This week’s readings have me once again thinking about Project Runway. Well, for one, because watching that show was a big part of self-care in undergrad (Season 15 was instrumental in getting me through the work week with a nice Friday reward of a new episode). But also because of the analogy Professor Hintz provided for us with regards to writing.

Perhaps grad school is also kind of like Project Runway. First off, it’s a sham world, and we all know it is—yes, we are all here because we love fashion, but we’re here on set for much less glamorous reasons. If we get to the end, or even close, we’ll have gotten the connections and exposure to make it worth it. The reality show is also a competition: we know that not all of us will make it out, and sometimes that’ll mean direct comparisons between one another. And yet, two surprising things happen. For one, people here really, actually cut and sew beautiful fashion that expresses extreme talent and creative ideas. That’s not fake. And secondly, despite the fact that we’re told that the network will get its best ratings if we start drama, most of the time, contestants will help one another and applaud as our pieces walk down the runway.

It’s a silly analogy, but I do mean it. I see graduate students support one another despite the structures that may naturally push people to act otherwise. Competitive toxicity and toxic competitivity were rampant at Columbia, and, so far, I haven’t felt that at CUNY, so I appreciate that (although I have felt to some extent people flexing academic clout and how much they read, and I appreciate that less). 

To some of the points on the blog thus far: I’ve also heard critique of the term “self-care” as revolving too much around one person and their isolated acts of care, placing the onus on individual actions and almost being another task one can fail to fulfill. Recently, I’ve been seeing “community care” thrown out more, especially in activist circles. I believe it comes from Black and Indigenous women and femmes expressing frustration with the idea of self-care that pressures the individual actor, especially in the face of systemic injustice and precarity/death. Community care emphasizes the interdependence and mutuality required in maintaining mental and physical health. It might not be self care to venmo my friend $20, but maybe I’ll be in need next week and it will be care for them to be there for me. 

Some nice resources on community care: https://alp.org/breaking-isolation-self-care-and-community-care-tools-our-people 

https://www.abpsi.org/pdf/FamilyCommunitySelfCareToolKit.pdf

https://www.self.com/story/white-people-self-care

http://www.forharriet.com/2018/03/self-care-is-community-care.html

This discussion makes me wonder what it would look like to perform trauma-informed pedagogy as a teacher during all the ongoing crises. At the last Friday Forum, this was discussed in depth, but was not presented in an instructive manner, so I’m not sure how much I learned as someone not yet teaching.

Two more scattered notes:

I really relate to Alessandra about sleep and disability. As I have mentioned in a past post, I developed a chronic illness in my senior year of high school that had a dramatic and traumatic impact on my life. During the worst of it, I was so fatigued that I could not be out of bed for more than a couple hours a day. Ever since then, sleep has been one of those hard limits for me. In undergrad, the latest I stayed up was 3am probably, and it’s only gotten harder! By now my lower limit of sleep is probably seven hours, and I’m at my best if I can get ten. The irony here is, unfortunately, I feel most productive in the evenings, and prefer to do my research and writing late (or at least I did in undergrad, but maybe now with the pandemic and just getting older that might change…)

When looking at the statistics on the Covid-19 study, I was struck that the single highest subgroup percentage for anxiety disorders was…nonbinary people. It’s a category I rarely actually see in a statistical survey, so I felt simultaneously validated and frustrated. My first thought was “of course,” since trans people are hyper-pathologized and require therapy in order to physically transition, so surely that causes more diagnoses to be distributed. On the other hand, I wonder if the statistics for Black/Latino students are actually lower than accurate because of phenomena of medical racism, criminalization rather than pathologization, and lack of access to healthcare. But yeah, my trans/enby community is riddled with anxiety. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve found the graduate trans community at all here at CUNY—I just know of other trans people and I’m like “hey,” but haven’t really discussed what it’s been like being trans right now.