#RethinkingStatus in Our Program

 For this last (last, last, last-minute) post, I want to think about rethinking status in our very own graduate program. When I think about status in the UNT Comm Grad Program I do not say "Ah, what a microcosm of our world," because, for obvious reasons, it is not. Few small communities are genuinely the microcosm that conventional wisdom tells us they must be. Instead, they are a specific amalgamation of community members who are brought together for some purpose. Maybe that purpose is spatial, maybe that purpose is hobbyist, and maybe that purpose is academic (and therefore sort of a combination, eh?).

Either way, a community is often shaped by a set of histories or myths that help to mediate the cultural norms that are prominent in that community. Those myths and histories are often hard to trace back to an individual, but they do a great deal to shape what is expected of the individuals who take part in that community. Here's a few norms/myths that I've noticed in our community:

• You will be tired
• You will be stressed out
• You will have to work very hard
• Your students will make your crazy
• Your mental and physical health will be impacted
  
• A graduate degree in this program will enhance your critical thinking skills
• A graduate degree in this program is worthwhile
• Completing a graduate degree in this program will force you to make sacrifices 

 For the most part, I can agree with these myths: I think that, like most myths, there's truth to them. In most cases, I agree with them wholeheartedly. However, some of the ways that the truth to these myths seems to be enacted ends up being somewhat...problematic. I've experienced an abundance of students who are so wrapped up in the perceived truth of these statements that they become their whole life. 

(The following are examples and please, please, please, do not take them as me trying to call someone out - they came out of my brain)

 

"Ohmygod I think I've only had coffee and a cheese stick to eat today."

"I swear, I've only slept an average of 3 hours each night this week."

"I was in the space until 3am last night. And the night before...and the night before."

"I think grad school might kill me, I'm just so miserable."

"I just figure I'll be miserable for the next year and a half, ya know?"

These are, by my account, harmful!! Not only does the continued verbalization of these things normalize them for you, they normalize them for others. Further, several of these statements seem to operate as a currency in our environment. Folks are making the statement about how little they slept not as an admission of guilt about not taking care of their bodies, but as a way to demonstrate how much they care, or how much they match the mythology of the program.

This, in turn, has the capacity to become a status marker. Because X has demonstrated that they are willing to take the worst care of their physical and mental health, they have demonstrated that they are the most invested in this program, and thus deserve praise and admiration. Or, X's commitment to the program in the face of their mental and physical health serves as an example of what is appropriate behavior to "fit in."

These are oversimplifications of the thought processes in peoples heads, but I think that they're uncomfortably close to the truth, and they make me worried. Why do we take for granted and perpetuate the kind of stress and lack of sleep and nutritional deprivation that is normalized for us as graduate students? I understand that part of it is due to a legitimate lack of financial means to support one's well-being, but I think that it goes much deeper than that.

I don't have the answers for this one, and I honestly don't feel like I'm engaged enough with the culture of the program to really understand it. How do you all feel? Do you feel like you're being pushed to a state of exhaustion as the norm? If so, how do we work to change that standard?

Blue Light Glasses

 Hi y'all,

It's migraine week for me! 0/10 - would not suggest. Last week was sick week, which is also unpleasant, but at least resolvable with a good dose of dayquil. Migraine week is worse, in my opinion. If you're not familiar with them, migraines are pretty unpleasant. For me, they lead to periods of nausea, exhaustion, extreme light sensitivity, and (duh) a really bad headache. For context: this week, I asked my fiance if it would be appropriate to put muscle rub on my forehead because it hurt so much. He told me no, which may or may not be true but certainly kept me from getting a mentholated rub in my eyes, so good on him. My migraines are brought on by stress, too much time in front of screens that emit blue light, drinking too much alcohol, and likely a couple other factors that I haven't had the displeasure of recognizing yet.

I spend a lot of time in front of screens between work and school, and although during the summer I was good about turning off my phone when I was in bed, sometimes after 11+ hours of attentive engagement I need some wind-down time with goofy instagram content (or an endless feed of election content, I guess). Between the lack of exposure to folks outside of our home, and the fact that I'm stressed out with school and work, I'm drinking more than usual too. If I'm tipsy, I'd rather watch TV on my laptop than do a crossword puzzle. If I'm on my laptop and tired, I might as well get in bed with it. If I'm on my laptop already, scaling down to a phone is effectively a good thing, right? If I slept poorly the night before because I was up too late, drank too much, and had a screen too close to my face, I'm stressed out the next day because I'm scatterbrained. Ad infinitum. I don't think I'm the only person going through some kind of this cycle, even if the specificity of the cycle differs from person to person. 

From an externalized perspective, there's a few obvious answers here about how to resolve things, but I don't even want to get into them, because I know what they are and they feel daunting. I want to stand on my porch drinking red wine and marveling at the little lights I impulse bought from target and finally put up today when I should have been responding to Mark about my thesis survey questions.

 

 

So big changes are daunting and make me feel a little more powerless when I already feel overwhelmed. And daunting + overwhelmed leads to anxiety leads to depression that is not well managed by 30 milligrams of Prozac a day. 

 

I'm saying no to big changes for now. Little changes though, those seem more manageable. Play with the dogs before you get on Twitter? Maybe. Take a melatonin before bed? Sure. Make sure to keep your water bottle filled? Yes. Listen to a song that lets you lose track of time? Good. Make a list of extremely cross-offable things you need to do in the morning? My gel pen is already in my hand. Use your blue light glasses that make your eyes look (ironically but charmingly) blue? Yes, please, take them off of the top of your head they do no good there.

Again, I'm not the first person to try to recalibrate my brain towards little steps of positivity, but I do know that hearing it over and over can make a difference sometimes. On a car ride last week, I was listening to the most recent episode of Reply All, which also addressed the general state of our happiness (but spoke less about our own self-defeating tendencies). I'd suggest listening to it, if it appeals to you. The Reply All boys are kind and make me laugh and act like real people. They ask questions that are hard, and questions that are fun, and talk about the things that makes them smile, and also their anxieties and fears. For me, the visibility is nice. This episode in particular ended with a call to their audience to send in a voice memo of the little things in their lives that were making things better for them during this hard and strange and lonesome time. They'll air those voice memos soon and both the visible path of that process and the fact that other people are offering vulnerability and a check on the hardness of reality will likely soothe me. After that the semester will end, and then a year after that, my time in graduate school will end and hopefully in the midst of that COVID will be under control.

Until then, I'm trying to get myself to remember the little things that I can do for myself, and to let some of the little things go.

***A note: I know this post wasn't about #rethinkingstatus - I promise we'll be back to regularly scheduled programming soon! There's an argument to be made about how the discussion of mental health and discomfort is in itself a breakdown of the ways that we traditionally conduct status, but I don't have the words to elucidate it right now. Maybe one of you do :)

Waiting...

I've been thinking a lot about waiting tables this week. I'm glad that I don't do that anymore, because we're in the midst of a pandemic and because for several of the past few days I have hardly wanted to get out of bed, nevermind to go smile at people and sell them pasta. I also don't miss the utter disdain that people have for folks in the service industry. The servers, bussers, hostess, and kitchen staff that diners interact with are often seen as mere objects - either a hindrance or a conduit to them getting what they want. Restaurant ownership often treats you a similar way, as if you are disposable. If there are moments of appreciation they are short lived, and generally predicated on nightly sales. 

I'm not the first person to remark on these dynamics, and I certainly won't be the last. If you're looking for more food industry toxicity, the recent and horrifying story about Mission Chinese will be right up your alley. Reading this piece brought me so viscerally back into kitchens and dining rooms of my past, even though I can fortunately say that I was never in quite so caustic of an environment. I'm sure that it did for many others too.

The thing about restaurants is that they provide a direct linkage between public and private, making your screaming toddler a visible occurrence for your fellow diners, and offering you solace in the form of a meal when you're feeling down (or hungover). I think that this is a phenomenally positive thing, because these communal spaces, and the spaces where our lines are blurred allow us simultaneous exposure to difference, and opportunity to escape our own tiny reality. They are both intimate and public, in a delightful sort of way. I think other people feel similarly - in general, people seem to like going to restaurants. If they didn't, I don't think they'd still be around.

So why can't people seem to put these two parts of their brains together? If I like restaurants, why am I seemingly incapable of being kind to my server? How can I so easily dismiss them as a person not worthy of my kindness or respect? The question again comes down to a complex relationship of status and the associated perception of that status. These status orientations are constantly in flux, and they determine what we deem to be appropriate behavior. They also point to a serious issue: culturally, there seems to be an assumption that if there is a certain type of status gap (i.e. I am your server, you are my customer), then the person with the higher degree of status is not required to act with common decency.

I'm thinking about all of this because of the Mission article, because my brain is a dumpster fire right now, and because I sincerely miss eating too-spicy-for-me red curry and drinking slightly too much white wine. It does relate though, I promise. In the context of our conversation about re-imagining educational spaces a la hooks, I was left thinking primarily about the "how." How do we design those spaces so that students and teachers alike can engage with one another in meaningful, vulnerable, and productive ways? How do we change our norms of discussion and understanding so that they don't only center hegemonic viewpoints and - moreover - that the very idea that centering non-hegemonic viewpoints isn't caustic to so many folks.

To me, the questions about these environments are linked. The way that we engage with one another, the kind of empathy and vulnerability that we have, whether we consider our actions at a later point in time should be part and parcel of both of these environments. Just because you leave the (ideal) classroom does not mean you are exempt from behaving in this way. Retooling these norms and these behaviors takes a great deal of work in all of our environments and social structures. That's a big, big job. Recognizing this, we can either say "welp, that's too big of a task," or we can approach it with a little caution and fear, but also with the mindset that we deserve to live in a world where we treat each other well. I don't know exactly how to do that, but I do have an inkling that it starts with kindness and that it happens piece by piece.

I'd Love to Help

 This semester (and forevermore), I want to spend some time thinking about status in the classroom. Both 'status' and 'classroom' are flexible terms in my consideration, and it's likely that the way that these terms are interpreted will vary from week to week, but the core of what I'm considering will stay the same. How do we interpret hierarchies in our environment, and how does that relate to our capacity to teach and learn effectively?

This week, I'd like to consider training within the corporate environment. As a part-time-trainer (part-time-administrator, part-time help desk gal, etc. etc.), I have direct exposure to folks across the company. In general, I try to take a status-neutral approach to assisting people. In training, I work to speak clearly, leave space for questions, and err on the side of providing excess access to resources. In administration, I work to act diplomatically, increase accessibility, and err on the side of providing excess access to resources. In ticketing, I work to be courteous and prompt, and to err on the side of providing excess access to resources. Do you sense a theme?

Status in the corporate world is a question of how you appear, who you know, and the previous exposure that an individual has had to your department. This is similar to the classroom environment in many ways, but it differs in a key way: your teachers are not always going to be of a "higher" status than you, at least not in terms of pay or organizational hierarchy. However, a degree of "high" status can be achieved in a variety of ways. For example, if you are a SME (Subject Matter Expert) in a topic, then you are given more cultural capital, at least in that arena. Because specialties are both defined and expected, this type of fluidity in status arrangements happens all the time. However, there is a degree of status or respect that is often assigned via age, race, gender, and degree of exposure. Do you know someone? Do you know who they work for? Do you like that department? Do you think that they should have control over the work that you do? All of these conversations go into the instant mental calculation of how we suss up one another. Further, it's how I, as an "Analyst IV," a 23-year-old woman, who has been stopped multiple times in the bathroom by other women who incredulously inform me that "you look like you're 14," am one of the primary administrators and trainers for our company's core set of collaboration tools. Would you like to learn how to use Zoom? I'd love to help.

I think a lot about how to minimize the intentional status differences in traditional classrooms, but being faced with the array and flexibility of status in the corporate environment has gotten me thinking in a different way. How status is articulated is not only a feature of the hierarchies we know and love (hate? feel meh about?), but also something that is constantly evolving, and is based on many aspects of our cultural capital. As much as there is dysfunction and uncertainty in my non-academic teaching environment, there is a certain degree of ease that I have knowing that this marker of status is up for debate. I know that this ease comes in part because I am (relatively) comfortable in my environment, and that is a privilege that is informed by other privileges like my whiteness and my degree of social comfortability, and that I try not to take that for granted.

In all: I can certainly I can muck it up with a group of trainees, but I also have the opportunity to redevelop a relationship with workers at a site 2,000 miles away who have felt alienated by the department in the past, and I get to do that while actively playing with my role. Instead of posturing myself as the leader, even in a teaching space, I try to represent myself as a capable individual, but one who is actively deferential and engaged with the specific needs of the group that I'm working with. I also try to show lightness and humor and vulnerability. Vulnerability is particularly accessible in the era of COVID, but that's a double edged sword. Will someone be charmed by your apologetic warning that you may hear a dog barking? Or will they be frustrated that I am granted the opportunity to work from home, while they are not? It's a gamble, and not one that always works out in my favor. Knowing that, I know my crutch is there if I need it: "can I show you where to find some of our additional resources?"