Of Advocacy and Isolation

I am going to start this week's blog with a story, because folk like stories and because this particular story was ringing true to me this week.  I promise it will connect to teaching and learning eventually so I appreciate you indulging me. 

When I graduated university I was in a relatively long-term relationship that was pretty bad. Like I needed to get out of the house often bad. But I worked a lot so often the only time I could get out of the house and have space was on Saturdays. So I would take my two tokens, pack my notepad and pencil/pens in a small over the shoulder courier type bag, and get on the bus from the North York almost Markham neighbourhood I lived in and then take the subway and go downtown where I would walk Queen West and King West for hours. I would get off at Osgoode and there was always an unhoused man at the corner sitting there with a hat and a sign asking for change. I would make this trip several times a year and he was always there. I would dig in my jeans and give him whatever change I had which often wasn't much and I still get upset about that. Sometimes I would give him a $5 and eventually we would chat a bit about how he was feeling anything new he saw. He was a really great guy. And then one day I went downtown and he wasn't there anymore, and then a second time and he still wasn't there. I never saw him again, but I think about him often. I don't even know what his name was cause every time he would give himself a different name, once it was Jimmy, another time Johnny. This was 22-23 years ago and I still think about him.

The reason I wanted to get out of the house was basically to have space to write and to feel my feelings. Even though I was working ridiculous hours in the lab I still had such desire for this bohemian life of a writer and poet. I wrote a lot, pages and pages. I would stop and have a coffee at a coffee shop which I would nurse for hours as I sat at the window and watched folk walking and wrote imagining what my life would be like if I had enough money for a small apartment even a room above one of the stores on Queen West where I would watch folk all day out my window with a bed in the centre of the room, books surrounding it, and ramen noodles on a hot plate. This in my mind was all I needed to be complete. I could see Jimmy/Johnny every day buy him a coffee and some lunch. I somehow thought that I could sustain myself with poetry chapbook sales. Keep in mind I had finished a whole chemistry undergrad at this point and though my job wasn't glamourous it was an okay job, and I was slowly trying to build savings for this to happen. I will not get into the complicated housing situation I was in at that time because it is not pertinent to this story. 

I would write poems and poems in my notebook, I wrote poems on coffee shop napkins, tons of them that I hid in a box when I got home. That I eventually transcribed into a Word document many years later. Sometimes I would go to Il Fornello for a snack because somehow in my head Il Fornello was super glamorous. I would have the cheapest thing like a Pepsi and Caesar salad and sit there writing poems. I would watch as folk glared at me like I didn't belong in this space. Like I should be in the coffee shops I used to frequent and not this space of "I am about to go to the TSO" diners. On days where I was feeling particularly gosh what's the word, disillusioned with my life maybe, I would go next door to the Elephant and Castle and order a rye and ginger half ice and hide in the corner sipping slowly and continue writing and writing. Again I did not fit in here either, but this space like Il Fornello, was kind of like a place of possibility for another alternative life. This is what academics do right? They eat Caesar salads at 3pm and have 4:30pm rye and gingers in a dark pub trying to write some sort of ground breaking deconstruction of anapestic verse as the foretelling of Lucas's Star Wars because the etymology of anapest is from the Greek for to strike back. 

I had two visions of my life that I worked through in those Saturday escapes, the bohemian poet in a small dingy apartment on Queen W above a shop, and the class climbing vision of an academic life of thought and leisure. But what was true of both of these visions was the sense of solitude that they brought with them.  Yet the bohemian life brought with it some sort of connection to people like Jimmy/Johnny and advocacy for housing for everyone. It was a life of social justice, a life of hope for a better, but simpler world. The academic life was equally isolated, but that advocacy piece was missing; it was just me in a pub with ideas I had not fleshed out well because I only had a minor in English and minor in philosophy and not the sort of critical theory training I eventually received in grad school. I was never stared at in the coffee shop with my napkin poems; I was always stared at with my notebook eating salad. 

All of these thoughts and feelings came back to me last night as I was contemplating what had transpired last week at Congress. My association didn't even acknowledge the issues I raised because who am I really to them; another member, another number, replaceable with a new contingent faculty member that they could equally forget a decade later. All numbers, all inconsequential. The federation slowly put in place accessibility supports that should have been there from the beginning, but still on an inaccessible platform they never vetted properly. I had somehow achieved both of the worlds I was looking for more than 20 years ago, here I am writing poems advocating for change, in an academic space. And yet, just as it was 20 years before as I walked Queen and King West, what happened (or in fact didn't happen) last weekend shows how these two spaces cannot coexist. There's no real space for advocacy in academia apparently. Academia is for structures and upholding systems is what last weekend taught me. I am going to be honest and say I am feeling pretty defeated, but maybe it's because I am too close to the issue at the moment. As I mentioned, this was a 17 year battle about a whole bunch of marginalized member things that they should have gotten right from day one and did not. Jimmy/Johnny did not exist to them. And so one day when Jimmy/Johnny disappears the only person who misses him is the person who realized he was there in the first place the whole time. So I am going to take the weekend to reflect on a lot of things. I am writing this on Wednesday night because my mind can't stop turning this imagery over and over. If there's one thing to serve as take away from all this is my request that you please look for Jimmy/Johnny, and don't forget him, he's there, as are so many others.