Telling my own stories – Part II

This post is Part II of what I started writing here. Props again to One Barefoot Bride for sending me these awesome questions, and as I said in my earlier post, I am all about sharing the love if anyone wants to get “interviewed” themselves; here are the instructions:

* leave me a comment with your email address saying: “interview me”* I will e-mail you five questions of my choice
* you can then answer the questions on your blog {with a link back to my blog}
* you should also post these rules, along with an offer to interview anyone else who emails you, wanting to be interviewed
* anyone who asks to be interviewed should be sent 5 questions to answer on their blog
* it would be nice if the questions were individualized for each blogger

Now, picking up where we left off:

3. What story would you like to be inhabiting in 10 years?

This is a question that makes my heart palpitate a little bit. A year ago, if you’d asked, I could have answered very easily: house in the city; two kids; lots of good fresh food; a dog; the mister owning his own business; me working an academic post at a local university. This past year has been kind of thrown me for a loop academically, though, and so the major thing that has changed in the above vision is the last point–I am no longer certain that I want to continue in the academic stream. I have funding for the next two years, but the time after that is kind of a blank. I am hoping that my postdoctoral work will help me figure out if this is, or isn’t what I want to do. Basically, I like being an academic because I love, love, love the research I do so much. I have the greatest colleague ever these days too–we finish each other’s sentences and collaborating with her is a dream. I hate everything else–the competitiveness, the namedropping, the ways in which women pretty much have to put their personal lives aside if they want to get ahead (having conversations about stuff like waiting for tenure to get pregnant makes me want to scream), the politics, etc. But I don’t know any other job in which I’d get paid to just…learn about stuff I want to learn about.

I guess I have a pretty clear vision of what I want my life to be other than the career stuff: I want it full of kids and animals, I want it situated in a strong progressive Jewish household, I want frenetic moments like travelling to awesome places with armfuls of kids, I want quiet moments like family Sabbaths and baking fresh bread a whole lot. I want our household to be full of the sounds of English, French, Polish and Hebrew, musical instruments (we are working on that one already!) and hysterical laughter.

4. What aspect of planning the wedding has been the most fun for you?

Planning the honeymoon! Ok I’m only partially joking there. Both the mister and I are pretty creative, so I’ve enjoyed when we’ve just been able to be creative together. I’ve also really enjoyed all the “holy shit, this is happening!” moments such as: putting our invitations in the mail; ordering our ketubah; meeting with the rabbi; getting RSVPs back, etc. Finally, I have loved every moment in which people have been kind and loving to us: it was amazing when our first UK friends booked their plane tickets, when a friend offered to take care of our playlists for us, and all the little moments when good people have come through for us in small and big ways. As this blog has made clear, wedding planning has not been a walk in the park for us; but almost every time that we have gone through something hard, someone amazing has been there to make us feel loved and surrounded by wonderful, caring people.

5. If you were Queen of the World (or even Montreal), and could reinvent society in a ‘better’ way, what would it look like? Or if that’s too broad, what are three things that you would change?

I believe very strongly that we need a return to compassion. I get very riled up about various injustices, but the only overarching theme I can get out of all of the mess that is politics/social injustice/atrocity/etc. is that we are moving more and more away from viewing compassion as a key virtue, as something to be nurtured and encouraged in humanity. We are becoming cold, we are more and more comfortable accepting “collateral damage”, we are turning inwards in profoundly narcissistc ways. I was talking with a friend about this the other day, and she really loved this book (The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice During the Holocaust by Kristen Renwick Monroe) for the way in which it asked a similar question: how can we harness the incredible compassion and strength of character exhibited by the “righteous among the nations” to find a means to create a kinder world?

It all sounds very hippie-ish, but trust me that my fangs come out when it comes to this topic. I am losing patience, more and more, for politics that are about the game, about winning the argument, more than they are about the people. Not to mention politics that are about self-interest. I had a housemate in the UK who is very ideological and kneejerk in his political arguments and it drove me insane to hear him advocate for focusing on x rather than y issue–as though one can speak about trading away people’s lives with such flippancy. Human lives should never be treated as political points. I guess that this is the natural consequence of spending so much time working with people–I study atrocity from the perspective of those who lived it, not from the perspective of the elites who planned it/reacted to it/etc. Maybe this naturally brings me to feeling that we don’t spend enough of our “talking politics” time thinking about the people that policies affect, and what we’re advocating means for real lives, and trying to forge connections with other human beings such that we are more invested in ending suffering. I think that this gets to the heart of why I spend so much time gathering these stories–because listening to them might make us more compassionate people. My work in Bosnia is a good example–it’s a country stereotyped beyond belief for violence and hatred. In reality it is one of the best places I have ever been, and all of this ignorance about it covers up the other features of the country: its natural beauty, its generous and hilarious people, its delicious food, and its diverse history which is more about peace than it is about war. Most of the people I know there feel quite angry that no one has gotten the chance to get to know them, and that the world is happy to dismiss them as bloodthirsty savages. We should know people for who they are, not for who it is convenient for us to see them as.

Beyond my academic work, even–I spent a good deal of 2007-2008 working in homeless shelters in Montreal. I had just moved back, and interestingly, we happened to have moved into the neighbourhood where most of the homeless in this city hang out. Acquaintances are frequently shocked that we would live here, around such “undesirables”. What I learned in my time as a shelter worker was the incredible odds that the women I was working with had survived–what some of them had lived through was shocking and horrific. For the many with mental health problems or substance abuse problems, I could not even try to be judgmental, even when they were difficult to work with–I could not imagine that had I been subjected to the torture that they had been subjected to, that I would not have become a heroin addict. Having survived at all is such a huge victory, I could not judge what were probably the best coping mechanisms some of these ladies had available to them.

Furthermore, these women were not zombies–they were funny, smart, loving and interesting. This is what I took away the most from the experience–the privilege of getting to know a group of people for who they were, not just for their labels (junkie/sex worker/homeless/schizophrenic/whatever), but for them. I think about some of these women every single day. And it pains me that so few people care about them beyond those labels–so few people recognize them as actual humans, as complex as the rest of us, as funny and weird and smart and well-read, etc., as the rest of us.

All that to say: I cannot stand the way in which most of us talk about the homeless. I cannot stand the way in which we run away from them, as though they will somehow infect us. I cannot stand that we treat the most vulnerable members of our society as criminals, as people to be rid of, rather than people who have survived remarkable odds and deserve respect and love. How are you meant to rebuild your life when you are treated like vermin? When being treated like vermin was what got you into your situation in the first place, and now that perception of yourself is just perpetuated over and over? One incredible shelter I worked at really prioritized making women feel accepted and loved; we worked so hard to show them that they could be cared for by others. We gave them foot massages and served them herbal remedies. We played cards and sang karaoke. We listened to them and we put limits with them when things got rough. I promise you that if everyone treated vulnerable folks this way, like actual human beings, they would have a much easier time getting their shit back together.

In sum: so much suffering in the world could at least begin to be solved if we actually tried to see each and every person out there as a human being.