my doctoral work on institutional violence and my current thesis on alonetude as healing practice. The ideas here are in conversation with Sara Ahmed’s work on institutional affects, Byung-Chul Han’s analysis of burnout society, Rosalind Gill’s research on academic precarity, and Bessel van der Kolk’s understanding of how bodies hold trauma and stress.

References

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.

Gill, R. (2010). Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia. In R. Ryan-Flood & R. Gill (Eds.), Secrecy and silence in the research process: Feminist reflections (pp. 228–244). Routledge.

Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2010)

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Stewart, K. (2014). Road registers. Cultural Geographies, 21(4), 549–563.

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

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.

Part 3: The Long Echo

Content Warning: This series contains discussion of childhood exposure to parental alcoholism and domestic violence, as well as exploration of ongoing healing processes. While absent of graphic detail, the material addresses trauma, hypervigilance, and the challenges of learning to rest that some readers may find distressing.

How Fear Becomes Structure

Image: The Architecture of Vigilance

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Threat became structure; vigilance became design.

The house where I learned hypervigilance no longer exists. My father has been dead for decades. My sisters are safe adults, living their own lives thousands of miles from that childhood home. The original threat has ended.

But my body held no record of this information.

van der Kolk (2014) describes how trauma reorganises the brain’s alarm system to interpret the world as a fundamentally unsafe place. For those of us who grew up in chronically threatening environments, this reorganization happens during the years when the nervous system itself is still forming. Durante los años de formación. During the formative years. The architecture has no foundation built on top; the threat becomes the foundation itself.

“The architecture has no foundation built on top; the threat becomes the foundation itself.”

The ball in my stomach, that tight readiness I described in Part 2, still activates five decades later. Never always. Never constantly. But predictably, under conditions that my conscious mind fails to always recognise as threatening.

I notice it most in restaurants.

Before I can focus on the menu, before I can settle into conversation, I need to map the space. Where are the exits? Who is seated near us? Can I see the entrance from where I am? If I cannot see who is coming through the door before they arrive, my shoulders rise toward my ears. My breath becomes shallow. Some ancient part of me needs to know who is approaching before they reach our table.

“Some ancient part of me needs to know who is approaching before they reach our table.”

This is what Porges (2011) calls neuroception, the automatic, unconscious detection of safety or danger in the environment. My nervous system, calibrated during childhood to constant threat, remains hypertuned to detect dangers that no longer exist. It scans for the heavy footsteps, the sound that meant violence was coming. It looks for the micro-expressions that once told me whether this evening would be safe.

“My nervous system, calibrated during childhood to constant threat, remains hypertuned to detect dangers that no longer exist.”

I do this in meetings. In classrooms, when I taught. At social gatherings. My eyesare constantly moving, constantly assessing, constantly ready.

Image: Mapping the Room

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. The nervous system scans for exits long after danger ends.

van der Kolk (2014) describes how traumatised individuals spend tremendous energy suppressing inner chaos, often becoming so skilled at ignoring their physical sensations that they fail to recognise when they are actually safe. This describes my adult life with painful accuracy. I became extraordinarily skilled at appearing calm while my nervous system churned with activation. I was performing competence while my body signalled danger.

“I was performing competence while my body signalled danger.”

At functioning while afraid.

When Survival Skills Become Professional Assets

“At functioning while afraid.”

Image: Productive Vigilance

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Notation: Survival strategies translated into institutional competence.

“But they also made me exploitable.”

There is a particular irony, una ironía amarga, a bitter irony, in how childhood hypervigilance prepared me for academic labour.

The constant monitoring of authority figures’ moods. The ability to detect subtle shifts in power dynamics. The skill at making myself useful while remaining invisible. These survival strategies translated seamlessly into navigating precarious academic employment.

I excelled at reading what was wanted before it was articulated. Anticipating needs. Managing up. At making myself indispensable while taking up minimal space. At absorbing emotional labour without complaint. At knowing when to speak and when silence would serve me better.

These abilities made me valuable in academic settings, particularly in administrative roles where the dynamics of reading rooms mattered. Where sensing institutional politics before they became explicit could prevent disasters.

But they also made me exploitable.

I lacked the capacity to say no. I lacked the ability to recognise when I was being asked to carry more than my share, nor could I distinguish between genuine professional responsibility and the compulsive caretaking that emerged from trauma. No podía distinguir. I was unable to distinguish.

When I was finally terminated from my faculty position after years of contract renewals, the loss activated every childhood fear. The ball in my stomach returned with an intensity I had gone decades without feeling. The hypervigilance that had kept me employed, that had made me useful, valuable, necessary, had also blinded me to the disposability of my position.

I had survived by being needed. When I was no longer needed, some part of me held no certainty of surviving.

“I had survived by being needed.”

Why Safety Feels Like Danger

This is what I am trying to understand during these thirty days in Loreto: why solitude, which should feel safe, instead triggers all my oldest survival responses.

The research literature is clear about loneliness, the unwanted, painful experience of isolation. But there is remarkably little scholarly attention to chosen solitude. To what I am calling alonetude: intentional, embodied, meaning-rich engagement with being alone.

Long and Averill (2003) distinguish between different types of solitude, noting that positive solitude involves freedom from social demands and provides opportunities for self-discovery and restoration. But they acknowledge that whether solitude feels restorative or threatening depends significantly on attachment history and prior trauma.

For those of us with hypervigilance rooted in childhood trauma, solitude activates specific fears that I am only now beginning to name.

When there are no others to monitor, where does the vigilance go?

Image: Solitude as Surveillance

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. When external threats vanish, vigilance turns inward.

My nervous system, calibrated to constant external scanning, turns inward when external threats are absent. I become hyperaware of bodily sensations, interpreting normal physiological processes as signals of danger. My heart rate increases slightly during my morning run, and I fear cardiac problems. I feel fatigue, and I fear illness.

Without external threats to track, I track myself with the same relentless attention I once used to monitor my father’s moods.

Rest feels like abandoning my post.

As I wrote in Part 1, parentified children learn that constant vigilance is required as much for the protection of others as for the self. Even though my sisters are safe adults and no one currently depends on my vigilance, some part of me believes that letting my guard down means someone will be harmed.

Solitude removes the immediate object of protection. But it leaves the compulsion to protect fully intact.

My own body feels like unsafe territory.

van der Kolk (2014) describes how trauma fundamentally reorganises the relationship between body and mind, making the body feel like a source of danger rather than safety. For years, I managed this through constant activity. Through staying busy enough that I could avoid feeling what my body carried.

Solitude removes that buffer.

The Long Echo· Post

It demands that I be present to myself. And myself includes all the unprocessed fear still stored in my tissues, still activating when I sit too still for too long, still insisting that rest invites disaster.

Image: Alonetude

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Finding a place in rock painting.

Intentionality as the Intervention

This is where alonetude diverges from both loneliness and passive solitude.

“It is something beyond something happening to me.

It is something I am choosing.”

It is something I am choosing rather than something simply happening to me. Estoy eligiendo esto. I am choosing this. Deliberately. With full awareness of the difficulty.

Alonetude, as I am theorising it, is intentional, embodied solitude undertaken with explicit healing purpose. It differs from loneliness (which is unwanted), from social isolation (which is often imposed), and from passive solitude (being alone without deliberate engagement).

The critical distinction is agency.

I am here beyond being rejected or abandoned. I am here beyond lacking social skills or opportunities for connection. I am here through active choosing rather than passive acceptance.

I am choosing this. Choosing to spend thirty days primarily alone. Choosing to face what arises when I cannot distract myself with work, with caregiving, with the constant activity that has kept me from fully inhabiting my body and my history.

Kabat-Zinn (1990) describes mindfulness as intentional, non-judgmental attention to the present moment. Alonetude applies this same quality of attention to the experience of being alone.

It is about something far beyond achieving some idealised state of peaceful solitude. It is about bringing full, compassionate awareness to whatever arises, including fear, hypervigilance, and resistance to rest.

Small Victories in Recalibration

Image: Touching the Foundation

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. The body returns to stone, tracing what held it when nothing else did.

I want to be honest about what healing looks like from inside the process.

“There is no dramatic before-and-after.”

It bears little resemblance to the transformation narratives that saturate popular culture. There is no dramatic before-and-after. No breakthrough moment. No complete resolution.

van der Kolk (2014) makes clear that trauma is both an event from the past and an ongoing imprint on mind, brain, and body. This imprint resists simple erasure. It can be worked with, integrated, and metabolised. But it resists disappearing.

What shifts is my relationship to the imprint.

My capacity to recognise when my nervous system is responding to past threats rather than present ones. My ability to compassionately witness the activation without being completely overtaken by it.

My aim is to work with the hypervigilance rather than eliminate it. I am learning to create space for other responses to coexist alongside it.

The Practice Looks Like This

Morning beach walks, where I notice when my scanning becomes hypervigilant versus when I am simply observing. When I catch myself scanning for threats, I meet it without judgment. I acknowledge: This is my nervous system doing what it learned to do. This kept me safe once.

Image: Morning Beach Walks

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Notation: Morning beach walks allow me to rest.

Then I gently redirect attention to what is actually present. Pelicans gliding. Waves breaking. The texture of sand underfoot.

Longer runs where I allow my sympathetic nervous system to activate through movement rather than through fear. This is the paradox: I need to learn that activation itself is safe. That my heart rate can increase without signaling threat. That I can mobilise my body through choice rather than terror.

Stillness practices where I sit with the discomfort of simply being, releasing production, releasing usefulness to anyone. These are the hardest. My body wants to move, to busy itself, to find some task that justifies existence.

Image: Rest

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Learning how to rest.

Learning to simply be, estar, rather than hacer, challenges everything my childhood taught me about worth through utility.

Creative practices like photographing shells, driftwood, and the way light moves across water. These engage moments of absorption where self-consciousness and hypervigilance temporarily quiet (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). In these moments, my attention narrows through interest rather than fear.

This is a different quality of focus entirely.

The Parts That Protected Me Still Protect

I need to name something crucial: the parts of me that remain hypervigilant are protective parts beyond fixing.

They are protective parts that kept me alive.

Fisher (2017) describes how trauma survivors can learn to recognise their survival responses as distinct parts of the self, strategies that emerged to handle different aspects of overwhelming experience. The Internal Family Systems approach suggests that what we often pathologise as symptoms are actually protective parts trying to keep us safe using the best strategies they developed during the trauma.

The part of me that scans restaurants for exits is entirely rational. It is a guardian. It remembers when knowing the exits mattered for survival. It has yet to fully trust that I am safe now.

Image: The Guardians

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Protective parts remain, even as new responses emerge.

And perhaps it never will entirely.

But I can appreciate its vigilance even as I gently work to expand my window of tolerance for feeling safe.

The part that makes me want to check on my sisters, even though they are grown women living their own lives, this is something beyond codependent pathology. This is the part that kept them safer than they otherwise would have been when we were children.

Les mantuvo más seguras. It kept them safer.

I can honour what it did while also recognising that the situation has changed. That they no longer need my hypervigilance. That I am permitted to rest from this particular guard duty.

This reframing matters profoundly.

For years, I approached healing as if I needed to eradicate the hypervigilance, to eliminate the freeze response, to become someone who naturally feels safe in the world. But this framing positioned my survival strategies as enemies to be defeated.

What I am learning instead is to approach these parts with gratitude and compassion while also creating space for new responses to emerge.

Who Gets to Choose Solitude

I cannot write about alonetude as a healing practice without acknowledging the profound privilege embedded in this project.

I can rent a casita in Loreto for thirty days. I can take time away from employment because I no longer have employment to take time from, which is both a loss and an unexpected opening. I am white, educated, a cisgender woman with Canadian citizenship and mobility rights. I am without dependent children or elders requiring my care.

The very concept of choosing solitude for healing purposes assumes a baseline of material security and social support that vast numbers of people are without.

hooks (2000) reminds us that contemplative practice has historically been the province of those with sufficient privilege to withdraw from the demands of survival labour. This matters for my analysis. I am arguing something beyond the claim that alonetude represents a universal solution to trauma healing.

I am examining what becomes possible when someone with my particular history gains temporary access to conditions that support deep rest and intentional solitude.

The economic precarity of academic labour, the contract renewals, the contingent employment, and the constant uncertainty itself constitute a form of structural trauma that compounds childhood trauma. My termination activated childhood fears precisely because both experiences involved powerlessness, expendability, and the message that my value was provisional.

But losing that employment also freed resources. Beyond financial resources. Temporal and psychological ones. I no longer carry the cognitive load of constantly managing precarious employment. I no longer perform the emotional labour of remaining pleasant and productive despite chronic uncertainty.

This created space for this retreat that would have remained beyond reach had I remained employed.

I name this to resist romanticising job loss, rather to acknowledge the complex relationship between structural conditions and individual healing possibilities. The alonetude I am practicing here is both enabled by and in tension with systems of privilege and precarity.

I am here to heal.

The Difference Between Withdrawal and Return

There is a crucial distinction between using solitude to avoid relationships and using solitude to develop the capacity for relationships.

The first is escape. The second is preparation.

I came to Loreto out of something other than hatred of people or fear of connection. I am here because my nervous system needs sustained exposure to safety in order to recalibrate. Because I need to practice being with myself before I can be fully present with others.

Because the hypervigilance that protected me in childhood now interferes with the intimate relationships I want in adulthood.

Winnicott (1958) describes the capacity to be alone as a developmental achievement that paradoxically requires the internalization of a reliable other. The child must first experience being alone in the presence of someone trustworthy before they can be comfortably alone in physical solitude.

For those of us who never had that reliable presence in childhood, we must somehow learn this capacity in adulthood, often without the scaffolding that childhood should have provided.

This is what the thirty days offer: a laboratory for learning to be reliably present to myself. To notice when fear arises and to meet it with compassion rather than judgment. To recognise when my body signals danger and to gently offer evidence of current safety.

To practice rest without the constant inner voice insisting I should be doing something productive.

But this represents a temporary retreat, with permanent withdrawal being the furthest thing from the intention.

The aim reaches beyond living forever in solitary retreat but to develop the internal resources that allow me to engage with others from a place of genuine presence rather than compulsive vigilance.

Kornfield (2000) describes contemplative practice as preparation for engagement rather than escape from it. The goal lies in returning to everyday life rather than becoming enlightened in isolation with transformed presence.

Similarly, the goal of alonetude is the development of internal safety rather than permanent solitude that allows for authentic connection.

Recognising the Incremental

Image: Incremental Safety

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Finding peace in the night sea.

It is Day 20 of my retreat.

I thought victory would mean no longer startling at sudden sounds. That it would mean sleeping through the night without vigilance. That my shoulders would remain relaxed, my jaw unclenched, my stomach soft.

I thought healing would mean the hypervigilance would leave.

What I am learning instead is that victory looks like this:

Yesterday morning, I woke at dawn and lay still for ten full minutes before my body insisted I get up and do something productive. Ten minutes of simply being. Of breathing. Of existing without purpose.

This may sound small.

It is vast.

It is revolutionary for a nervous system that learned rest equals danger.

Victory looks like recognising when the ball in my stomach clenches and being able to say to myself, This is old fear. This is my body remembering. I am safe now. Even when my body remains uncertain, I can hold the truth alongside the fear.

Victory looks like going to the beach and allowing myself to simply sit and watch the pelicans without bringing my camera, without documenting, without turning the experience into something useful.

Estar sin hacer. Being without doing.

These transformations are incremental rather than dramatic. They are incremental shifts. Moments when my nervous system practices something new. Brief windows when rest feels possible rather than dangerous.

What My Body Now Knows

After twenty days of sustained alonetude practice, here are the shifts I notice:

My breath sometimes deepens on its own. This happens beyond the reach of my attention, when I am absorbed in watching light change on water or in the intricate architecture of a shell. The diaphragmatic breathing that signals safety to the nervous system arrives without my effort.

The space between stimulus and response occasionally widens. When I hear a sudden sound, there is sometimes, beyond always, a fraction of a second where I notice my body’s response before it overtakes me entirely. In that space, I can choose.

Rest feels possible in small doses. Beyond hours. Beyond days. But for minutes at a time, I can simply be without the voice insisting I should be working, should be useful, should be justifying my existence through productivity.

I can sometimes distinguish between different kinds of alone. Loneliness, the painful sense of unwanted isolation, still visits. But it is far from constant. There are increasing moments when solitude feels neutral or even nourishing rather than threatening. When being alone with myself feels like coming home rather than abandonment.

These are the victories.

Beyond dramatic. Beyond complete. But real.

Son reales. They are real.

What Continues

In ten days, I will leave Loreto. I will return to my regular life. To job searching. To navigating the practical realities of middle age after employment termination. To relationships with friends and family who love me but cannot fully understand this particular journey.

The question reaches beyond whether the hypervigilance will disappear.

It will remain.

The question is whether I can continue the practice, the daily, incremental work of teaching my nervous system new possibilities while honouring the wisdom of old protections.

Brown (2010) describes vulnerability as involving uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure, while also being the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change. Alonetude as I am practicing it requires profound vulnerability, the willingness to be alone with all that I carry, to feel what I have spent decades avoiding, to rest when rest feels dangerous.

But vulnerability without support becomes retraumatization.

This is why the temporal boundedness of this retreat matters. Thirty days is long enough to create new neural pathways, to practice unfamiliar ways of being. It is short enough that I remain connected to the relationships and structures that support my ongoing healing.

The alonetude practice I am developing here is a temporary renewal rather than permanent solitary withdrawal. It is meant to be a renewable resource, something I can return to when my nervous system needs recalibration. When the hypervigilance becomes overwhelming. When I need sustained exposure to safety in order to remember what safety feels like.

Integration Beyond Resolution

Fisher (2017) writes about trauma healing as integration rather than resolution. The parts that protected me through hypervigilance remain present. They have no need to disappear.

What changes is my relationship to them.

My capacity to hold both the protective impulse and the present reality. To appreciate what they did while also creating space for new responses.

Some days, this integration feels possible. Some days, the old patterns overtake me entirely, and I spend hours caught in hypervigilance that serves no current purpose.

Both are part of the process. Neither represents failure.

The body learned fear across years. It resists unlearning over the course of weeks. But it can learn new possibilities alongside the fear. It can practice safety even while remembering danger.

Puede practicar la seguridad mientras recuerda el peligro.

It can hold both the truth of what was and the possibility of what might be.

Where Transformation Happens

Image: The Third Shore

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Where land and sea meet, transformation is negotiated.

I chose Loreto because it sits beside the sea. Because there is something about the rhythm of waves that mirrors the rhythm I am trying to find, the inhale and exhale, the arriving and receding, the constant motion that is somehow also constancy.

I call this project The Third Shore because the shore is neither ocean nor land, but the meeting place. The threshold. The liminal space where transformation happens.

This is what alonetude offers: threshold space. A place to practice being between who I was and who I am becoming.

The shore holds the tension between land and sea without resolving it. It holds both. It is where waves have been shaping sand for millennia, grinding rock into powder, polishing glass smooth.

The shore is patient.

It understands that transformation takes geological time. That healing is measured beyond breakthroughs, in in the accumulation of small moments when something shifts, softens, and the body remembers, even briefly, what safety feels like.

This is what I am learning to trust.

That the small shifts matter. That my nervous system is doing the work even when I am beyond consciously perceiving the change. That rest is deep labour rather than dereliction.

That solitude can be refuge rather than abandonment.

Alonetude offers refuge rather than resolution. Capacity rather than the elimination of fear to be with fear without being overtaken by it. Beyond the achievement of permanent safety, there are moments, increasing moments, when safety feels possible.

And for a nervous system that learned early that the world is fundamentally unsafe, that rest invites disaster, that vigilance is required for survival, these moments are everything.

They are the shore where new life becomes possible.

What These Three Parts Have Traced

This series has moved from childhood hypervigilance to adult manifestations, and now to the practice of alonetude as a healing intervention.

Part 1 established the theoretical framework for understanding how chronic childhood trauma shapes the developing nervous system. Part 2 provided the embodied narrative of what hypervigilance actually felt like, lived like, inhabited a child’s body and world.

This final part has examined how those childhood adaptations persist in adulthood and why intentional solitude, alonetude, offers possibilities for healing that differ fundamentally from both loneliness and passive alone-time.

The body keeps the score, yes.

Image: Refuge and Integration

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker 2026

Notation: The body keeps learning.

But the body also learns.

Slowly. Incrementally. Through patient practice, the nervous system that learned danger can also learn safety. Beyond complete safety. Beyond permanent safety. Moments of safety remain. Windows of rest. Brief experiences of what it feels like to simply be rather than constantly, vigilantly, doing.

These moments accumulate. They create new neural pathways. They teach the body new possibilities without requiring it to forget old protections.

And this, this is revolutionary for those of us who learned early that we existed to serve, to protect, to scan, to anticipate, to prevent. That our worth was measured by our usefulness. That rest was dangerous, and solitude was abandonment of our post.

Alonetude says: Rest is permitted. You are allowed to simply be. Your worth exists independent of constant productivity. Solitude can be a refuge rather than a threat.

The body holds this truth tentatively, still learning.

But it is learning.

Slowly. Incrementally. Through twenty days of practice by the sea. And ten more days to come. And whatever comes after.

The work continues. The body continues learning. The shore continues shaping what the waves bring.

La curación continúa. Healing continues.

Ya no tengo que vigilar todo el tiempo. I no longer have to keep watch all the time.

Except I do, still, sometimes.

The difference is that now I sometimes notice when I am keeping watch. And I can choose, sometimes, slowly, to gently set down the vigilance and rest.

This is what healing looks like.

Beyond dramatic. Beyond complete.

But real.

For readers struggling with trauma histories: Healing is rarely linear. It is rarely complete. But it is possible. These small moments of rest, these brief windows when safety feels real rather than theoretical, these matter profoundly. They accumulate. They create new possibilities. You remain whole. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it learned to do. And it can learn new responses while honouring the wisdom of old protections.

Con cariño y esperanza. With care and hope.

References

Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you are supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.

hooks, b. (2000). Feminist theory: From margin to centre (2nd ed.). South End Press.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full catastrophe living: Using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness. Delacorte Press.

Kornfield, J. (2000). After the ecstasy, the laundry: How the heart grows wise on the spiritual path. Bantam Books.

Long, C. R., & Averill, J. R. (2003). Solitude: An exploration of the benefits of being alone. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 33(1), 21–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5914.00204

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

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

Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The capacity to be alone. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, 416–420.

Here rests vigilance, laid down with care.

Translation note. Spanish-language text in this post was translated into English using Google Translate and reviewed by the author. Translations are intended to convey general meaning rather than certified linguistic precision.

Memory: The Kitchen Table

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on difficult childhood memories and family pain. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

“I was learning that what matters to me is allowed to matter.”

My grandmother’s kitchen table was oval, oak, scarred with the evidence of living. A burn mark from a forgotten pot. A gouge from something dropped or dragged. Rings from glasses placed without coasters during conversation are too absorbing for caution. I spread my rocks across that table, and she pushed nothing aside to make room for proper things. She let them stay. She let me sort and re-sort, building small cairns that meant nothing to anyone but me. The table held it all.

“I carry it with me, beyond furniture: as a method.”

I had no idea then that kitchen tables carry their own literature. June Jordan wrote of Kitchen Table: Women of Colour Press, founded in 1980, deliberately naming itself after the place where women had always done their realest thinking, beyond offices or academies, in domestic spaces where hands stayed busy, and mouths could speak truth (Jordan, 1980). Barbara Smith, who co-founded the press, understood that the kitchen table was a site of knowledge-making beyond lesser, perhaps the most honest one. The table where meals are prepared, where children do homework, where bills get sorted, letters get written, arguments get had and resolved, this is where theory meets the texture of actual living.

My rocks on my grandmother’s table were part of a long tradition of important work. tradition of kitchen-table meaning-making that predates and outlasts the institutions that later claimed authority over knowledge.

bell hooks wrote about the homeplace as a site of resistance, the domestic sphere that dominant culture dismisses as trivial but that actually sustains everything worth sustaining. In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990), hooks describes her grandmother’s kitchen as a place of profound teaching, where lessons arrived through doing, snapping beans, rolling dough, and washing dishes side by side. The kitchen table is where hooks learned that theory and practice are inseparable, that the hands and the mind work together, that wisdom passes through presence as much as words.

While my grandmother peeled apples, I sorted my rocks, receiving an education I had no words for then. I was learning that what matters to me is allowed to matter. That there is space at the table for my small concerns. That someone will witness my treasures without asking what they are for.

Miriam Greenspan (2003) writes of kitchen table wisdom, the knowledge that emerges from lived experience, from the ordinary intimacies of daily life, from sitting with what is rather than theorising about what should be. This wisdom requires no credentials, no publications, to be valid. It requires presence, patience, and the willingness to stay at the table long enough for understanding to emerge. My grandmother never told me what my rocks meant or what I should do with them. She simply made space. She simply witnessed.

In that witnessing, I learned that my meaning-making mattered.

The kitchen table is where Scholarly Personal Narrative finds its truest home. Robert Nash (2004) argued that the stories we tell from our own lives carry legitimate scholarly weight when carefully theorised and ethically contextualised. But long before methodological language existed to justify it, women were already doing this work at kitchen tables, sharing stories, finding patterns, building knowledge from the raw material of experience.

The academy eventually caught up to what grandmothers always knew: that the particular illuminates the universal, that one life carefully examined reveals something about all lives, and that the table where we sit with our small treasures is exactly the right place to make meaning.

Now I sit at a small wooden table in Loreto, sea glass and shells spread across its surface. The table here is rented, free of scars from decades of family living. But it holds the same possibility my grandmother’s table held: that what I find might become what I know, that sorting and arranging might teach me something words alone cannot reach.

I think of all the women at all the kitchen tables across all the years, spreading out their own versions of treasure, trusting that the pattern would reveal itself. I am held here, even in solitude. I am in conversation with a lineage of kitchen-table scholars who never called themselves scholars, who simply showed up, paid attention, and let their hands learn what their minds would understand later.

La mesa recuerda.
The table remembers.

It holds the memory of every object placed upon it, every hand that reached across its surface, every conversation that unfolded in its presence. My grandmother is gone now, and I have lost track of what happened to her kitchen table. But I carry it with me, beyond furniture: as a method.

I still spread my treasures across whatever surface is available. I still sort by colour, by size, by feels right. I still trust that the pattern will emerge if I stay long enough, present enough, and am willing to let the objects teach me what they know.

“The table remembers.”

Reference

Greenspan, M. (2003). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications. https://books.google.com/books?id=ZfvRo3PkDcwC

hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. South End Press. https://philpapers.org/rec/HOOYRG-2

Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G. (Eds.). (1981). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. https://hal.science/hal-04262369/

Koren, L. (1994). Wabi-sabi for artists, designers, poets & philosophers. Stone Bridge Press. https://books.google.com/books?id=jQelDAgr63oC

Juniper, A. (2003). Wabi sabi: The Japanese art of impermanence. Tuttle Publishing. https://books.google.com/books?id=objWAgAAQBAJ

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966). The savage mind (G. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1962). https://books.google.com/books?id=JI6GVFbP9hAC

Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press. https://books.google.com/books?id=wvSMDwAAQBAJ

Rose, G., & Bingley, A. (2019). Creative methodologies in trauma-informed research. In J. Sunderland et al. (Eds.), Arts-based approaches to trauma and healing (pp. xx–xx). Routledge. https://books.google.com/books?id=MROSEQAAQBAJ

Here is What the Table Had

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.