Sometimes a memory surfaces of an experience I had while backpacking through Europe, at age 19. I carried the same heavy Mountainsmith 65 liter backpack I’d used to climb Mt. Rainier and lead backpacking trips at a summer camp in the Colorado Rockies, and the same attitude of exploration and desire for new vistas, carrying all I needed in my snail shell of a pack. I eventually sold that pack and downsized my travel and backpacking kit, in an effort to travel more gently to myself in the world. Discovering more gentleness within and for myself has finally brought more ability to take compassionate care of myself while traversing challenging memories, and to honor my own story.
Early in my journey, I took a ferry from the beautiful White Cliffs of Dover to France, landing in Calais. As the boat prepared to empty, I needed to use the restroom. So I found my way through the white decking, there were a couple people lined up for the single stall room ahead of me. I waited my turn, increasingly anxious in the flow of disembarking passengers that I would get stuck on the boat. Soon before I was up, a group of drunk French women in garish makeup arrived, 3 or 4 of them. They were still having their party. When it was my turn to pee, one of them grabbed the door and tried to get in ahead of me, but I was faster. They began to yell at me in French. I had put my pack down and was about to sit on the toilet, with my pants halfway down, when one of them somehow yanked the door open. Then two of them grabbed my arms and tried to pull me out of the bathroom, but my pack was in the way. I managed to protestingly push them off, get the door closed again and finish my business, as they yelled at and mocked me as I exited. By then, there was nobody else left on the boat but me, the women, and the crew. I tried to mention the incident to the impatient crew member at the exit before walking the long ramp to shore, but he just shrugged. I went on my way, shaken, to try to find my way to my meal and lodging as fast as I could.
It was an upsetting, humiliating moment. I was trying to take care of a basic human need, had waited my turn, and so cruelly had my privacy violated by that chaotic gang in such an ugly way. I felt very alone in the world, and that I had no recourse but to try at all costs to avoid groups like that. I took the Chunnel on my return trip to study abroad for a semester in London.
That travel and subsequent semester living abroad was filled nonstop with startling and surprising encounters, both enchanting and discomfiting. By the time I got back after having been on the go for so long, juggling the constant concerns of finding hostels, food, getting to what I wanted to visit, navigating different cultures, keeping track of everything, my nervous system had become pretty wound up. It took some months to process all of the different experiences and the chaos of the world at large.
In the warmly lit classroom of my small liberal arts college a month or so into the fall of my senior year, I found myself feeling like I was just in the right place at the right time, somewhere I wanted to stay forever. The class on feminist literature and film took place two evenings per week with an additional film screening. I had slipped into feeling deeply co-regulated with my brilliant butch professor. My ideas became effusively lofted and my experiences gained context in the scope of world and literary history as I was encouraged to “unpack your ideas” and “externalize more.” Not only that, I was suddenly getting needs I hadn’t even realized I had had met. Needs for approval, support, encouragement to go to grad school, having my sexual identity validated as she regularly participated in the lgbtq club I helped lead one evening per week, being told I was smart, having my skills recognized, having someone outline a future pathway where she believed I could be successful.
Someone who not only fawned over but also confided in me, and even needed my supportive presence. Not only that: feeling that someone found my body attractive, was flirting with me: I experienced myself for the first time as a full woman who was being desired in a way that I found that I really wanted to be desired. It was so natural to flirt back, I surprised myself with the new part of me which had been unleashed. I was being taken seriously as a scholar, and as a woman. I felt cherished and tuned into, at every level.
She was often one for dramatic gestures. When I accidentally dropped a piece of paper during a film screening introduction, she would leave the podium in the middle of her talk to swoop up the aisle to pick it up with a flourish and return it to me. “Yes, my dear,” she would say when I raised my hand in class. My friends in the class teased me about it. After a lgbtq meeting on safe sex where we embarrassingly discussed dental dams (we were the generation raised in the shadow of the AIDS crisis), she made sure to pull me aside to inform me that nobody really used them. In the next class alongside a literary mention of syphilis, she said: “The safest sex, of course, is masturbation!” as she looked at me.
We effortlessly seemed to read one another. I absorbed all of this like a sponge and took it deeply into my being. My confidence in my intellect and in general soared. I felt so much gratitude and awe. Awe for the sense of understanding that bound us together. So natural. It began to feel like an instinctive, primal bond necessary for survival. I felt embraced for all that I was and could be, and needed for my unique being and understanding. A vast new connective space of shared power had been revealed to me and I felt seen and cared about, as we mirrored each other in the midst of discussing psychoanalytic theory and women’s narrative literature, and as she took part in club events I sometimes ran. During office hours she would winkingly recommend I read the books The Bonds of Love by Jessia Benjamin, and The Practice of Love, which was on film theory. It seemed we could even control time and space. I took that limerant waltz.
We were a united front against the world, and against whatever sufferings and inconveniences she was facing from the college administration which she had deemed incompetent, annoying colleagues of hers, the persecuting enemies of hers in her field, or her allegedly depressed or deranged exes. Being confided in at this level felt so familiar, as my dad had often confided in me his dissatisfactions with my mom, his colleagues and extended family. But WE were allied in our joy in the true causes of feminist lesbian liberation, literature, and the world of ideas.
On that island of perceived safety, I also began to realize and mourn things about my family. I went through a deep grief about the love and validation I had missed out on from parents who, in spite of their love and good intentions, had their own limitations and could not fully provide what I had needed. Bittersweet because of my current state of happiness and increasing fulfillment in feeling so fully met. I didn’t really even have the words for it at the time. The birth of a new soulfulness.
It was a seismic shift, and directly impacted my ideas about myself, my potential, the worlds I could belong to. I became dissatisfied with some things about myself that I wanted to improve and grew like a weed, intellectually, personally, and even spiritually with new ambition and confidence.
At one point, after an evening lgbtq club meeting, as we were exiting the building she said “my car’s down there,” and we fell into step walking together right towards it, but at the last moment, I turned off for the library. I had had more casual, experimental sex with other students – but this was different, and I didn’t feel ready for it. In class the next day, she remarked: “There are the women you sleep with, and then there are the women you marry,” looking meaningfully at me.
I began to feel more isolated, separated from my peer group by my ecstatic, almost febrile experience of a special shared connection that I instinctively knew not to tell anyone about, but that separation seemed to matter less when I believed that I had been so deeply received and understood; maybe I had something better.
Because of my blossoming intellectual interest combined with renewed interest in my heritage, I had signed up for her second course in the spring semester, but this unfolded differently. She seemed almost disappointed that I was there, even possibly bored with me. She became more distant, calling on me less often in class though she still attended lgbtq club meetings and flirted with me outside of class. This was accompanied by an increasing, frightening vulnerability as I continued to seek her admiration but was not quite sure where I stood. “I really trust you” I had told her one day, wanting to convey the vulnerability I was feeling, which was now in her hands. “Thanks, that’s really sweet,” she said. Once or twice she made some cynical remark that cut me, but then quickly said “just kidding.” I worked even harder on the class material and did wonderfully in all my other classes and my senior thesis on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in a different department. I was still inspired, but unsettled.
I felt academically like I had really found my footing, but also like there was so much more to learn, like I was just beginning to grow at the bottom of a big trellis in that new field, and that I needed and wanted to stand on my own feet in order to be able to stand even better in the space of whatever relationship it was. To feel less dependent. This led me to bury some academic needs beyond the class minimum in order to perpetuate my new exciting status of being treated more as a peer or romance than a student as it became clear that maybe I couldn’t have both. No, I did not want a demotion, I liked being relied on by someone I so admired, it made me feel special, and I wanted to show I was sophisticated. She had encouraged me to go to grad school; maybe that would be enough, and I could take care of the footwork to make it happen on my own. So some of my student needs for guidance or budding intellectual interests went underground, because she was surprisingly not seeming into those anymore. I sensed that in acknowledging or putting them forward, it would be too much, now that managing the relationship was my job, too, and she seemed to be bored with the academic part of things. If I brought them forward, I might have to sacrifice the very fulcrum of my growth and new state of being; it would disrupt our shared intersubjective reality that superseded and tunneled through any power constructs (as the Bonds of Love described them)– trappings that my academic needs would reinvoke. I felt like maybe I’d done something wrong by enrolling in the second course. But she invited me to lectures by visiting professors in the field and introduced me to her colleagues almost as a peer, and complimented me on the alumni panel I’d organized for the lgbtq club.
I had learned to sit with the uncertainty, my lack of control of the situation but welter of feelings, and trust that over time, I would find out, and that she knew what she was doing and ultimately had some sort of control or plan. I wondered if maybe I just wasn’t naughty enough and found solace in the ritual of smoking; she smoked and it was quite a dramatic action for me to take as an avid outdoorswoman and athlete. It had troubled me that she smoked, and I wondered if I could start and quit, and then she would of course quit, too. I could rescue her.
After the semester ended, she greeted me warmly and asked me pointedly if I intended to stay in the area. We shared a long meaningful hug that might have gone further had I not needed to request a recommendation letter that compelled me to behave more formally. She remarked that my visit was like a breath of fresh air, and that she didn’t know what she’d do without me. All of that magically wiped out any uncertainty about where I stood that had accrued the prior spring.
And yet, I wondered, if anything were realized, could I really support her full emotional weight which would surely land on my shoulders, and did I want to be tied down on the brink of possible independent adventures in the world? I didn’t even know how to cook. Would I get to have a big meaningful career, too? What would it be like to sleep together? Would I be able to stand my ground if we fought? I wasn’t so sure. Would she like to hike? Could I be happy living more permanently somewhere without mountains? Would it even work? What did I really want? Did she want kids? Did I? I had never had a relationship, and I was intimidated by the thought and by my own inexperience. I mentioned that I had a summer job lined up and wanted to give some thought to my next steps. Even as there was still a lot of confusion and ambiguity surrounding that experience, like: Why me? What was really happening? What had really happened? What control did I have over it? How could I affect it? Did I cause it in some way? Was it ok? Where did I really stand? What did she really want? What were my options? What could be acknowledged? What could the future hold? No answers that I could discern by not asking.
The summer after I graduated college, after I finished my summer job, still aglow from the prior year, my family suddenly fell apart. If I’m honest, at that time I probably wanted someplace soft to fall and all the tenderness in the world, to be somewhere stabilizing when that happened, but didn’t know how to ask for it. It pushed me to a tipping point as my system went into overdrive to escape that overwhelming situation where both distressed parents were pulling me in different directions but I had no actual control over how anything unfolded, I helped my younger sister get stabilized and pack up to return to college in Maine for her next semester, and took the GRE exams. In the midst of that crisis, I wrote her a love letter. In some ways, it was also a crie de cour as I saw the foundations of what I had grown up understanding to be love demolished before my eyes and I wanted to stake myself to my own new experience. She eventually, a couple weeks later, impersonally responded that she could not get involved, and could not take responsibility for my feelings, and did not want to talk on the telephone. But of course, I reasoned, what else could she really say in writing given that she was just coming up for tenure, despite all she’d said implicitly about it and all the many indications she’d given me that she was as attracted as I was and cared about me romantically. The last thing I wanted to do was jeopardize her career, our possible future in any way, so I didn’t ask my questions. I reconnected with a couple of old friends I hadn’t seen for awhile for support around my questioning dejection and also my family.
By the autumn I’d moved to Europe to teach English, where I stayed very busy navigating employment and visa situations, learning all I could (language, culture, literature), and, after a year, applying to grad school. Nonetheless, the sonorant, gentle voice that had encouraged and flattered me the prior year had moved into my mind and heart, her words a presence that urged me on and buoyed me into the following couple of years even after I had “left.” One foot stayed bound to that time as the root I would grow from and thought I could reunite with after more time abroad gaining life experience and learning.
In the throes of trying to survive, I didn’t have much time to pine away – but the idea that she was just across the ocean and believed in me, that my work was in service to shared goals, and that we could reunite in some form later, even if only professionally, provided a sense of comfort and security in the hardest moments. Step after step, I found my way, holding my precious red thread.
We stayed in friendly touch via email over the next year and a half, as she had encouraged. I shared pieces of my life abroad and congratulated her when she shared that she had gotten tenure. I also ran my grad school acceptance options by her, partially because I wanted her to feel like she was looped into the decision, and secondly because I didn’t know who else to ask, who would know both me and the field. We had a brief phone call about it, where she confusingly said: “The more the merrier, huh? Just kidding, I think you’ll do well.” So I thought that she was on board with my choice, having had the opportunity to warn me of anything not in my – or our – best interests. She responded with a little more information about the strengths of each program, and that she didn’t think I could make a wrong decision.
So I visited three on the west coast, eventually landing in X (where she was an apparently disengaged alum of 10 years and had in my senior year once said she could really see me at) with a fellowship. I thought I could do well and even find answers to my lingering questions unobtrusively across the country from her, in a place that would still give me some intellectual familiarity and what I needed to stand better on my own feet, to grow into the peer role that I’d been assigned but that had felt too big for me before. To not just be treated like a peer, but to actually become one. To be able to play well together in the world of ideas and eventually maybe more – perhaps even over the course of a lifetime – as I could bring all my new knowledge to bear. One long beautiful conversation. Starting grad school was a tender space of development, because I now needed to take risks with my ideas that until then I’d only been able to work with in isolation while living abroad on my own for a couple of years, without any forum for discussion. I needed to keep building the voice I had begun to develop. To professionalize. I was on my path.
All of these seemed basic needs in understanding myself and where I belonged in the world, and in growing into whatever potential I had. I paid attention to whatever meaning and glimmers of answers I could get from the literature and amid the new caste system of characters. I put my full being into the effort as my work became central.
At the same time, I wanted to show her that I had brought something back, and that I was on my way: assemble the shards I had collected over the few years into a great big mirror for her that showed that beyond the mirror I had re-created for her, there was me with my gratitude, collegiality, respect and care, in our familiar shared language. If I could somehow inhabit the mental, emotional and physical space of being there, where she was and wasn’t, perhaps I could understand what had happened too, and heal or meet my own needs and open questions. I strove to be the best student.
Everything started off wonderfully. I was thrilled to be back in an academic setting and did well in my classes, got along with my fellow grad students, and even secured another fellowship for the summer so I wouldn’t need to start teaching until the following year. Mount Rainier gleamed on the horizon on clear days, a touchstone of achievement that anchored me to my ambition.
Our emails had trailed off, but then the department head announced that my professor had volunteered to organize a big alumni conference in my program which would be preceded by a grad student conference the day before. I was curious and felt both reassured that I’d get to reconnect with her in a professional setting, and some pressure to perform, because I wanted her to be proud of me.
I didn’t know what happened when one day in the spring of my first year she walked into my shared windowless grad student office, which was bathed in headache-inducing fluorescent light, took my officemate (another student from my same undergrad institution) to coffee, and stonewalled me. Like she didn’t even recognize me. I felt suddenly, shockingly intruded on in my new professional space.
The blinding gut punch and sense of impending doom from her cold visitation sent me into the arms of first a colleague with whom I’d become friends, then the university counseling center. When I finally emailed her a week later to ask what was wrong, she had the undergrad college psychiatrist on the other side of the country call me as a proxy unexpectedly at home on a weekend as I was working on my conference paper two weeks before the big conference. The psychiatrist communicated that the professor had “moved on” and that my questions were “inappropriate” and that I was not to attend the professor’s panel at the upcoming conference. What? Moved on from what, and to where? Had I done something wrong? I was simply unable to believe that someone who I’d been led to understand would be in solidarity with my efforts the way that I was with hers, actually wasn’t. It must be a trick, she must be doing this for my own eventual benefit, but what was it? Was she trying to hide us for some reason because she didn’t want me to get hurt, and did she plan to make it up to me later? Was there some big misunderstanding? I thought I was safe? I thought I was landing and could again unpack my experiences and ideas? What the hell was going on? I had the psychiatrist talk to my therapist at the time, then I heard the words “bad boundaries,” “we agree the problems are on the other side,” and “it’s like you two are holding a bomb.” What? My steps in my new program became more uncertain, and I wasn’t even officially out of the closet yet there beyond a handful of fellow grad students, I didn’t see it as relevant to my work.
I was unable to believe that I had simply been abandoned, that the ground had been swept out from under me. I was unable to believe my new well-meaning professors who gently let me know that she’d been saying negative things to them about me and had outed me. I thought that they had something against her, did not like my allegiance, and wanted to drive a wedge between us. “It’s not your problem, but it’s your problem to deal with. You may want a lawyer,” one senior prof frighteningly advised. I thought she was blowing things out of proportion because I was sure that my professor and I could just calm each other down, like before. The shattering was a long process with wave after overwhelming wave of confusion, agonizingly deep hurt, trying to assess realities that simply didn’t match up, or create any narrative that I could understand. Trying to stay afloat in a workplace that I no longer felt safe in understanding, I felt completely separated from my department by my experience, but also bound even tighter to it by virtue of my ever increasing isolation with the certainty that the nobody in the external world would ever understand what had transpired on what felt like an entirely different planet.
I managed to pull myself together to deliver my paper, which actually went really well, although the professor had scheduled a large meeting exactly during my presentation time that took away most of the audience. During the following reception when everyone was in the same room, I was stunned to see the professor being publicly affectionate with another woman. By that point, I really wanted to go home, but the grad students were required to do the dishes from the reception afterwards so it was a terribly long evening that went on so long that I then had to wait forever for the infrequent bus service. I stayed home alone most of the next day, while everyone I knew was at the conference that I wasn’t allowed to attend part of. That hurt. When I went in for the afternoon sessions and sat down with my fellow grad students, she pointed me out snickered together with the woman I’d seen her being affectionate with and also with my graduate advisor, it became clear the three were a pretty tight clique. We didn’t talk at all during either day of the whole conference though at one point she came and stood right behind me with her back to me.
A week later, there was another department event which included an undergrad play and an honor society induction where my cohort of 4 needed to get up on stage to receive our certificates. The professor appeared. As she and my grad advisor were coming out of the bathroom as I was in the hallway going in, I caught a very dark, angry, cornered look in the professor’s eyes as she spotted me. She smiled from the audience and took a photo of me as I accepted my certificate, and then left without a word. What the hell?
I later learned that the other woman was her long-term girlfriend, who she’d never told me about – or, rather, had briefly mentioned as an old grad school friend. Apparently, they were long-distance together even during the same time that she developed a romantic bond with me. And I learned that they had met several years before in my same program, and the girlfriend was already a peer in the same field, but at a different institution. And she was taller and skinnier than I was. Apparently, everyone but me had been aware of this. As the numbness wore off and the denial abated, my learning space was suddenly polluted by the new primacy of their relationship, the vaunting and meeting of my professor’s needs by the program as mine and any ideas of democracy within that setting were trampled (though she’d graduated a decade prior and lived across the country). This new awareness speared through me on a daily basis. I was nauseated and could not believe it. I’d been discarded. I was an inconvenience, had been just a plaything, a filler? Or what? Did her girlfriend know about me? Had I unwittingly participated in an emotional affair? The idea revolted me, having just experienced the devastation of my father’s affair play out in my own family. Maybe she was just biding time and wanted me later after all? I had long since come to the realistic assessment that she might have little flings while I wasn’t around, as would I, but that I probably didn’t want to know about them. I hadn’t volunteered information about my doings while away. But why wouldn’t she talk to me about it? What had I gotten wrong? How had I not known?
Much later, one visiting professor let me know that my paper had been much better than the professor’s girlfriend’s paper, which was very strangely about the same book I presented on, which I’d written for one of my seminars. I can see now that that probably also got me into some trouble.
The vagaries of who had power over what at any given time within my department, the attacks and obstructions, the shifting goalposts in terms of what I needed to do, the broken promises about advising, no real feedback more than half of the time. Library books stolen from my office. Grad students used as pawns in the professors’ agendas against one another. Almost half of the faculty on an annual leave at a time. Most professors married to each other and/or to former students. Rumors of organized conferences and ideas stolen from visiting professors. The icky advanced male grad student who controlled my teaching schedule and hit on me. I did not want to burden the handful of profs who were shouldering the bright spots of interesting classes and helpful feedback, some of whom were in precarious pre-tenure positions. I did not want to admit the mess into my few positive experiences, when I most needed clarity about my work. I needed to try to compartmentalize my own problems, it was not safe to react in any way.
I became deeply uncomfortable with her unexpected and repeated participation in my program, where she would fly across the country to suddenly appear for some meeting or something, then disappear again. But there was nothing I could do about it. I was not allowed to have boundaries of my own there.
Apparently, my inescapable grad advisor (who was also simultaneously the acting chair and professor for two of my courses) was another past or present romance and friend who was not out of the closet. She seemed to take all of her life dissatisfaction out on me. Slut-shamed me (though I mostly dressed in baggy clothes which hid my body), screamed at me, forgot advisory meetings, ignored me in class, would assign low grades but not return work, excluded me from fellowship lunches. I found myself unwittingly, unwillingly embroiled, mired in a quicksand I tried in every way to navigate, a shame that didn’t really belong to me, that took years to shake off. Trying to grab onto whatever ropes I could to reach safety, trying to hold fast onto my bond to the literature. But barely telling anyone about my distress because it was so personal and I didn’t want to put a foot wrong. Also, the shame of it: I was afraid they would see me as damaged goods and reject me.
When I was democratically voted onto an advisory board committee position by fellow grad students at the start of my second year, she called me into her office where I sat down in my khaki pants and grey sweater. She demanded that I give it to a pet student of hers instead, because unbeknownst to me my undergrad professor was on the 20-person committee that met quarterly and didn’t want me in the same room. She screamed at me the startling, distressing news that the professor felt harassed by me and that I should have known better than to run for office as I cried and lifted off somewhere to the ceiling above my body. Then I had to go teach my first class ever in a different language right afterwards, I felt terrible that that was my students’ first impression of me. I was advised by a senior prof to keep my head down and not make waves if I wanted to survive. At the same time, my family a few states away continued to heartrendingly split at the seams and was unable to provide emotional support, and I found myself drained rather than replenished after holiday visits back. University counseling was mostly pills and supportively bilging a water from a boat with a hole in it, basic stabilization while it took time and energy from my work. I wanted to prove myself in spite of it, show that I could handle it. I also wanted to try to penetrate the opacity of what had been hidden from me even as I became increasingly immobilized. I had been demoted to worse than a student: a grocery-getting servant, a child sent to the corner, a fish in a barrel. But I wasn’t someone who gave up easily. I joined an interdepartmental study group to get some breathing room, which my graduate advisor frowned on; she even sent an advisee to visit a meeting and come back to tell everyone in my department how boring and lame it was. Promisingly, my study group included a number of union organizers.
A senior professor offered to request a mediation between my graduate advisor and myself, but recommended I wait until after passing my MA exams before doing so, because otherwise there was a good chance that I wouldn’t pass. So I passed my MA exams in 3 different centuries of literature and we requested mediation. My grad advisor refused.
I got a little respite to study abroad again for a year in a small university town after passing my MA exams, and there was no time to take any further steps in the university complaint process before departing. I taught awesome English classes, attended seminars, and spent more time in therapy. When I discovered that the first therapist I saw there had been billing my insurance for visits which never transpired, I found a second one, who helpfully administered EMDR. With new information from my granddad, I connected with distant relations for the first time, building an alternative sense of family as I climbed upwards and outwards on my family tree. I started feeling well again. My graduate advisor stayed in frequent contact with the professor I was working with abroad, so it didn’t feel right to consult her about what to do about my program or to even share any information that might get back to my graduate advisor.
Close to Christmas I went dancing at a lesbian club, and the undergrad professor appeared there. She crashed right into me from the side as I was walking across the room, caught me around my waist, her hand grazing the side and underside of my breast as I was thrown off balance, then disappeared. I couldn’t believe my eyes at first, but it was her. Still wounded, defensive, and feeling vulnerable there on my own, I ignored her when she reentered the room. I knew that she wasn’t in town to stay, and had that girlfriend back in the U.S. If she couldn’t find a way to respect and have a reasonable conversation with me during one of her visits to my program, I certainly didn’t want to be just another port of call she could just slide into. And: this was my space now, and I intended to occupy it. I drank beer and danced unabashedly as a big fuck you. She was not a dancer. As I was sitting down at the end of the evening, she walked past me from behind and brushed her sleeve against my back and back of my neck, and left. I didn’t see her there again. No communication from her before or after. And yet, I wondered: “What if?” I found a lesbian tango group and didn’t return to the club often following that.
I was offered an additional exchange year abroad by my department because they had nobody else to send but needed a warm body to fill the spot. I took it, still feeling uneasy about returning and thinking about transferring though I had established two solid, trustworthy dissertation advisors who wanted to help me succeed in spite of it all. I managed to secure a promise that I would get a new grad advisor when I returned, and that there would be no issue with course credits. By the end of the second year away, I decided to continue forward in my degree program; I was feeling better; at least it was a known quantity, and my language fluency was by then really solid. My EMDR therapist bit his lip for a moment as I discussed this decision. Starting over somewhere new seemed insurmountable as many adaptations as I’d already made, and I was low on vim. I worried about getting recommendation letters. Though I had been doing generally well, the two classes I’d taken with my graduate advisor had tanked my GPA. I didn’t know who to ask for advice about other programs, my general trust level being what it was. I had presented papers at two conferences while abroad, which helped me to feel better about conferences.
So I (stupidly, I felt for awhile) and sadly said goodbye to my lovely new girlfriend of 6 months (a psychology grad student at the time, who I’m glad for that she’s now happily married to a woman and they have a couple of kids), my distant relatives, and a couple of other friends and went back, ready to jump into PhD work.
When I returned, the chair who’d promised me a new advisor had gone on leave, and I was back with the same one as before, the one who had refused to have a mediation. I was required to take another of her courses in the fall, though she’d not returned work from the prior two. Another low grade for hard, smart work. I didn’t feel safe and couldn’t fight or freeze or escape so I was just really sweet and hardworking. At renewal time, she rejected my credits and work done abroad, the two conference papers I’d given there. She smilingly said I was disqualified from the program and could not continue, and could not appeal the decision. Was it because of what had happened at the dance club in Europe? Or was it the same obstructionism as before?
Besides requesting mediation, I had visited the ombudswoman a few times, taken all avenues to gently address the maltreatment so I could attain more safety and a more viable path, each one a dead end. When I finally raised my concerns – with proof – just after the end of my final quarter to the university Title IX office and sought recourse, the total failure to respond was deafening. My undergrad college dean also effectively shrugged, saying that since most things had happened at my university and the others that had happened at my former college couldn’t be proved in a she said/she said situation – it wasn’t their problem. I talked to a couple of lawyers, who found it too messy to take on. I finally got a response from a dean, who wanted me to resubmit everything again, but by that time I had started a new job and it was simply too destabilizing to go back through it all again.
Within a year of leaving grad school and after I’d found a job in a different state, I was contacted on an online support forum I sometimes visited by a French woman, a translator with part African heritage who had relocated from France to Toronto. It turned into an online romantic correspondence for a few months, but she was not able to connect via Skype because of her debilitating shyness. She liked to give somewhat controlling advice, came off as slightly juvenile at times, her English was not excellent, and she began to ask very prurient, probing questions about my experience with the professor that I had to ask why she wanted to know, and then strange ones about things like a piece of clothing I wore sometimes while in grad school, which she could not possibly have seen. I became 99% sure it was my former grad advisor based on the writing style, prurient interest and looking up teaching schedules, and ended the communication.
I tried to move on with my life, but the mess bubbled in the background. The confusion of it all had muted me from knowing how to talk about it. Whatever power I thought I’d had, gone. My belief in my ability to take care of and fend for myself, to know who to trust, to steer clear of danger, upended. Whoever I thought I was or could be, thrown into question. What was real about my experiences, beliefs, intellect, value, body: completely into chaos. Who I could trust ever again, a mystery. The legitimacy of my being, my aspirations, negated. Any healing I’d done, reopened wounds. Any in-group solidarity about my sexual identity, vanquished; I was clearly not welcome in the academic lesbian club. The wearing degradations and abandonment and the lies and the betrayal were all that I really walked away with. My bravery and my time, squandered. My productivity, my ability to concentrate or function well, shredded. The piece of paper commemorating my MA degree “achievement” just more useless currency, more useless even than my ideas.
My ideas of myself as someone with integrity, of someone who was good and deserving of respect and dignity, vanished as the voice I had so trusted and relied on had told so many damning lies, that I went back over my actions again and again trying to figure out what I had done wrong that had led her to have those complaints, or right any misunderstandings, and to try to correct whatever offence I’d caused.
Sometimes I would still scan for answers, for the missing pieces that would explain it to me so I could know what was real. I clamored for this, my shouts were ignored. I railed on, with rage becoming sadness and desolation and then rage and then sadness again, sometimes with alcohol as an accelerant, as my feelings ricocheted in an echo chamber, against a slammed door, the very door I needed to exit. I got more therapy and could eventually start to have the reactions I’d had to stifle before.
I’ve been sometimes breadcrumbed along by the odd conference paper, concept, with perhaps some ambiguous oblique reference or small spark of empathy or understanding that seemed to speak of a hint of remorse. Just paper airplanes that would never provide anything that I really felt I needed. Paper airplanes in my interest areas that build their careers, their credit, their reputations, their cabal but that don’t help me in any way to establish for myself, or address any of my basic needs, which were completely ignored. Paper airplanes with which they only play Keep Away. They clog up the arena and create spectacles in ways that demonstrate even more hostility and gatekeeping. They call bloody murder on me and try to manipulate any available authority against me the moment I reappear in any corner of the field, whether a Zoom room on a public talk about film or large conference, as I’d sought new contexts in that small field with evaporating opportunities which to right my own intellectual boat, while they’ve done everything possible to slam and shame me back to silence. As though I was the Unabomber, though I’d never made a single threat.
The last time I saw the professor was in 2019. The field’s enormous annual conference happened in Portland, and I decided to go put my foot in the water and see how I felt about the content after time away. I didn’t know if she’d be there. I spotted her standing in the middle of a narrower hall, a conduit I needed to pass through between conference areas. I gathered my courage and went up to her, standing about 6 feet away, looked at her, and said “Good morning.” Her eyes were bloodshot and she simply froze. After a moment, I left and went to the bathroom prior to my next session. As I was there, she entered the stall next to me. I left as someone else came in. On my way to the next thing I saw her girlfriend, who smirked at me in passing. I’m glad I took that moment to assert my humanity, but to also understand that she was actually truly terrified of me. I’m also glad I went because it put to bed any lingering desires to pick up my academic career as I found myself getting bored often enough to not want to attend an additional day. My partner said when I came home that it must have been quite a look I gave her because I still had power in my eyes, and she could easily imagine that I had snakes for hair.
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Later, I learned that she and her girlfriend actually called the Portland Police to report that I’d assaulted her. I could finally identify the many hurtful and untrue allegations which had so confused me, still disbelievingly, as just banal gaslighting and DARVO. I felt that in showing up for my career over the years in all of my sincerity and with all of my hard work, openness, and good, full faith, I had simply been badly tricked.
No acknowledgement or ownership of action or words or a small, simple, humane gesture like: “There’s something I’d like to talk to you about, are you available for a discussion.” or, “Over the years I’ve come to a new understanding of this situation and my professional power, and I want to share some information with you that you might find helpful.” It’s just been continued escalating terrorization, stifling of my voice and concerns, baseless legal threats of upending my life and that of those around me further when I try to tell the truth about it.
The people who I had thought would support and collaborate with me became, nightmarishly, people I could not recognize against my mental image. They became the women on the boat in Calais. Drunk with their own power, garishly decked out in their own sense of importance, carrying on their own party, intruding on my vulnerability, taking my turn, lying, mocking. Three or more against one.
Even now, long off the boat, it’s still at times unsettling when I enter a new context and find welcome and appreciation. When someone makes a point to compliment, for example, my presence or my ideas or even my body, I’m momentarily back into that magical realm of validation, of getting what I need and want to believe about myself, and then have moments thrust into sadly remembering the impermanence and mixed agendas of that space before I can shake it off to be more present. When I do well, I’m now mindful of anyone who I might unintentionally offend with my success.
Feelings of forgiveness fade in and out. While I know that most people do the best they can with what tools they have and whatever injuries they may carry, I’m frustrated that these people remain in positions where they can wound others. But I don’t want to give them any more attention.
In time I’ve achieved greater emotional literacy and healing, have been able to experience a solid, fulfilling relationship with a wonderful woman of deep integrity for more than a decade, and over the years been able to be increasingly present for that relationship even as it morphed into a beautiful friendship, stepped progressively more into my personal power and leadership, regained increasingly more of a sense of supportive community.
I’ve found deep solace and a recovered sense of awe in nature, release and regulation in exercise, trust in the medical professionals I needed to rely on in an emergency as well as informed, discerning trust in many other professionals, and honored my enduring love of literature. I’ve reestablished some sense of professional control via self-employment. I’ve grown up a lot and am better every day, but residues remain. There’s still a lot I have to do, and the future is brighter.
Maybe there are no real answers or landings or rootings or order in the capricious chaos. There’s only taking one breath after another and simply being: here, now.
