Sometimes a memory surfaces of an experience I had while backpacking through Europe, at about age 19. I carried the same heavy Mountainsmith 65 liter backpack I’d used to climb Mt. Rainier and lead trips 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 to a couple who were going to motorcycle through Europe and downsized my travel and backpacking kit from that heavy beast, 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 gaggle 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 and English. 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 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.
That travel and subsequent semester living abroad was filled nonstop with startling and surprising encounters, both good and bad. 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 time 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 in my senior year, I found myself feeling accepted and safe and slipped into also feeling deeply co-regulated with my brilliant butch professor. Suddenly all of that experience could surface and I could digest it. 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 participated in the lgbtq club I helped lead, 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 was being taken seriously as a scholar, and and as a woman. I felt tuned into at every level. We effortlessly seemed to read one another. I absorbed it 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, primitive 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, as she took part in club events I ran. It seemed we could even control time and space. I took that 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 deranged exes. We were allied in our joy in the true causes of lesbian liberation, literature, and 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 all the love and validation I had missed out on from parents who, in spite of their good intentions, had their own limitations and could not 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 world 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. However, 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.
I felt academically like I had 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, 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 in order to perpetuate my new exciting status of being treated more as a peer or romance than a student. No, I did not want a demotion, I liked being relied on by someone I so admired, it made me feel special. I liked flirting. She had encouraged me to go to grad school, maybe that would have to be enough and I could take care of the footwork on my own. So some of my student needs for guidance or budding intellectual interests went underground, because I sensed that in acknowledging or putting them forward, it would be too much, now that managing the relationship was my job, too. I would 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 – trappings that my newer academic needs would reinvoke. I could barely request a recommendation letter.
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 found solace in the ritual of smoking; she had smoked and it was quite a dramatic action for me to take as a devoted outdoorswoman and athlete who was into health and nature. I was left feeling very 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.
At one point, after an evening lgbtq club meeting, we started walking together to her car, 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. Later, in class, discussing some piece of literature she said, “There are the girls, that you sleep with, and then there are girls that you marry,” winking at me. At the end of the year she asked me pointedly if I intended to stay in the area.
And yet, could I really support her full emotional weight which would surely fall on my shoulders if anything were realized, 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.
Nonetheless, the sonorant, gentle voice that had encouraged and flattered me at that time moved into my mind and heart, her words a presence that urged me on and buoyed me into the following 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 and more time learning. 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.
The summer after I graduated college, after I finished my summer job where I took some time to think about my next steps, still aglow from the prior year, my family suddenly fell apart. If I’m honest, 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 terrible situation and get into my own future. In the midst of that crisis, I wrote her a love letter. She eventually, a couple weeks later, impersonally responded that she could not get involved, and could not take responsibility for my feelings. But, 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, but relied on my overarching experiences, and looked to old friends I hadn’t seen for years for support around my questioning dejection and also my family.
By the autumn I moved to Europe to teach English, where I kept leaping from frying pan to fire and back while navigating employment and visa situations, learning all I could, and applying to grad school. We stayed in friendly touch via email, as she had encouraged. In the throes of trying to survive, I didn’t have much time to pine away – but the idea that she was out there and believed in me, that my work was in service to shared goals, and that we could reunite in some form later, provided a sense of comfort and security in the hardest moments. Step after step, I found my way, holding my precious red thread.
Those earlier lingering questions combined with so many others about the literature and my family history and lived experiences took me to grad school (where she was a disengaged alum of 10 years but had encouraged me to go) with a fellowship two years later. I thought I could get the answers, in the most unobtrusive way possible 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, playful 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 learn better how to express them and 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, love, friendship 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, so she could be proud of me.
At first, I could not believe that my ideas, experiences, and even my person would be a topic of cruel amusement. There was no welcome. I didn’t know what to make of being suddenly, shockingly intruded on in my new professional space when she walked into my shared grad student office one day in my first year, took my officemate to coffee, and stonewalled me. Like she didn’t even recognize me. She suddenly stopped our light but meaningful email correspondence, where I had shared tidbits of my life abroad and congratulated her when she shared that she had gotten tenure. I had also run my grad school options by her, partially because I wanted her to feel like she was part of the decision, and secondly because I didn’t know who else to ask, who would know both me and the field, and have both of our interests in mind. So I thought for sure that she was on board with my choice, having had opportunity to warn me of anything not in my – or our – best interests.
The blinding gut punch and sense of impending doom from her cold visitation sent me into the arms of first a colleague, then the university counseling center. She had suddenly withdrawn and, when I tried to communicate and ask what was wrong, she piled people between us to speak by proxy on her behalf, to communicate that my questions were “inappropriate” and that she had “moved on.” Moved on from what, and to where? 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? My steps in my new program became more uncertain, and I wasn’t even officially out of the closet yet there.
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,” one prof advised. 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 was surprised to learn, suddenly and without warning at a conference in my department (which she’d again traveled across the country for) as they were being publicly affectionate, that she’d had a 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 evolved 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. 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?
I had given a paper at the same conference, during the grad student part, though the professor had scheduled a large meeting during my presentation time that took away most of the audience. My paper went well, though, and years later one visiting professor let me know that my paper was much better than the professor’s girlfriend’s paper, which was very strangely about the same book I presented on, which I 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, never even looking my way. 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 was another past or present romance and friend, and 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. 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. University counseling was mostly pills and supportively bilging a water from a sinking boat, 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. Promisingly, my study group included a number of union organizers.
I got a little respite to study abroad again in a small university town after passing my MA exams. I taught, attended seminars, and spent more time in therapy. 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. Close to Christmas I went dancing at a lesbian club, and the 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 bottom 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. I drank beer and danced unabashedly as a big fuck you. She was not a dancer. As I was sitting down, 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 dissertation advisors. I managed to secure a promise that I would get a new grad advisor when I returned, and that my credits would transfer unproblematically. By the end of the second year away, I decided to continue forward with my degree program; I was feeling better, at least it was a known quantity. 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, my work was not at its very best following the destabilizing incidents of my first year in grad school, and I didn’t know who to ask for advice about other programs, my general trust level being what it was. But when I returned, the person 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 with me. 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?
I had requested and been denied mediation after passing my MA but prior to leaving for Europe, visited the ombudswoman a few times, taken all avenues to gently address the maltreatment it 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 apathy and 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.
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 for survivors of professional abuse I sometimes visited by a French woman, a translator 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 and prurient interest, and gently cut off the communication.
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 time and again trying to figure out what I had done wrong that had led her to have those complaints, to feel harassed (my grad advisor had told me this startling, distressing news as she took away a committee position I’d been voted into), or right any misunderstandings, and to try to correct whatever offence I’d caused. After their final maligning assault on me years later, I could finally identify it all, still disbelievingly, as just banal gaslighting and DARVO. I felt that in showing up in all of my sincerity and with all of my hard work, openness, and full faith, I had simply been badly tricked.
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’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. Calling bloody murder on me and trying to manipulate any available authority against me the moment I reappear in any corner and assert my humanity as I’ve sought new contexts in that small field with evaporating opportunities which to right my own intellectual boat, while they do everything possible to slam and shame me back to silence. As though I was the Unabomber, though I’d never made a single threat.
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.
In time I’ve achieved greater emotional literacy and healing, got to experience a solid, generally fulfilling relationship with a wonderful woman of deep integrity for more than a decade, 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 emergency as well as some other professionals, honored my enduring love of literature. I’ve reestablished some sense of professional control via self-employment. I’m better, but residues remain.
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.