musings-from-alexithymia

[musings-from-alexithymia]

Meta Reflection: Part Two

My freshman year of undergrad I became very close with one of my professors-Len. He witnessed me enter my first semester of college with a fire of certainty about my path personally and professionally. As the semester went on, the flames of certainty began to flutter from the winds of change, new ideas, unexpected realities, and an onset of self-discovery I did not expect. 

How could I expect it? I thought I had it all figured out. 

That was it. The idea of having it all figured out is what set me of course from my own sense of stability-because, in my head, how could anything ever go awry? By the end of the semester I changed from having a declared major to undecided, and registered for all elective courses for the spring. Dissatisfied and afraid of my own self, I found my mind and soul in conversation with Len, frustrated that all my plans have fallen to pieces. 

To give you a better sense of just how challenging that was for me, school was the only thing I ever felt in control of, it was the only thing that brought me joy, it was where I found love and comfort. I found friendship in academics instead of other humans. Learning and academic success was the only thing I was able to connect to - it was the only thing I could trust to connect to and didn’t feel afraid of. Sitting in Len’s office at the end of that first semester, in tears about my path, academically and personally, he said to me, “Joanna, I am more concerned about the people who have it all figured out than those who feel completely lost”. 

It’s been nearly a decade since that conversation and I find myself in a headspace that doesn't feel much different than that first semester of college. Despite having succeeded in many parts of my life, having failed desperately in others, and learning from every lesson there was to inhale, I’m sitting here one project away from finishing my degree and uncertain about so much.  Perhaps I’ve grown too comfortable believing that things will just “work out” and haven’t been deliberate enough, or maybe I’ve lost faith in trusting the process and am finding myself in emotional limbo. 

I started this semester navigating rough emotional and mental waters with an intensity I last experienced several years before that brought me back from my first master’s program in Northern Ireland. I lost touch with everything that helped keep me grounded in thought and rationality and when I wanted to seek the controlled comfort of an academic setting, our shared online world of schooling was far from calming. I eventually settled my bare feet back onto stable ground and built excitement for the semester and the intellectually stimulating conversations that I always so deeply crave. 

I had three goals this semester: 

Figure out what I want to do with my Phd 

Present at the Learning Sciences Graduate Student Conference 

Add something new to the foundation on which my research and educational transformation ambitions lay

Let’s talk about those.

The Phd will wait. Am I satisfied with that? Yes and no. I like plans laid out, remember? I am dissatisfied only from the prescribed notions of what “should be” that were defined by arbitrary standards and toxic judgement. I am working on letting that go. I am deeply comfortable and happy with the plan that has been put in place to figure out whether a PhD is actually what I want. I am excited about the questions I will be paying attention to that spark my curiosity, fuel my ambitions and that will guide me further into the ways I want to transform education. I am very much okay and enlightened by this plan. So, for that, I put a green check for what I hoped to accomplish this semester. The conference is a different story, but to continue on a path of listening to my mind and body and doing what I need to do, I will leave it at this: I made a choice that, at the time, was exactly what I needed. My comfort and understanding in that choice will settle, what’s right doesn’t always feel the best. 

That last goal, though, I feel good about that one. 

There were particular class sessions this semester, especially in the latter half, that opened conversations during which I was eagerly waiting to unmute myself and dig deeper into the topic, my own unraveling thoughts and curiously engage with other perspectives and insights. As is my modus operandi, I used every lecture, discussion and assignment to wrestle with how the content can uplift my ideas, answer or deepen my questions, or play a role in how I develop my research in genocide prevention. As I weaved that thread throughout each session, it was made stronger by the structure of the class wherein each previous lecture was revisited the following week and served as a purposeful transition into new content. This kept me aware of how all the concepts are connected to themselves as well as how I can continue to weave my purpose into these topics. As we discussed transfer, it provided me with an additional foot hold for making sense of the impact of transgenerational trauma and its effect on student experiences and ability to learn. This became apparent again toward the end of the semester when discussing stereotype threat and recognizing that the way individuals internalize ideas, lessons, concepts and ways of being and doing with regard to education, ourselves and our social and physical world can be challenging to overcome once those beliefs and values become deeply embedded and bleed into any new information we try to internalize. This is especially the case when the new information directly challenges those beliefs and values that define how we see the world and ourselves.

Then, even in very small ways, conversations about culture and context always found themselves in every class session-which I think is a critical focal point when discussing education, especially in the context of educational transformation. That was a persistent motivator in recognizing our collective role in the world we are building, in the social realities we generate on a daily basis that can amplify individual worlds in the best way or in the worst. 

We can often fall into talking jargon, being too research minded or outcome centered, that we disconnect from the pure humanness of every experience-the impact of small words and phrases, of smiles or rolled eyes, hello’s or scoffs, a welcoming embrace or fear of difference. There is an unwavering beauty to the human experience that is marred by the amplification of each other’s differences that are held to existential competition with grave and long lasting consequences. We have an incredibly powerful platform within our schools that is waiting idly to be engaged with-a platform that reconnects learning to who we are as individuals in all that makes us similar and different. Perhaps that sounds idealistic, but if I didn’t believe that our schools and the way in which we engage with one another in purposefully meaningful conversations about identity, history and empathy could transform our collective experience on this planet, then I would not be writing it here. I’ll leave it at that. 

[musings-from-alexithymia]

Meta Reflection

Physics is a subject I internalize much like the music I listen to. I can feel it. I can feel from it. It brings me into a reflective and contemplative space about my own-and our-existence. But I do not understand the notes. I can’t play any instruments and lack the ability to transfer the information I’ve internalized. From the little about physics I am able to tune into, my understanding of superpositions is that electrons hover in a space of an infinite possibility of positions until observed and imposed into a given reality-one among infinite other realities that you and I feel, learn, smile and smell in. I often struggle (as many do) with the uncertainty of life as random-chaotic and irrational-or as having inherent meaning to it, driven by a purpose to which all life is a part of. Whether or not we ever get those answers, the moments we experience that make up our daily interactions and experiences have meaning in this condition we call being human. Where am I going with this? 

Of the many worlds we are positioned into with every single action from the multiplicities in a superposition, this is our observed reality and our collective consciousness lies in this one reality we all agree upon as shared. Amidst the myriad cosmic uncertainties, we cannot be more confident about this sense of humanness all 7.594 billion of us feel. So I struggle-deeply-with the need to understand the human condition and its various capacities for hatred, violence, collective evil, manifestations of soul definitive beliefs of detrimental differentiation between identities, need for opposition, and the seeming ease with which we subscribe to rhetoric that deems groups of people as lesser than another.

The ability for that to happen is a characteristic of being human-it can happen as easily with love as it can with hatred so that in and of itself is not what haunts me. Our lack of understanding for just how much hatred, discrimination, violence and evil is a choice we make on a daily basis rather than an inherent belief in our core, is the facet of life I seem to have given myself to attempting to understand. How can good people, that I love with my whole heart, feel like such bad people to me? Expand that to earth’s population and we see good humans who hold beliefs destructive to the rights and wellbeing of others on a daily basis. 

I have been studying genocide since I first became obsessed with Schindler’s List when I was a kid. I became acutely aware of the existence of humanity-an awareness of life as a whole that transcended my yellow-walled bedroom in Naugatuck, Connecticut. I grew into a budding activist tackling every human rights issue I could give my attention to throughout middle and high school and then I pulled back as I began to cultivate a need to understand not how to fix all these issues we are seeing but how to prevent them-especially in the context of larger socio-economic-political processes that lead to the destruction of entire groups of people. 

I studied genocide, sociology and political science in my undergrad where I began to focus my attention on identity and experience of historically and continually targeted groups. Over time this manifested into a desire to study how trauma transcends the experience of solely the individuals targeted and bleeds into the climate of our society as a whole. In that way we are all connected and thus all have the responsibility to be conscious of our collective experience on this earth. With that consciousness comes the opportunity to cultivate behavior that recognizes our marred past in the context of human experience, become aware of our daily interactions with one another and tread toward a better future with a stronger sense of empathy toward one another. Perhaps that sounds idealistic, but if we can understand how hate is learned, can we also understand how the exact opposite manifests and use that as a deepening sense of self reflection on our impact in order to prevent atrocities? 

Developing a foundation for how human beings learn is the foundation that will allow myself and others to begin to develop mechanisms within education that are deeply human centered-that focus on identity, transgenerational trauma and empathy. Understanding how we internalize the past in order to understand our agency in creating our future is a basic tenet to which I’ve subscribed to in order to make conversations in schools about the prevention of genocide and ensuring a better future for all identities become a core in what education means. 

Over the course of the semester I want to continue to deepen my sense of the human mind in its learning processes and continue developing my research musings. I admittedly need to pick up the pace-I’m starting to feel the grad school pressure- and begin to prepare for both the LSGSC and my applied project this spring. To be honest, as impassioned as I am about my research, I am dealing with a sense of imposter syndrome with regard to the conference. Perhaps I feel misplaced because I still feel undeveloped in my research. Regardless, I am looking forward to bringing my ideas to a new audience and finding community with those who share similar research interests as well as those who are willing to listen to me ramble. 

I think it’s also time to seriously start thinking about this PhD thing. I don’t have much to say there other than the fact that I’d like to figure that out this semester, and decide whether it’s the next endeavor I need to prepare for. 

[musings-from-alexithymia]

Still. Motionless. 

Eyes closed, the sense of a delicate sway, in the slightest circular motion overwhelms the perception of his catatonic body. 

He’s standing at the central information kiosk. Champagne brogues, small perforations along the toe and heel accentuate the otherwise bland dark navy slacks and light blue button up that conforms to the crowd of men that push out of track twenty-six each morning. Less eagerly, they walk up the steps into a city of steel cages consuming  the minds and hearts of those devoted simply to making a life. This life, seemingly envisioned as an eventual reality in an endless pattern of yes’ and no’s that follow the arbitrary guideline of how to “succeed”.

This was never intended. This was not the plan; the blue button up with faux leather shoes; routine of timed entries and exits from an eight car long steel frame twice a day. He stands, unsure whether what he is feeling is truly what he is feeling, if it is feeling at all, or nothing more than a cerebral acknowledgment of his biological reaction to external stimuli. 

Is he afraid, he questions? Is his life fulfilled-professionally, personally? Does he have a capacity to love, or allow himself to be loved? Does he feel hunger or a rattling of uncertainty in his core? Is this eagerness about the pending final hours holding him back from the next forty-eight outside of the cage? Is there a longing for certain individuals? Does he dream, imagine, create? Or, is he simply feeling nothing?

Explore the nothing.

A perceived sense of nothing is heavily accompanied by the associated discomfort of being empty. But is that the case, is nothingness emptiness? A lack of depth? Is nothingness an acute awareness of lacking something-when even in that moment, that awareness constitutes something? What, then, is true nothingness, and must it be eerie, loathed and numb? Consider nothing a symbiotic yet juxtaposing sense of everything-an uninhibited acceptance of everything without bias, without fear, without prescribed notions of what one “must” in a given moment. 

Eyes still closed. Senses heightened. Grounded in a spatial awareness of the octagonal structure by which he placed himself. The shifting smells of toasted sesame and poppy from a few tracks down, accompanied by notes of fresh floral’s and warm vanilla’s from curls and bouncing tails blowing in the wind of a rushed walk. The brief flashes of brightness from behind his eyelids illuminate the rounded darkness through passing figures. Track change announcements, excited field trip goers filled with small town curiosity of an unknown world. Team leads boosting partners for big pitches, and quiet personal pep talks before life changing interviews. His delicate inhale and smooth graze from one corner of his lip to the next notes the Colombian blend awakening him. 

Nothing. His momentary everything. 

He begins to exhale. One. Two. 

A step outside of his prescribed notion of reality; the imposed sense that one must be doing in order to be.

Three. Four. 

Complete transcendence from what one “should” to a trust in all that is-this time and this place, these individuals, uncertainty and this indescribability. The process. The very one that opens his soul and heart to cosmic swirls of all possibilities.

Five. Six. 

Eyes open. 

We govern our behaviors and aspirations by standards of what we have been conditioned to believe is the “right” way to be, to move forward, to succeed-life’s do’s and do not’s if you will. In those experiences we build or we break, and we question our readiness and rightness in moments as we analyze scenarios days, months and years ahead of the now.  There is a purpose in that; as humans we must develop patterns of growth and evolve so plans, aspirations and rationalization are key. But, in the grandiosity of all that we strive for our lives to rationally become, we lose faith in the present moments that fleetingly pass through our minds and bodies that we miss the opportunity to grab and hold on to. There will always be uncertainty …that is inevitable. We learn to not fear that uncertainty and accept that regardless of whether any given moment will be a chance to build or to break, it is nevertheless the present moment. The most important moment. The most we can do, and should do, is live it, breath it, hold on to it deeply, and trust it with the rush of blood that beats our heart.

Take that which is most unknown and undefined and love it unconditionally. With uncertainty and fear. With hope and anticipation. Allow it to lift you into a place of transcendence and spark your every atom into existence.