Reflections on grad school: the truth about my time abroad
CW: Anxiety, depression, intrusive thoughts, suicidal thoughts. For mental health support, please see a list of resources here (Canada), here (United States), here (United Kingdom) and here (Aotearoa New Zealand).
As part of my graduate school journey, I’ve been keeping an honest record of my experience in academia; my previous writing on the subject can be found here, here and here.
—
If you’re a close follower of mine, you may have noticed that I suddenly stopped writing in 2023. My social media presence made it look like I was too busy having fun to put pen to paper; behind the scenes, I was navigating a work and research nightmare unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.
I never wrote about my time abroad because the pain of what happened was so big it escaped words. My Aotearoa chapter is the most traumatic thing I have ever been through. As someone who comes from a long history of complex trauma, I don’t say that lightly. For many years, I thought no trauma would ever rival the experience I had fighting a sexual assault investigation while in university.
Aotearoa proved me wrong. What was cruelly painful about experiencing earth-shattering trauma this time around was that there was no one event, no one person to blame; what happened was a series of compounding traumas that I didn’t recognise until they had already left their devastating mark on me.
—
The story starts here: January 14th, 2023, at the Tāmaki Makaurau airport. After an incredible few weeks of travelling Te Ika-a-Māui, I was scheduled to fly to Ōtautahi, my new home for the next six months. A bright-eyed master’s student, I was thrilled to be starting what I thought would be the most rewarding experience of my life: a research assistantship conducting interviews about Māori water governance in partnership with a local iwi (tribe).
As I walked the lengthy green arrow-lined path separating domestic and international flights at the Te Ika-a-Māui airport, the realisation that this was no longer a vacation, but my whole life, kicked in. I stared at that green line, shedding tears onto it the entire way. I cried because I sensed intuitively, at that moment, that I was making the wrong choice.
If I could go back and change one moment in my life, it would be this one; I would have listened to my intuition, abandoned my project, and returned to Turtle Island. At the time though, I was twenty-four and deeply unsure of myself. For over a year, I’d been told by my research team that this was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”, and thought I would be ungrateful to turn down the investments others were making in me. So, I said yes to someone else’s project, and no to my innermost desires.
I cried the entire 90-minute flight to Ōtautahi. That afternoon, I sat on the empty floor of my new bedroom, 14,749 kilometres away from home, feeling empty inside too.
—
That January, three challenges became clear:
I had arrived unprepared for all the nuanced cultural differences of my new country;
I lived on the far outskirts of the city, which made commuting laborious and time-consuming;
Living in Aotearoa entailed a 16 (and later 18) hour time difference, which strained all of my interpersonal relationships.
Case in point: one January afternoon, I was reprimanded by a lifeguard for swimming at the wrong part of the beach, and then later, by a cashier for not bringing my passport as ID to buy 0.0% alcohol mocktails. Embarrassed by my self-perceived incompetence, I burst into tears at the grocery store.
Another day, fed up with 90-minute bus rides to the city, I made an appointment with a “car dealership”; upon arrival, I discovered it was one man selling beat-up, uninsured cars out of his driveway. Feeling duped and frustrated, I boarded three buses home.
I didn’t know where to find housing when I sourced my flat. No one told me which neighbourhoods to look in, or how to find students to live with. I did the best I could, and am immensely grateful for the flatmate I had and the home we shared. But being a 30-minute drive/90-minute bus away from the city heightened the isolation of my entire experience.
These inconveniences were minor, but they shook my confidence to succeed in a new country. With no local family or friends to teach me the nuances of this unfamiliar place, I felt alone; and with my loved ones asleep for most of my day, I was far too often completely on my own.
As a lonely knot grew in my stomach, I tried to stay positive; as I wrote in one January journal entry: “I didn’t realise how much I was living for tiny kindnesses until I wasn’t given them. I guess when you’re lonely, these are the things you hang onto. Being away from everyone I love remains difficult. I know I’m in the worst of it. But that means from here on out, things can only get better.”
I wish I had been right.
—
February 2023 started with my becoming ill.
Two years earlier, I was diagnosed over the phone with an anxiety disorder and prescribed an SSRI that did not work. After a year with no improvement in my symptoms, I requested a new medication. I began taking it on February 1st; on February 3rd, I woke in the middle of the night, violently shaking and throwing up.
At first, I chalked it up to food poisoning or a stomach flu. Time went on, and I remained sick. I researched my medication and found that its side effects included nausea, sweating, headaches, dizziness, insomnia and constipation; risks that my doctor had never mentioned to me. I sensed that I should lower my dosage or change medications; but with no access to the doctor who had prescribed my medication, and no idea how to navigate the medical system in Aotearoa, I felt stuck.
I called a telehealth line, and was told my symptoms weren’t bad enough to be taken seriously. I was prescribed what I thought was medicine - only to go to the pharmacy and realise all I had been “prescribed” was an over-the-counter laxative. The doctor had heard only one of the symptoms I described to them, and suggested a band-aid fix for it.
For weeks, I was bedridden by my medication’s side effects. Fed up with its debilitating effects on my body, I decided to stop taking it, which made me feel even worse. My physical symptoms remained for weeks afterwards, while my anxiety spiked.
In the midst of this was the First Nations Futures Program, my only opportunity to network with other Indigenous scholars. Being as ill as I was completely detracted from my being able to participate in the program. While everyone around me made connections, I left sessions early, unable to make it through them without throwing up.
Not knowing what was happening to my body while lacking access to medical care was terrifying. Eventually, my medication-related withdrawal settled, but my mental health struggles and medical issues continued to worsen.
—
A few weeks before moving abroad, I fell down a set of concrete stairs. At the time, I brushed the injury off as a bad bruise; as time went on, however, my pain worsened, and by mid-February, I was struggling to walk. Hours of waiting and $150 later, a doctor gave me an osteopath referral and an X-ray requisition.
The osteopath did nothing for me, and I quit after two wordless appointments of having my head probed. The treatment didn’t match my injury, and I knew I needed more care than what I was being offered. I sought the care of a chiropractor instead, but soon realised that I would not find the care I needed there either; unlike back home, chiropractors in Aotearoa are not doctors, just people with BSc degrees.
When I went for an X-ray, I discovered that the requisition I had been given was faulty. I was immensely frustrated; to this day, I don’t understand why a doctor would give me a false requisition. At every turn, the Aotearoan medical system made me feel crazy for the pain I was experiencing. I spent thousands of dollars while living abroad in search of medical care, and every insurance claim I made for my health was rejected.
It would be another seven months until my pain was taken seriously - when I finally did receive a valid X-ray, I learned I had been living with a tailbone fracture the entire time.
—
My graduate program also proved increasingly difficult. Not only was I an ocean away from my classmates, I was the only one writing their thesis. While the rest of my cohort laughed together over budding inside jokes, I sat quietly on the other side of a Zoom screen, thinking grad school was supposed to be more than this.
I knew that structuring my degree to write my thesis early would come at the cost of my peer relationships. At the time, I was convinced that these were necessary and worthwhile sacrifices for my research. They weren’t; especially because the “once in a lifetime opportunity” I was promised was smoke and mirrors.
—
As Biin et al. (2021) identify, research alongside Indigenous peoples necessitates a lot of careful steps - ones that I wanted to take seriously. What no one shared with me was how impossible it would be for me to do this work ethically. For my thesis, I was expected to:
Move and adjust to a new country;
Build community connections in a new context;
Earn the trust of research participants;
Become trained as an interviewer;
Gain ethics clearance from multiple universities;
Conduct 10-15 interviews;
Make field visits;
Protect data under community ownership;
Write my thesis;
Present my findings per ceremonial procedures; and
Build a relationship that spanned beyond the project.
All within the timeframe of a six-month visa. My supervisors and research team should reasonably have known this would be impossible to accomplish. I didn’t. I moved abroad willing to do it all because I believed I had a fulsome support network to catch me on the other side.
For over a year, I was told that I had:
A Māori supervisory committee member to guide me through the process;
A network of Indigenous community members eager to work with me; and
A nation-to-nation partnership-based project.
That February, three things became evident:
No one wanted to supervise my research;
The network of community members did not exist; and
There was no project I was wanted for.
After investing my time, energy and money into moving across the world to work with them, my supervisor notified me via an email in February that they were now “too busy” to help me.
I asked for a replacement and scheduled a meeting with who I was told would be my new supervisor. During said meeting, this individual did not ask about my research. When I raised the possibility of working together, I learned that they were not employed by the university. Even if they had wanted to supervise me (which they did not), they were in no position to. I was frustrated and confused that my time had been so mindlessly wasted.
I went back to my would-have-been supervisor for a third option. They suggested one of their colleagues, whom I emailed with the hopes of connecting to the iwi I had been invited to work with. This colleague was Pākehā (of European descent) and did not have the connections I needed. Running out of time to find someone to work with, I accepted their offer to be part of my committee anyway.
Doing so twisted a proverbial knife into my stomach. Conducting research on Māori people with an entirely non-Māori committee felt extractive and morally wrong; I knew that if someone non-Anishinaabe were facing a similar dilemma in my homelands, I would expect them to respect me enough not to tell my story for me.
Locked into my research assistantship contract and indebted to thousands of dollars in scholarship funding, I felt trapped. With no other plausible choice, I agreed to a project that I fundamentally disagreed with; it would be the first of many occasions where my work and research forced me to cross my core values.
—
In addition to writing my thesis, I had also been hired as a Research Assistant. The position sounded groundbreaking in theory; part of my work entailed organising a net zero transition conference. However, the position was nothing like the opportunity that had been described to me.
Isolated an ocean away from everyone I loved, my boss was the only person I knew within a six-hour drive. This was a person I had a strong foundation of trust with; years of close collaboration had taken us abroad for research together and integrated our families into each other’s lives. When our relationship unravelled, the pain was searing on both a professional and personal level.
March 13th, 2023, began as a good day. That morning, my colleague and I met with one of our invited youth panellists. We considered young people’s voices included in climate discussions integral and were confident in the speakers we had selected.
In my second meeting of the day, things took a disparaging turn. As my colleague and I shared our work on the youth panel, we advocated to start the day with their voices; a suggestion that seemed sensible considering that youth are inheriting the consequences of climate change. For the next half hour that followed, everyone else in that room degraded our idea and demographic.
“If we invite youth, they’ll just boomer bash,” said one person, “We have to train them on how to speak beforehand.”
Another said, “It’s not a good strategy.”
A third said, “If the youth speak at the beginning, the business people will walk out.”
Every adult in that room suggested moving the panel later and later through the day until it was off the agenda. The entire time, my boss sat in silence.
Finally, they said, “Taylor, I can tell you’re getting upset. Why don’t you share your thoughts with the group?”
What I wanted to say at that moment was, “You’re going to let some ageist individuals ruin the work we’ve been doing on a project that you asked us to organise? And you’re going to sit in silence, letting them tear down a demographic I belong to? If these comments were made about any other group, would you be sitting here, okay with it?”.
I said none of these things. Instead, I sat shaking in quiet rage. I replied meekly, “I can feel myself dissociating, so I am going to excuse myself for another meeting.” I ducked out of the room, closed the door in another, and sobbed.
—
I returned for a meeting with my boss the next day. I was terrified to open up to them, but I knew I needed to honour my feelings no matter how vulnerable it was. I shared that the events that had transpired the day prior had made me feel mentally and emotionally unsafe at work. I asked why they had stayed silent during these comments, and what their plan was to establish a safer environment for myself and my colleague.
They insisted that their silence during my mistreatment stemmed from a place of “just listening to other perspectives.” They, a tenured professor in their fifties, stated, “We aren’t that far apart in age,” and that they had, “only recently stopped feeling like a youth” themself. They then shared their own advocacy mistakes with me, instilling a point that I was too young to know what I was talking about.
I left that conversation feeling so, so small.
—
That afternoon, we drove to a farm so I could shadow my boss’ work. The extractive nature of my research continued to gnaw at me, and I asked how the project would benefit my community back home. I had been promised a nation-to-nation partnership, but the reality was that I could not see my work in its current form benefitting Māori or Anishinaabe people.
My boss responded, “It won’t connect linearly. Imagine the people here are your community, and journal the question as you go along.” It was a paltry answer, and I was livid. To pretend that Māori were my own nation, when a core element of Indigenous peoples is our distinctive relationship to place, was an affront to both groups.
That evening, I journaled, “I don’t feel cared for by the adults who asked me to make the sacrifice of moving across the world for their project. I feel duped and apathetic - like I just have to get through this and graduate. I’m being shoved into a project I do not want, and it’s the only way for me to get the resources and support I was promised in the first place.”
—
The next day, I called the three people whose advice I trusted most, desperate for advice on what to do about my job.
The first tried guiding me toward my intuition. I broke down to them.
“I just want to come home,” I cried.
“Then come home, Tay,” they replied, “this is not worth it”.
The second pumped my brakes and reminded me that to abandon this project would burn all the academic bridges I had built. They pointed out that dropping out of the project would only reflect poorly on me.
They were right: I had research assistant expectations to meet, scholarship funding to merit, future earnings potential to consider, and the time, energy and money of eight months already sunk into the process.
The third echoed the second’s comments, and encouraged me to “bad bitch” my way through it. I resigned to stick it out, convincing myself that I could overcome the obstacles in my way if I just pushed myself harder.
The problem with this approach was that blaming, shaming, and hating myself for the unfolding situation happening to me came at the expense of my mental well-being.
I stopped writing for pleasure and forced myself to work on my thesis every single day. I began waking up at 5 am and working out seven times a week despite my fracture. I kept an onerous list of “wellness” tasks for myself, and shamed myself whenever I failed to perfectly execute said list. From the outside, I was doing all the things I was supposed to, but on the inside, my habits felt like punishments.
—
During a rare night out with friends in mid-March, I came to an important realisation: I could not compromise on my core research values. I realised I needed to stand up to those who had conditionally supported me; doing so meant I would need to come up with a new topic on my own, now more than two months in.
Doing so late in the process closed my window to conduct interviews and forced me to write a literature review-based thesis instead. It was a decision that came with immense grief. My research was turning out so differently, and so much worse, than I had ever expected it to.
—
The events of the week prior still hadn’t settled well with me. I coped by writing my boss a letter. I tucked it into my bag as I drove to their house for another work trip, memorising the four requests I wanted to assert to them:
Agency and support on a project to help the local iwi I was working with and my own community;
Someone Māori to connect with and ensure my research was ethical;
An apology from those who had demeaned me or to no longer engage with them as part of my Research Assistantship; and
My boss to empathise with me, listen to me, take accountability for minimising my feelings and ensure a safer work environment going forward.
My boss refused all four of my requests, and chided me for even suggesting I come up with a new project idea of my own. We argued about it for a long while, and then, after a good cry, I holed up in his house to scrap together a joint presentation for a faculty audience. I worked on it until the last minute before we took the stage, and presented it without time for a proper run-through.
Sharing a half-formed project I had no support for to a crowd of strangers was difficult, and I felt ashamed of myself for not having better-rounded arguments. Following the presentation, my boss and I spent our afternoon in a break room, receiving mixed feedback from those who had listened in. During a lull between visitors, my boss told me to give up on getting any kind of apology; they told me they would not stand up for my colleague and I. Shortly afterwards, I was shut out from conference planning entirely.
—
I was told that the conference I was planning would be groundbreaking; stakeholders from all sides of the political spectrum were convening to collaborate on solutions to the transition challenge facing agriculture and the environment in Aotearoa. I was thrilled to lend my support to tribal leaders, government representatives, academics, agricultural industry stakeholders and civil society organisations on this issue. Agriculture may not be my passion, but I deeply care about the major contributions it is making to the climate crisis.
After the youth panel was rejected, the conference began falling apart in other ways. Those organising had never checked to see if a similar conference to ours existed - and it did, in the same city, on overlapping dates. My boss, and my colleague’s boss, started meeting with the organisers of the other conference to strike a compromise. They made an intentional choice not to include us in any of those discussions.
We went from playing an integral role in the conference to not having one at all. Why? Because they wanted to show us that as youth, we were not to be taken seriously as conference organisers - even though we had been hired specifically for that purpose.
—
My online classes continued. During one of them, a guest lecturer asked everyone about their thesis topics. When it came time to talk about mine, I broke down and cried. I couldn’t make sense of my feelings and felt intensely ashamed and embarrassed for not “handling my emotions” better.
My breakdowns were proof that I was crumbling under the weight of odds impossibly stacked against me. My thesis supervisors, hired to help me navigate all of this, were nowhere to be found. Each time I asked for feedback, they each took more than two months to reply - something that never would have been acceptable in a workplace. I believe it should not have been acceptable treatment towards a student under their purview either.
Being an ocean away from their offices, I couldn’t show up demanding support in person. Nor was complaining to their supervisors an option - I had spent so little time on campus that I didn’t even know who they were. I was alone without options. As I wrote about it in a journal entry from April 4th:
“Things have been all-consuming tough lately. Thesis writing is harder than I ever thought it would be. Every day, I sit down and feel viscerally uncomfortable with what I have written. I doubt the direction I’ve taken, and resent the way things have transpired here. I worry that what I write won’t be significant enough, and I feel a responsibility to get it right for my community. I feel ashamed too, of how I’ve failed so far, and that shame keeps me from reaching out to anyone.”
With no one to share my concerns with, I turned the blame on myself. I deemed myself a failure for not overcoming every challenge in my way. I hated my circumstances, and I hated myself. My internalised self-hatred caused me to spiral into a dark hole.
—
Later that day, I received a call from my boss, who wanted to check in on how I was doing. I risked vulnerability again, this time to let them know that I was struggling deeply with anxiety and depression. I asked if they could help fund my mental healthcare for the remainder of my time in Aotearoa.
“I’m afraid I don’t have funding for that,” they said, “but you should pick up this book I’m reading on internal family systems so you can love your parts. We all have firefighters and managers inside of us. Sometimes I have to remember to be a parent instead of a manager at home.”
As you can imagine, their advice did not resonate.
“I need to move home early,” I replied. “I am so unhappy here.”
“That’s your choice,” they told me, “but I can’t cover the costs of changing your flight.”
“Can you cover the cost of my going home then?” I asked. “Even just for a week or two?”
“Again, that’s outside of my budget,” they said, “but if you want to go home, you can pay for it and come back for the conference.”
They reminded me that they were not my thesis supervisor and therefore unable to support me, but considered themself my friend. With that, they hung up on me.
Friends don’t let friends suffer alone, I thought, setting down my phone to cry.
—
On April 7th, I journaled, “It feels agonising to sit in front of my computer and commit to working on a thesis that feels wrong, in a country that feels wrong, in a program that feels wrong, in a school that feels wrong. Where am I supposed to summon the energy when my whole body screams no? I feel stuck in a steep hole without a ladder. I know sunlight is up there, but I don’t know how to climb up to it when the earth keeps crumbling beneath my fingers.”
Reading that entry makes my heart ache; the damage this chapter wreaked on my mental health was not worth it. At the same time, dropping out would have financially crippled me; I was trapped in my circumstances until June.
—
I started looking at flights home. It would be $2,100 round trip. Had I been making what my colleague (who was paid $25,000 for the same work) was, a loss of $2,100 wouldn’t have impacted me so significantly; but because I was only paid $10,000, this constituted a fifth of my total salary as a research assistant. Desperate to improve my mental health, I no longer cared what leaving would cost me.
I started paying out of pocket for a therapist. My first session came with a lot of validation, both about my time in New Zealand and other traumas I had experienced throughout my life. “You have one of the most difficult histories I’ve ever heard,” she told me. It was comforting to hear, and it hurt, too, because it didn’t change my situation.
That week, I received a call from my colleague’s boss, who rattled off a list of individuals I could interview for my thesis. Their offer came too late; my non-refundable flight had already been booked, and there was no way I could conduct the interviews before leaving. The ethics board application alone would take weeks to be approved.
Here was the opportunity I so badly wanted, dangling just outside my reach.
—
After being shut out from conference planning for weeks, I finally received this email from my boss:
“For the youth you’ve invited, I think the message is we would still really hope to have their participation. We only have room for about 15 speakers in total. I do hope the youth can join us, though we are not asking them to ‘speak’. As we move forward, we’ll work out the process for June 21, bringing diverse voices to the fore, youth included.”
Four months of planning and advocating were in one email reduced to nothing. The youth we were tasked with inviting were not just pushed to a later or irrelevant time slot in the event programme; they were removed from the agenda entirely. I wondered what the purpose of my position had ever been.
—
May brought with it financial stress; between spending $2,000 on a Visa application, $2,000 on summer tuition, and $2,000 on my return flights, my scholarship funding was quickly running dry. With my research assistantship ending in June, I was set to spend my summer unemployed, and my impending financial precarity scared me.
I tried hard to get myself unstuck; I booked online meetings with my program chair, a professor on my research team, my research centre manager, some library staff, and an archivist. I shared openly the struggles I had faced throughout my time in Aotearoa; everyone I reached out to offered resources that they never followed through on.
“You know, this is not the first time the Centre has failed an international student,” said my research centre manager. I asked what happened, and he told me that another researcher had struggled through similar circumstances. “I was hesitant to invite you after what happened with our last student,” they elaborated, “once bitten, twice shy, you know?”.
I did know, now. I wondered why no one had ever shared this information with me; if they had, perhaps I would have said no to the opportunity entirely.
—
My meetings with the library staff and archivist went well; they understood why I cared so deeply about my research and showed me relevant archival and library materials. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make much use of their materials, as they were all stored in Ōtautahi. Like the call about potential interview subjects, these were resources I needed months earlier.
I spent my last day asking my program chair to help me find more committed supervisors for my thesis, a promise they agreed to but never followed up on. I packed my things and had my colleague drive me to the airport.
As I wrote in my journal: “I can’t wait to get out of here and onto something else. I have mixed, bittersweet feelings about my time abroad, but they’re muted now. My excitement to go home is much stronger. In that sense, I suppose I did make the right choice.”
My heart ached as I left. It was not at all how I had imagined my time abroad would go.
—
I made a stop in Tāmaki Makaurau on my long trek home. I bought tickets to the Auckland Writers’ Festival, hoping that immersing myself in creativity would pull me out of the rut I was stuck in. However, my sense of confidence disintegrated in Ōtautahi, and it showed.
I shook with anxiety during book signings and shamed myself for mishandling social interactions with my favourite authors. I went home early from the festival because I believed I was too ugly and worthless to be seen in public. I was trying to do what I loved, but my internalised self-hatred continually stole from the experience.
That week, I started summer classes. While I didn’t have the capacity to take on my coursework, I didn’t have the luxury of choice, either; unless I moved back to Vancouver, online summer classes were the only way out of my degree. Desperate to graduate, I forced myself through them.
—
Finally, I came home. I was relieved, and hopeful that being surrounded by loved ones would heal what had happened to me.
It worked, for a few days. I surprised my friends, and hearing their shrieks of joy about my early return was one of my highlights of the year. As the weekend wound down and everyone returned to work, however, my real life kicked back in.
I had left Aotearoa, but the trauma of my work and research followed me home. I had months of unprocessed trauma from New Zealand to talk through, as well as the ethical dilemmas I was still struggling with about everything I was working on. With no one around me who understood what I was going through, I slid further into an anxious, depressed state.
—
Knowing that I was not well, I tried hard to secure mental health support for myself; I hoped that a diagnosis and being put carefully back on a better-fitting medication would help me feel like myself again.
Unfortunately, everywhere I turned for help came up empty; the earliest doctor’s appointment I could schedule was for mid-August, and every clinic I reached out to quoted me $4,000 to undergo mental health testing. As I wrote in a journal entry one day, “I wish I had the mental healthcare I need - the medication, the testing, the counselling - but I don’t. I don’t know what else I can do for myself to make it okay.”
Without the mental health support I needed, I hit my breaking point. When the thought “You should kill yourself” followed by “I know” came to me, I panicked. I had been in a months-long fight with my own worst thoughts, and I could sense myself losing the battle. I finally shared what was going on with a loved one that night.
“Sometimes it just feels like my own thoughts want to kill me,” I said, and we both cried as they held my broken pieces together. They reminded me that together, we would kill them first. Sitting on their kitchen counter, we closed our eyes and imagined me, ten years into the future, healed from all of this. Through tears, they reminded me that they would be devastated if they lost me. I promised them that no matter what, I would not act on my thoughts to hurt myself.
—
The next morning, I groggily dragged myself out of bed and to work. One of the professors taking part in the conference was retiring, and my boss asked me to volunteer for the day to support them.
I burst into tears the moment I saw my boss again; their presence was a painful reminder of the worst chapter of my life. When they noticed and inquired about it, I told them, “I’m just so nervous to return to New Zealand. I really don’t want to.”
They gave me a side hug and told me to hang in there; “It will be a great trip, with helpful conversations for your thesis.” I wanted to ask to back out of the conference, but I bit my tongue, knowing my Research Assistantship funding was precarious enough already.
—
Later that week, I flew back to Ōtautahi. My work week began at the Global Food and Fibre Systems conference - an agricultural conference tackling the same themes as the conference I had helped plan. I got to the Ōtautahi City Council building, hopeful for productive discussions about the net zero transition. Instead, I was subjected to microaggressions.
“Is your name missing a few letters?” a middle-aged white man asked.
“No,” I said, “It’s German.”
He asked what I was doing here. When I explained my work, he questioned, “Oh you’re German, living in Canada, and working with Indigenous peoples? Why?”
I explained that in addition to being German, I was also Anishinaabe, and from Turtle Island. He continued to interrogate me about my identity, and as soon as I found an opportunity to escape, I fled to the bathroom and cried.
Later that morning, I relayed the story to my boss outside the venue doors.
“Don’t let him get to you,” they said, giving me another half-hearted side hug, “It’s still going to be a great day.”
It was, for them.
—
The next day, while on a marshlands tour with the research team, I started feeling sick with a sore throat, headache, and congestion. I stayed in bed for the first day of the conference. My boss did nothing to accommodate me; thankfully, one of the conference presenters, a stranger to me, was kind enough to buy me medicine.
On the second conference day, I wore a mask to work. The opportunity I was long told would “shape the future of Aotearoa’s net zero transition” had devolved into little more than a classroom discussion. Nearly all thirty people in the room were professors and students already working and learning in the climate sector. When it came time to share our ideas, all that came forth were platitudes like, “We should have more community gardens.”
Community gardens are important; but five of us had flown here from Canada for this conference, and based on our emissions alone, I felt immensely frustrated by the lack of fulsome solutions discussed. Everything said in that room could have been shared over Zoom or email.
In the middle of our discussion, my boss asked me to present my research to the entire room. Frozen, I croaked out two sentences and excused myself. Sickness and stress were wearing on me, and I cried to my colleague outside the conference room. I cried again when one of the research team members asked how my thesis was going. Emotionally and physically exhausted, I went home after work and slept the rest of the day.
—
When I awoke the next morning, I tested positive for Covid-19. I felt awful that I had gone to work the day prior and put others at risk. I texted my boss to let them know I would not be coming to work in person the rest of the week. They asked me to attend via Zoom to make up for it.
Not wanting to risk the health of the research team I was staying with, I asked my boss to cover my isolation accommodation. I checked into the cheapest place I could find on short notice - a dinghy garage-turned-studio Airbnb where I isolated myself for the next four days. At one point, a colleague came by to drop off groceries and commented, “I can’t believe your boss is letting you live like this.” Meanwhile, my boss had wished me well and moved on to another conference in Australia.
Feeling physically, mentally, spiritually and emotionally depleted, I made it home for good; finally set free from the worst chapter of my life.
—
I wish I could say that going home healed me; I certainly hoped it would. The truth is, my spirit completely collapsed while I was abroad, and it took a long time for me to recover myself from the wreckage. A year has passed since I returned home, and while my body and mind have healed in many ways, I admit that I am still recovering.
In How to Know a Person, the author shares an excerpt from an esteemed religious leader, who discusses immense growth in the aftermath of grief. After sharing the extent of his newfound knowledge many could only dream of possessing, he states: “I would give it all up for the return of my son.”
My circumstances may be vastly different, but my thoughts around graduate school are much the same; I would do anything to exchange this degree for the life I had before I began my studies.
I wasn’t the only one who got hurt in this process - trauma begets further trauma, and those caught in the crosshairs of my mental illness had their psyches damaged too. To this experience, I lost parts of myself - and those I love most - that I might never get back.
That is the part of all this that still crushes me most.
—
I graduated on May 24th, 2024. It was a day I had been dreading for a long time. Convocation represented an extraordinarily painful time in my life, one I had no desire to celebrate. But my parents wanted to watch me cross the stage, so I went.
It was a rainy day in xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territory. Three hundred of us gathered to graduate in UBC’s Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. Our valedictorian shared a powerful speech calling upon academic institutions such as our own to end its complicity in colonialism and climate change.
A few minutes later, a senior administrator took the stage. In their speech about Indigenous peoples, they referred to “missing and endangered Indigenous women”, a misnomer for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2S).
The word endangered refers to plant and animal species at risk of extinction; as the stewards of Turtle Island since time immemorial, Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit people are not going anywhere, no matter how hard colonial governments try to disappear us. This individual did not even try to learn the proper terminology behind a devastatingly painful epidemic of violence; to me, it signalled that they do not see us as human.
–
Universities love to be seen as though they are working for the benefit of Indigenous peoples; submit a research proposal with the words “Indigenous,” “decolonial,” “sustainability” or “climate change,” and you’ll garner academic funding for it; even if you are non-Indigenous, even if you have no deep commitment to what those words mean. Rarely ever are universities doing the deep work it takes to actually decolonise.
They will give land acknowledgments but fail to recognize us as human in the same speech. They will invest millions of dollars into “Indigenous” buildings but not tuition or counselling for Indigenous students. They will fund non-Indigenous researchers to conduct “Indigenous” research around the world, instead of paying and enabling communities to do it themselves.
As Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith articulates it best in Decolonizing Methodologies: universities “tell us things already known, suggest things that would not work, and make careers for people who already have jobs.”
My acceptance into my master’s program had little to do with my brilliance or research interests; if it did, I would have been supported in the ways I deserved by the three institutions that promised me the world.
Instead, I served as a mere token for my professors, faculty and program; a nice profile to spotlight on their website, a convenient checkbox to make it look like they care about Indigenous students. If my experience demonstrates anything, it is that universities have a long way to go before they can claim that they do.
—
Those I’ve shared this story with tell me I should complain, that what happened to me was awful and that my university’s administration should know about it. I agree.
At the same time, I know intimately the experience of fighting with a university administration to receive any semblance of justice; it is a fight that almost always comes up empty. Launching my sexual assault investigation five years ago took nearly everything out of me. Healing from all that happened to me last year was another fight, one that has required me to find every ounce of tenacity I have.
While I consider myself an okiticitakwe (“warrior woman”) to my core, I do not have a third fight in me right now. Even if I did, I am terrified that said fight would come at the expense of losing my references. In the academic world, connections are everything. I still have a lot I want to accomplish, and I cannot let a bad reference steal my future from me. Maybe one day, I’ll feel comfortable enough to come forward.
For now, I wrote this piece, knowing that while it can never give back to me the things that trauma stole from me, at least it is proof that it happened. I remind myself that despite what I went through, every day brings me closer to the version of me I want to be - someone who, ten years into the future, has healed from all of this.
