Erasing Our Academic Bodies and Kang from the Simpsons

It’s going to be another short post from me this week because I am not necessarily feeling a 100% and I probably need to focus on my energies on recuperating and not analyzing systems and structures. However, this post actually has to do with the process of recuperating.  I woke up a week ago with a dodgy back for no apparent reason. I hadn’t shoveled snow or lifted anything heavy. It just decided to hurt and make walking difficult and slow for most of the week. Meds helped a bit but it is only today that I have finally managed to walk at a somewhat regular-for-me pace again and I know I can’t really push it because it is only slowly getting there. Finding out why this happened in the first place has actually be more on my radar than figuring out how to fix it this week because in true academic fashion I needed that first bit of information in order to best proceed with the resolution.

I have reflected a lot this week about the cause and also did a bit of reflecting on my discourse and the framing of this injury. At first I thought it was just age, which in retrospect is sort of silly and also unlikely. It is interesting how easily we jump to age as a reason for things when something isn’t quite working out. Then I thought it was my sleeping position and how I need to make some changes there. Sure maybe but I don’t think it would be enough to cause me to be sore for a whole week.

It was two things that happened over the past two days that together made me figure out what I feel is the real reason for this back injury. One is on a few occasions this week I mentioned to folk that I wished I was just a brain or head in a jar, you know kind of like Kang from The Simpsons. I know Kang is not a head in a jar, but is rather an octopus type alien but it was that same sort of aesthetic I was going for in my reference (see Futurama, Matt Groening’s other show, for more about this, there are many episodes with heads in jars).  And then yesterday Aimée Morrison posted this great post on Hook & Eye about the importance of mindfulness, bodies, and how bodies feel while doing academic work and everything fell into place.

I spent most of December glued to my desk at home, when I was not at work, working on my manuscript edits. January has been a bit slower, but I have still spent a fair bit of time at my desk at home typing articles, working on an edited collection, doing research, you know the usual academic procedures. My desk chair at home is really not great; I bought it at Ikea when I moved to this apartment 7 plus years ago, it was all I could afford at that moment. I mean it’s a desk chair, but it’s not one that gives tons of support. It is not one that is ergonomic in any way. It is precisely the kind of desk chair that can mess up your back if you sit in it too long. And I have done exactly that.

I never really thought about the chair because academics often forget that we have bodies;  because a lot of what we do involves us being like Kang, I mean not in a hostile attempt at a takeover of a planet sort of way, but in a we are often seen like heads in jars by different people, including ourselves, sort of way. As an academic body we need to remember our academic bodies. This involves a physical body awareness, just as much as it involves an emotional body awareness. Our bodies react to the conditions we put them under. We were not meant to forget our bodies, our bodies are also part of us- academics are not heads in jars, as much as we may want to be. I used to joke about days of dissertation writing when I would sit all day and forget to eat, or not drink enough liquids because I was in the zone. Then I would wonder why I wasn’t feeling great the next day. I am not the only person to have done this or admitted to it.

I am typing this post from my bed because this is the one place where I can sit for a bit of time in my house and not really hurt myself. However, I know I should stop typing now because my right leg is feeling a bit crampy. Our bodies tell us what we need to know, we just need to learn how to listen carefully. We just need to be less like Kang.