Little Cat in the Big World

This week was extremely hectic for me, and in between all the classes, and meetings and work and volunteering etc. I kept waiting for this week’s blog topic to smack me on the nose, but to no such luck. Then yesterday night, I found a little inspiration in the strangest place, in a game of “GO FISH”! You all remember that game right?! The really simple card game that you play when you are about 7 year old, where you try and make pairs by asking the other people for cards. If they don’t have the specific card you want then you “go fish” and pick up another from the deck. Yep, that’s the one! Well, I got to play a more “extreme” version (this was no game for seven year olds =P) last night. Friday night, myself and the other coordinator of the UW Women’s Centre organized training for our wonderful volunteers. Included in the training was an Ally training session facilitated by a representative from GLOW. I have done Ally training before, and I was no stranger to the content in the session, except for this crazy game of go fish, which was a new edition to the training. Let me explain. The group was split up into three smaller groups, and each of these smaller groups had to pick a leader. These leaders were then taken out into the hall and given additional rules for how to play the game. Two of the teams were given one set of rules, and the third group was given a different set. I was in the 3rd group, and our set of instructions was to play a regular game of go fish, but with these additional rules: 1) players weren’t allowed to look at anyone in the eye, 2) players must always address other players by first name, 3) female identified players received two turns in a row and male identified players only one. As we were playing, I found myself being agitated by the fact that we weren’t allowed to look people in the eye, and with the fact that I had to excessively use people’s names (excessive name use is one of my biggest pet peeves....weird I know). Most of us didn’t really understand the point of the exercise, but we all just blindly followed the rules, assuming that a point was going to be made. After each group finished the first game, participants from each group were forced to join another group, but were not informed of the rules in that new group. We were instructed to start playing and that was it. So, our leader started, and he turned to me and rested his hand on my legs and asked, “do you have any sevens, please?” I of course shrieked and pulled my leg away, because my personal space bubble is massive, and when people touch me it makes my skin crawl a little. That’s not an exaggeration either, it feels like little spiders are crawling on my skin. It really doesn’t matter who it is, it’s just less intense when I know/like you. Of course, everyone found it amusing, but I was slightly confused as to why I was being touched. I eventually figured out that this was part of the rules, as everyone kept touching each other on the leg when they asked for a card, and when I didn’t do it I missed a turn. Apparently, part of the rules was also to be extra polite, which I didn’t realize, because I was saying please and thanks every time I asked for/received a card anyways (my parents would be so proud). Once I caught on to the fact that we had to touch each other, I clenched my jaw and powered through the rest of the game, uncomfortable, but resolved to suck it up because I assumed it was part of the learning experience. So, after we finished the game, we had an opportunity to debrief and discuss the exercise. The participants who switched groups were asked how they fared. Everyone commented that they were extremely confused and uncomfortable, but once they figured out what everyone else was doing, they just conformed. This was the point where our facilitator made the link between the exercise and life. According to the facilitator, the game represents the unstated rules of our society that are considered “the norm”. And our experience of switching groups and not being told the rules, represented someone who exists outside of the definition of “the norm”. How we react is how many of us react in a situation where we feel like we don’t fit in. We do things that we wouldn’t normally do, and we conform to these unwritten rules. And for those of who are “the norm” we force others to conform by making them uncomfortable to be themselves. While obviously not a perfect analogy, the overall point was that we need to learn to appreciate and accept diversity and individualism, and we need to learn to question authority and the things we accept blindly.

In this scenario, I was a conformist. I sucked it up, and let people invade my personal space, to make things go easier – apparently shrieking and yanking my limbs away was rather disruptive to the group...go figure. I made myself uncomfortable in the name of what I thought was a learning experience, but the underlying suggestion is that I should have put my foot down and told them to stop invading the personal space bubble. Joanne always says you aren’t learning unless you are uncomfortable, but I would have been uncomfortable either way – if I had thrown a fit and said stop touching me, or if I just clenched my jaw and pushed through it. Ultimately, we react different ways in different situations, and it made me reflect on my boundaries, and situations where I have chose to conform and situations where I refused to. I can honestly say I have learned something from each of these situations, and sometimes I’ve stepped on people’s toes, and other times I tried to make them more comfortable. How do we balance our own thoughts and feelings with the thoughts of others? And how will this have to change abroad? We all have fairly established boundaries here in our comfortable western lives, but when we go off to our placements, those boundaries are going to be seriously challenged, and will probably have to shift in the name of our own safety/health/happiness, at the expense of others. I guess the question that interests me the most about all of this is, if our boundaries have the potential to be so fluid, why do they mean so much to us while we are here? Do we ever really know what the “right” path is? These are definitely meant as rhetorical questions, and I don’t really expect an answer, it’s just something that I have been pondering and thought I would share with the group. In any case, it was an interesting exercise, and I appreciated the opportunity for reflection that it provided. Hopefully I have something a little more interesting for you next week!

Cheers,
Cathleen