Read on Twitter
I am lying here thinking about how the day I chose to leave academia behind for good because I couldn’t compromise my ethics or my health was the same day I went in for my second round of nerve blocks. January 4th, a month ago.
I’m thinking about this because I’m in pain. I am just feeling the migraine ease after six hours. The muscles in my neck are standing down for now. The medication for nausea has kicked in enough to make me feel less acutely alarmed.
I remember that I was so terribly anxious about wanting to get my nerve blocks because I couldn’t possibly teach in pain. And then as it turned out I couldn’t teach for other reasons, more than just my individual pain. I needed to do what was ethically and pedagogically right.
So now as I am lying here, I realize how the entirety of my journey with pain has been about steeling myself against it, willing it into submission, meeting it with anything but gentleness because I needed to be in less pain for something or someone else.
I have spent decades clenching my jaw or gripping my chair or my clothes or my arms when I was in pain in class and couldn’t leave. I have spent time trying not to pass out, or passing out and then going straight back to work or school.
And it occurs to me now that perhaps I have a chance, finally, maybe, to be in a different relationship with my pain. I’m learning how to attend academic events and actually do what my body needs in that moment. Sometimes I just curl up in bed with my computer beside me.
I have endured physical pain only to spend time in academic spaces that themselves caused or aggravated pain. I mean the bullshit of academic institutions more broadly as much as I specifically mean classrooms with chairs that hurt and lights that make my eyes water.
I was already struggling with chronic illness so much in the first year of my PhD that I commuted from my house to my sister’s house, halfway between here and the university, so I could sleep there and not have to get up quite so early to be in class. That was 11 years ago.
I have been finding so many creative ways to adapt to pain and illness not because I deserved gentleness but because I had to be in class. I had to be at work. And so my body curled around that pain so tightly and made it worse.
I defended my PhD after a term where I lost my voice three times with colds and then finally, a flu that hit hard on a December night. I had barely recovered in time to defend. I passed with no revisions. And then...I couldn’t hold it together anymore.
In the time since I finished my PhD I finally learned what was wrong: all the weird joint pain and passing out and suspiciously high heart rate when standing. I thought knowing the names for my pain - Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, dysautonomia - would make it better. Easier.
But then I hit my head and I had pain that was no longer possible to ignore. It passed a limit of what I had previously been able to tolerate, and I tried really hard to pretend to be an academic. I had no paid leave, so I just kept going as I had kept going every time before.
In the fellowship I had after my postdoc, I tried again to work so hard and go to the office when I could but my neck and my head were just in so much pain. I was too ashamed to ask for help. Or to postpone the fellowship - that didn’t even cross my mind until this second.
All this to say that I have for so long tried to get my pain under control because I have both needed and wanted to be an academic, and I know that I can’t separate my experience of worsening health and injury from my time spent in academia. They shaped each other.
And now, I wonder if I have a chance for things to be a different. My body still tightens around a migraine as if I have to be up for class or to present a conference paper with jet lag. Academia made it impossible to trust that I had any time for pain to be and then to pass.
Don’t get me wrong. I would very much simply like to be in less pain. I find head and neck pain to be debilitating, and this is the second night this week that I have felt utterly and completely undone by it. (Less so now, as the migraine eases and I have less distress.)
I want to learn how to breathe when I’m in pain. Deep, loud breaths, the kind we are discouraged from taking in public. I want to learn how to let my shoulders relax so I don’t aggravate my neck more than it is already aggravated.
It’s a year into the pandemic and being home and my body still doesn’t trust that I’ll lie down and take breaks when I’m in pain because I have more years of leaving the house and having to pretend I’m not in pain than I do getting to just quickly lie on my bed during my workday.
I might have an opportunity to relate differently to my pain, at least partially. Work is still work and I’m still at the computer a lot but I might be finally ready to process some of the emotions around the physical experience of pain that academia made it impossible to do.
All that to say that tonight was the first night where I really felt a moment of deep, loving gentleness towards my pain, a gentleness absent the rage and resentment I usually have towards it, and in turn towards my body and myself. And it just cracked open this little hope.
The back of my head hurts. It hurts and I would prefer it not to. But for a moment I felt able to be with it in a different way, and to know why and how that is possible now that I’ve really, really left academia as a career path.
