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A Doctor in the House: Seeing, Speaking, and Stitching Connections

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About thirty years ago, I moved from Vancouver, BC, with my new husband, a southerner, to Atlanta, to pursue a PhD in women’s studies. The doctoral program at Emory University was new, one of the first of its kind, and I was to become one of the first graduates in the country in this interdisciplinary field.  I was more than a little proud, very exhilarated, completely terrified, and somewhat culture-shocked.   That first year, we joined a big Presbyterian church in downtown Atlanta. How we ended up there, neither of us being Presbyterian, and having an over-abundance of churches to choose from, is a story for another day. Kind of formal and fancy, but without much by way of artistry or liturgy, somewhat wealthy and very white, it really wasn’t the best fit for either of us, but we stuck it out for about a year. Determined to really give it a go, I joined the women’s bible class, even though it met before the service (I am not a morning person) and, at 26, I was the youngest member by
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New Waters: Making a Way, Finding a Way

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As my family, friends, and colleagues know, I have been on a journey to find my "next thing." It's been a long road —or, since I'm a swimmer, let's call it a long swim. It started as a little paddle close to the shore, but eventually led me out into deeper, choppier waters, where I knew I could not touch down. It's been exhilarating, sometimes terrifying, definitely hard. And the best swim of my life. It began a little over two years ago when I took that first call from a recruiter. I was about six years into my “dream job”—the one I’d moved my family across the country for and had imagined staying in until retirement—and it was hard for me to consider leaving. But I knew I couldn’t just keep on. I felt like I was treading water, getting nowhere, and constantly out of breath. Every ounce of my spirit went into just trying to stay afloat, and none of it was renewing. I was on the edge, at least, of burnout.  COVID had certainly made every pain point worse, and
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The Curious Incident of the Bison in the Night-Terror, or Learning to Welcome Uncertainty

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  I believe -  no, I know - that our dreams carry important messages for us - messages from our unheard selves, to ourselves. Most often, mine are not clear dictates, magical incantations, or compelling omens, but rather a mixed-up bag of suppressed feeling, hope, and worry, dressed and tossed with the detritus of the day’s matter. My dreams, like my waking imagination, are vivid, rich, abundant, and complicated.  Sometimes I feel plagued or perplexed by dreams. This was so in my first year of graduate school, where I was working through so many things. I kept a dream journal for a few months, but ultimately had to stop because the more I wrote, the more I remembered, and I didn’t have time for that much writing!  Mostly, I am grateful for my dreams, though, and can’t imagine living without them. They’re like a foreign language I only speak in my sleep: I wake up with odd phrases on my lips that I have to guess at translating.  While I dream a lot, often with overtones of stress or wo
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Back to School

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There is a sacred list of names, deep in the musty desk-drawer of my heart, of those teachers who changed my life. Some did so by pulling back a veil. Others, by helping me course-correct by just a degree or two ... and thus changing the direction of my journey as a student, a writer, a thinker, and a person, in the process. As I return to teaching this fall, for the first time in a long while, I'm prompted to pause and think on what it means, and has meant, for my life. I'm in a professional transition stage right now, and  I don't imagine that I'll be teaching for very long,  but I do feel extraordinarily grateful and excited to be back in the college classroom right now, at this moment in my life and in history. Teaching is such challenging, energizing, and always evolving work, and it has made me better at pretty much everything else I do. Teaching is leading, and it is also following. Teaching is listening. And it is also clarifying and articulating. It is designin
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Swimming for My Life: Care for Others and for Self

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Care work - the physical and/or emotional labor of caring for, taking care of, others can be a burden. Something we carry with us, as a load, whether we relish it, resent it, or something in between. I was once in the sandwich generation, for sure, but that’s been a while ago now. With both my parents and my in-laws long since passed, and our only daughter now graduated from college and on the cusp of moving out one last time, I’ve been thinking lately about the less tangible forms of care we extend for others, and how we integrate that kind of care with our own physical, mental, emotional, and professional well-being. I’m contemplating, especially, the psychological and emotional weights we each carry with us through our days, our lives, and our work, and how that shapes the ways we navigate obstacles and opportunities. When our metaphorical hands are full, do we shift our weight and nudge a door open with a hip? Does that then throw something out of whack, creating chronic pain? When
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