Even now I still search for clarity. Where did I go so wrong? Where was the point at which I stepped from safety into all the danger. How might I have kept myself safe, how might I have survived all that. What didn’t I see, and still don’t see? What didn’t I understand then? Not having any answers is its own special hell because it prevents one from having enough information to build a solid narrative.

I remember the opening of a new space when there was a flirtation. I didn’t know what to do with it. My experience was so limited but I was curious. I sensed some unknown danger but I thought I could be smart enough, spry enough, to avoid any danger. After all I was a mountain climber and I knew how to watch the weather.

Another in my position might have been offended, and still another might have jumped right in and let it be simple, transactional, stress-relief. I got stuck on trying to figure out if I wanted it or not. I’d gotten attention like that from others, mostly men, but hadn’t really been interested. But now? I was deeply flattered. It was a new experience to actually receive the attention that I deeply desired.

The next sticking point was did I trust – for me the experience represented the unknown and I started to think about the nature of trust – what it was. Would I trust someone with my body, and beyond that, would I trust someone to the extent that I would know I could trust them to have my back during something like the Holocaust, hypothetically? I meticulously observed and picked up instances which proved I could trust and put them in my pocket until I had a huge declarative pile of stones to put on the scale for trust and little to place against it. I engineered little tests to kick the tires of trust.

Also I had never really believed in my academic skills enough to envision myself as an academic as my life’s calling and when I got a boost by virtue of another’s declared belief in me, it was life-changing. But now I have to wonder: was that encouragement just pro forma, what someone thought they were supposed to say in that context, rather than any reflection of me and my skills. Or was it an attempt at recovery from an incursion which retroactively was identified as a misstep, and the academic encouragement was an attempted salvation of the task at hand. The belief in my skills that I had thought was genuine boosted me into a space of academic confidence, risk-taking, the development of my voice and value as a person. It had seemed to be just the thing that I had needed most. But now, in retrospect, it seems like I was just willfully living in a false reality.

The thing was that only one person owned up to the fact that it was a false reality: my grad advisor, toxic as she was, did me the service of letting me know that I wasn’t a real fellowship student in the case of being deserving, that it was more a pity case. That my ideas were bad, that I wasn’t a good student, that my papers weren’t even worth looking at, that my thoughts on feminist literature not worthwhile and best ignored. That my needs were a nuisance, that I was always out of step, a dunce.

And then there was the flirtation with risk and safety. At some point I needed to make this delineation for myself and decided that the academic route, the classroom, the intellect, was a place of safety and keeping one foot there, I could nudge the other foot out into the space of risk but return to the safety if needed. I could balance between the two. The structure supported it.

The problem with that is that one goes in and out of structures. Sometimes the time’s up. And when that happened, there I was, in the place of risk, but also in a place of trusting. But that place of more absolute safety was something I was starting to feel locked out of, because it was situated within the structure. One had a sense of safeguards even if these were vague and even if one never used them – it was enough to know that they were supposedly there. So this inevitably led to a search to return to the structure (of academia) when I most needed a sense of safety, especially as my family crumbled and the world was at times scary.

I was too naieve (and too lucky in life before that) to entertain the thought that institutions were not, by definition, places of safety.