21 Post-Scholarly Growth – Michelle Sayles

I landed at McMaster in the fall of 2017 as an international student from the U.S. My return to academia marked a bookend on four years post-undergrad living in a community of deep experiential life learning and activism. I was giddy, and hopeful that this year would be a chance to reclaim my focus. I had prepared myself to weather the challenges of grad school, though I worried about how I would find my state of mind through the isolation. Pre-departure, I did everything I possibly could to anticipate what would come that year. I sought grounding in therapy, peer relationships, and a never-ending supply of St. John’s Wort. I had gotten into McMaster on a full scholarship. I knew I needed to trust that my best efforts would pull me through, and worked to relinquish my anxieties as best I could.

Within my first few weeks, I strategized to build community and find people I could trust. I was just starting as a TA, and got a fellowship position with the MacPherson Institute to develop a graphic history project on student disability activism.

Novelty proved a temporary balm. Within a short time of arrival, I started to feel overwhelmed by an exhausting and banal wave of depression, crowding out the space I needed just to think. I tried to sit with difficult thoughts as best I could. Often one of the only things that released some of the pressure-cooker in my brain was drawing, so in fits of exasperation I released my energies in free-form abstracts and grotesque doodles. I would walk for hours back and forth from Sous Bas at night to dance. I had to be in my body – that was the only steadying practice I knew to connect with some clarity of mind.

I noted how easily my peers could retain the information from our readings. I would often spend a whole day agonizing over a single article, struggling to remember while nearly transcribing a full detailed outline of each piece. I fumbled to converse about the work, conscious of how hard it was for me to simply retain. My memory felt faulty, I assumed as the result of a decade spent fighting off a yet undiagnosed depression. This struggle to feel competent in basic ways eroded the trust I had in my own abilities.

Graduate seminars were incredibly stressful and performative events. I wanted to sink deep into the material and engage with my peers in authentic ways, but I felt as though I was constantly struggling to latch on to the flow of the conversation – witnessing the tail of the discussion soaring, but not able to bring the thrust of it into focus. In this feeling of slow-motion, I often worried I didn’t belong in the room.

I imagined my brain was a sieve – not broken, but not reliable. Not long into my program, I started to feel completely overwhelmed by that burdensome morbid feeling again…

And then, I lost someone very dear to me to suicide.

I made it through that year in a haze, but things didn’t start to clear – really – until nearly three years later. I didn’t feel well, and I couldn’t understand how I was supposed to delay this traumatic grieving process. Recovery ended up being as nonlinear as my learning journey.

That winter, I received a wellspring of accommodations that allowed me to continue in the program, both academically and financially: grief counseling, flexed deadlines, altered assignments, and a re-arranged teaching assistantship. I drove eight hours to a funeral in New England that winter, only to rush back and write two – twenty page papers in the course of two weeks. It was like I had punctured a lung, but still had to finish the race. It was awful. I’m grateful for my supervisor who helped me make things work when I broke down and couldn’t TA my spring semester. I wasn’t functioning, wasn’t thinking clearly, and thought about dropping out.

I watched myself showing up for group discussion with that eviction-resistant demon of despair on my back. In all my preparations, I could never have fathomed adding “dark night of the soul” to my to-do list. To lose someone who had shared their own journey so vulnerably with me felt like an impossibility, but there it was. These experiences were fodder for another level of soul learning, but that wasn’t what the classroom demanded. Of competing urgencies, something artificial took precedence, and the classroom became a dissonant place to be, rather than a place of growth and integration.

As I researched my thesis on the psychological experiences of people living in climate disaster zones, I learned about the concept of Post-Traumatic Growth¹  – the idea that people can flourish following traumatic life events. The concept struck me because it pointed at some hope for making meaning of the existential dead end I was experiencing. I was trying to heal myself, and in the thick of this complicated grief, I felt my contributions seeping like sludge into absolutely all of my exchanges. I tried to put a plug on something that needed out. I joked about wanting to go on a spiritual quest. I felt completely overwhelmed by the state of the world and had pinned my sense of purpose and hope on doing something about it. However, I hadn’t cultivated any tools to emotionally prepare for the work I wanted to do.

Over the years, I’ve come to associate my depression, mainly, with alienation². Our world breeds its ubiquity. Can pedagogy be healing and stimulate transformation?

To create deeper accessibility, I wonder about the urgent need for an educational space where our full selves can be integrated, maybe even witnessed. I want a learning community that can bridge formal study with the lessons that our own paths have taught us.

None of us are bystanders, casually removed from this existence, but all deeply impacted and shaped by it. To learn is to see the interconnectedness of life and text, future and history. In popular education³, learning is structured so that we see each other as valuable sources of knowledge, and we engage in deep sharing, pulling out the threads that connect our independent (but deeply linked) experiences of the world.

I imagine I’m in those grad seminars again. Rather than returning to a space of performative intellectual volleys, it’s comforting to think about a format that’s more introspective, more healing, more real. Since graduating, I’ve been learning about the process of council-based dialogue⁴, and I see how that could have been fruitful for a more authentic ecology of engagement. Sitting with peers in a circle, speaking spontaneously and honestly, without some ingrained pressure to perform – this might start to build up a social groundwork for barrier-free learning. Shifting the expectations for how we engage and slowing that process of exchange down is so critical for drawing out an authentic and more accessible conversational flow.

I imagine sitting in a circle with my peers and building our inquiry from the seeds of a more organic relationship. I want to dredge up my knowledge to share why I’m doing this work, and I want to witness you as you do the same. We’d observe some ground rules as a guide.

Proposed Group Agreements:

• Share with the intent to cultivate connection and relationship. Your colleagues are also co-conspirators for building a better world.
• Speak up and then listen intently. Don’t posture for standing.
• Slow it all down.
• Break open your assumptions.
• Remember why you started on this path and dream hard about what you hope to build. Who can you build it with?
• Find them. (But also find yourself).

In order to address the massive challenges before us – climate change, a global pandemic, food insecurity, homelessness, hopelessness – we must stop depersonalizing the space of learning, and we must create an environment where all voices are brought to the table⁵.  We’ve got to model in the classroom how we hold one another as we integrate deep learning that is not just mental, but emotional, spiritual, and deeply embodied.

Deadlines are artificial, and true learning never segregates itself from the teachings of our lives. We must integrate all of it, and nurture a new way to be real with one another.

Author’s Recommended Readings: