Little Cat in the Big World

I won’t lie, I am definitely a little relieved that this posting will fulfill the last blogging requirement for this term. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the blog. Reflection through writing is something that I do on a regular basis, and it is something that I find quite comforting, but sharing that sort of thing in a public forum....well that's just not ideal. Whether it be in blog form, or in person conversations, I am not really a big fan of bouncing ideas off people. In all honesty, it’s because most of the time I legitimately feel that I approach things much differently from other people, and that most just simply don’t understand where I am coming from – and this feeling is usually reaffirmed in the responses that I receive...not always, but usually. My intention isn’t to sound angsty, although I am sure I do. I am merely suggesting that I don’t typically feel as though the blogging process is a beneficial experience for me in terms of processing my own experiences [sorry Joanne, I tried], and I’m definitely ok with that because I have other outlets. That being said, I have in some ways been thankful for the blogs, which is why I say it’s a love-hate relationship. I feel as though blogging has allowed our group to make a deeper connection with one another than may have been possible in a classroom setting alone. Our Beyond Borders group really hasn’t met all that often this term, but when our last class rolled around on the Monday, I found myself feeling somewhat saddened at the idea of us parting ways. And this feeling was actually a common thread of the week – as this was my last week of classes at UW....EVER!

**Let me tell you...there has been some embarrassing displays of me foolishly dancing in the street. I can only imagine what is going to happen on the day of my last exam. Luckily I am not writing in the PAC for that one...haha**

I have been keeping myself so outrageously busy this term that I have barely had time to really think about the fact that I am done here. Five years of my life has been spent at UW not simply trying to get a degree, but also forming a community and trying to discover my place in this crazy world. I have learned so much about myself and I am eternally grateful for the people who have shaped my experiences, good and bad, while here. Some of these individuals I have known only in passing, and some have been by my side since day one, but in their own ways they have helped to get me to this point – in spite of the fact that I didn’t always believe I could do it. In particular, the people I have surrounded myself with this school year have been pivotal in getting me to the end. When I started this year, I hit a really big wall, and wasn’t sure what I was even doing here or what direction I should go even if I did finish. I was sick of the system, and sick of not being challenged, and I was sick of the people that I was in class with [it’s a bit funny how I say “was” like this is no longer a problem...]. Call it final year burn-out or whatever you’d like, but I was not psyched about this year. What helped a lot, was the Beyond Borders program/the thought of Nairobi, my wonderful community group at the Women’s Centre, GLOW and the Student Equity group I am a member of, and finally St. John’s Kitchen. These places/groups became my refuge during the term because they were filled with people that shared values that centred on the importance of social justice, mutual respect, and a continual pursual of knowledge and self betterment. I can safely say that without these people/places, I probably would have freaked out and quit. And this week I was forced to start saying my goodbyes. Let me tell you, I am really not very good with goodbyes. Shocking, right?! Or, not at all really.

During goodbyes, my intense social awkwardness takes over, and instead of sharing a moment with someone, I get weirded out by their weeping and excessive touching, and then I ruin the moment [perhaps make it better...depends how you look at it] with awkward jokes. *sigh*. But despite my robot like expression of emotion, it is rather important for me try and express gratitude to those who have made a difference in my life – big or small. I’m the person that stops and tells the friendly bus driver that says hello when I get on the bus, that I appreciated their friendliness. I feel like it’s often the people that do the smallest things that make the biggest difference in our lives, and these small things are rarely acknowledged. I have very rational motivations for this, and I just truly think it's important to acknowledge when people are being awesome. So, during all of these goodbyes I am trying to sum up why say that random late night conversation I had about queer theory in the Women’s Centre was more than just a random conversation for me, which isn’t a particularly easy (or short) thing for me to articulate, and then it ends up being a disaster for all parties involved. People start weeping [myself NOT included], I start making jokes....and then my personal space gets invaded with hugs. Yikes! The next couple of weeks before departing are going to be just so awful....I can't even imagine how this is all going to go down when I leave Nairobi in August.

But, the point of all this is to say thanks to those in the Beyond Borders program. I have different reasons why each of you have made a difference for me this term, and I would need a lot more space to individually thank each one of you. So I will have to settle for this: Thanks for the challenges, laughs, conversations, and continual push that I needed to make it to this point. It hasn’t always been smiles and giggles, but it’s always been a valuable learning experience – and if you aren’t uncomfortable then you aren't learning....right?! I imagine I will see most of you before we all depart - and the hugs and awkwardness can take place then.

This is so much easier to do online.

Cheers,
Cathleen

This week, I had a particularly relevant Beyond Borders learning moment that I plan on sharing with you all. It’s pretty simple, and it’s not like I didn’t know it before, it just seems a little more important as that departure date comes ever closer. Here it is:

If I could be represented by one animal I’m pretty sure it would be a donkey. Yep, that’s me – super duper stubborn. I know how to dig my heels in the ground with the best of them, and sometimes I don’t even need a legitimate reason to do so; most of the time I just don’t like being told what to do because I am a fairly independent individual and I like figuring things out for myself. Stubbornness is not a particularly flattering characteristic to have, and I do my best to keep it in check most of the time, because it has landed me in some trouble in the past. But where I really tend to dig those heels in deep is when people try and help me - I do not do well when people try and help me, and especially when they start questioning why I don’t want their help. It’s not that I won’t ever ask for help/accept help. In fact, I am pretty willing to ask for/accept help when I know that I need it. But this certainty only results when I have attempted to tackle whatever problem/challenge by myself, first – multiple times usually – with minimal to no success. When people try and offer me help when I haven’t asked for it, most of the time I will say no, and more than once this has created a little bit of friction between myself and the person offering assistance. Typically when this friction does occur, it’s because I perceive the situation to involve gender-power dynamics, and I refuse to play along. For instance when a man tries to give me their seat on the bus, despite the fact that I am perfectly able bodied and I am not carrying heavy things. I get that it’s meant to be a nice gesture, but I also understand the gendered meaning behind it and regardless of how uncomfortable it makes the other person for me to turn it down, it makes me equally as uncomfortable to accept it. My intention is to not be some sort of “radical man hater” (yes, I have been called that when I have declined a seat on the bus), I just don’t feel that I should have to indulge outdated social graces for the sake of politeness or keeping the peace [see Ani's "Not A Pretty Girl" for a more poetic (perhaps cliche) explanation]. This however is not the type of scenario that I want to address – I understand that this blog is not a soap box for my poststructural musings about gender-power dynamics, and I am trying to keep it that way – besides that slight tangent of course.

The type of scenarios I am trying to address are ones similar to what happened to me on Friday while at St. John’s Kitchen. There is an expectation that you take a break and eat lunch while volunteering at St. John’s – you stand in line like all the other patrons, you eat the same food as the patrons, and you sit at the same tables as them as well. The idea is that this way there is no “othering”; everyone is a part of the same community. I quite like that sentiment, but haven’t really been able to share in that experience as I can’t really eat any of the food they serve there because of my crazy digestive system and its ever constant food-feud. My inability to eat the food there has become a source of entertainment for a few of the workers who know a bit about my dietary resitrictions. Any time they can find something I might be able to eat, they seem to get rather giddy. Because food is made for everyone and in mass quantities, they can’t exactly make something specific for me, but they will try and send me home with whole food. I tend to decline these offers though, because food doesn’t exactly give me a whole lot of enjoyment (I essentially eat because I have to), so I would rather leave it for someone who actually would get more than just a meal from it. This isn’t something I talk about with the workers/volunteers at St. John’s though. I am rather private about the whole health issue thing, and I only tend to bring it up when I am in a place where I feel prepared to answer the inevitable barrage of questions that accompany my story. I also tend to avoid taking food from St. John’s because I feel like I am already taking enough from there in other ways; again not an easy thing to explain to people without going into a fairly deep and intellectual discussion. So, on Friday when I was offered squash to take home, I politely declined. This apparently was a problem, because they kept pushing me to take them the more I said no. So, of course, in my typical stubborn fashion I refused to budge and just dug my heels in deeper, and I refused to offer a substantial explanation because I felt like my boundaries weren’t being respected. Eventually we agreed to disagree and I didn’t take anything. Before I headed on my way home that day, I was given a piece of advice by the individual who offered me the veggies. They told me that sometimes I should just accept help from others not because I need it, but because it makes the other party feel good knowing that they did something for someone else.

I thought this was a really interesting comment, and I thought about it a lot over the weekend. I think we’ve all been in situations where we have bit our tongues and accepted something from another individual, not because we particularly wanted it, but because we recognized that it would be meaningful to them. But where do we draw the line? Why is it not ok to just say no thanks, and leave it at that? I bring this up, because in Nairobi I feel there are probably going to be situations where I will be offered, say food that I can’t eat, and I am going to decline it. I realize that their offer has meaning behind it – a gesture of good will, community etc., and I will probably explain that I have dietary restrictions rather than just flat out declining, but a lot of the time people don’t take that seriously and they try and force food on me anyways. My intention isn’t to offend others by declining, and in fact I feel offended myself because they aren’t respecting my boundaries and right to say no. My intention in declining is because I want to preserve my own boundaries or values, and their intention in insisting is that they want to do something nice for someone else so they feel good. Both sides are essentially doing “selfish” things – so why do we get so offended in exchanges like this? And is the only way out of this pickle to have one side bite their tongue and give the other side what they want? I like the idea of honest and equal exchanges – where both parties can give and receive. In all honesty, had I just been offered the food, and my no accepted the first time, I would have been pleased by that exchange. It’s nice to see their kind gesture, but also nice to see my boundaries respected. And they could have felt good that they tried to do something nice for me, and that I was pleased by it.

So here is where I turn it to you the reader....where are your boundaries in these types of situations? And how do you choose between your own comfort and the comfort of others?

"Hi my name is Cathleen, or Cat is fine too." *shakes hand* "It's nice to meet you!"

It's amazing how after a 10 second interaction with a stranger, we think we have people completely figured out. Sometimes we don't even interact with that person directly, and yet still we think we've seen enough to have their story down. We all do it - I certainly am guilty of it. Try as we might to avoid it, and heed our elders' warnings to not judge a book by its cover, we all still find ourselves doing just that. And to be fair, I think these snap judgements do have a place - we need it to provide context on how we should behave and approach the world when we are in each others company. Our initial perceptions tell us which walls to keep up and which are ok to let down, and they dictate how further interactions will occur, at least until we are able to gather more pieces of the puzzle and get a better sense of what the whole picture looks like. This is why first impressions are often so important. Because depending on how you come off, not many people are willing to stick around and gather more pieces of the puzzle. We all know this, of course. I am not saying anything particularly shocking or revealing, but here's where I make the Beyond Borders connection....

I make a horrible first impression! Perhaps horrible isn't the word, but I certainly don't seem to make a consistent first impression or one that I think accurately reflects who I am. When it comes to first impressions of me, I have heard it all. I've been told that people thought I was "a dumb jock", the popular girl who has a new partner every 2 days, a flirt, a hippie, non-athletic, a radical feminist, super conservative, mean, really nice, really shy.... the list goes on. And if I am being honest, I don't think any of those things are true. I like to think of myself as a fairly self aware person...although I guess we all would like to think this. I am pretty certain that I am a fairly multi-dimensional person, and have a lot of different sides of myself that come out at different times depending on where I am or what I am doing. Some of these sides can seem complete opposite to one another, for example, I am currently enrolled in Science, Women's Studies and American Sign Language at school. There isn't a whole lot of connection with those things other than I love learning - and I can safely admit that I approach each of these programs differently. My parents always laugh and say that I am the hardest person to stereotype, but there has got to be a reason why people are thinking what they are thinking. I made it my task this week to try and figure this out. In fact, this whole post was inspired by a comment that someone made at St. John's Kitchen - one of the workers there told me that she thought I was extremely conservative. I thought this was completely bizarre, and when I headed back to the Women's Centre that afternoon, I asked around. Turns out, that almost everyone there had a seemingly different first impression of me - although they did agree that I was no conservative (phew!). When I asked what it was about me that gave them their respective first impressions of me, no one really had a solid reason; apparently that is just what I came off as. What is it that I am doing that makes me come off so completely wrong?!

I only raise this question, because I feel as though in Nairobi, first impressions are going to be a big deal. The last thing I want to do while I am there is offend or put off the members of Education for Life, or even the women that I am supposed to be working alongside and teaching. I would like things to go smoothly as possible, and I think a good first impression could at least help a little with that.

Well, I have two months (eep!) before Nairobi. That should give me some time to figure it out....hopefully....maybe?....

Cheers,
Cat

I promised you all this week that I would write more about my experience at St. John’s Kitchen. I have been putting this off for many reasons, but mainly, I'm having a really hard time articulating my feelings towards the experiences I have had there. When we were initially told that we had to choose an organization to volunteer with in KW - one which we have never been involved with, and one which involved working with marginalized groups - I had this expectation that my experience was supposed to be so far outside of my reality that blog topics would be spewing from me. I chose St. John’s because I had never been involved with an organization that was exclusively involved with addressing issues of poverty. This was supposed to be outside of my comfort zone; I assumed I was supposed to feel alienated and detached and oppressive etc. Well I definitely failed on that one, because besides my existential crisis about the guilt associated with using service work as a means for self improvement; I haven’t found myself feeling negative things. I keep waiting to be shocked by the things I’ve seen there. I keep waiting to feel like I couldn’t possibly understand where these individuals are coming from. But I don’t feel like that at all. In fact, I find myself doing quite the opposite. In some circumstances I even find myself getting rather defensive of the things that go on there, regardless of whether they are considered “socially acceptable” or not. I hesitate to get into specific examples of this, because I feel like they aren’t my stories to share, and that without context people may make judgements or assumptions about these individuals, and this is the last thing that I want. But I will do my best to try and honour the experiences of others, while still sharing my own for the purposes of illustrating my point.

I am going to start with the story of my day yesterday, which will seem random, but I promise to bring it back to St. John’s. My day yesterday got off to a rather unexpected and frustrating start. I am one of the coordinators of the UW Women’s Centre, and as such I often times get dragged into the ridiculousness of student politics on campus. I can be rather diplomatic, and I know how to play the game when I need to, but dealing with bureaucracy is probably my least favourite thing about any position (paid or volunteer) that I’ve had. There is one particular issue that we are dealing with currently at the Women’s Centre that has been causing a lot of contention, and there are some who feel that the Women’s Centre should take less of a stand on this issue, because it is making certain individuals uncomfortable, and might reflect badly on others. But of course the political game requires that no one ever come right out and say any of this, instead everyone tip toes around one another and uses carefully crafted emails so as to not offend, but to slightly intimidate. Gotta love the political game – fakeness, lies, and red tape: what’s not to love?!...*sigh*. Of course, all of this nonsense yesterday morning made me frustrated, and upset, and all I wanted was to not be near UW people – which unfortunately I have come to associate with not so nice things. So, my solution was to head to St. John’s earlier than usual and try and distract myself. I figured I would still be angry underneath, but that being in an environment, like that of St. John's, would force me to at least pretend to be fine. Well, it did a lot more than that. After about 20 minutes of being there, I completely let go of my frustration. I of course was even more frustrated once I went home and received what seemed like a million emails about the same ridiculous issue...but for about 6 hours of my day, I was frustration free.

It’s hard for me to articulate why I can let go of my frustrations at St. John’s, but I am going to attempt to do so. There is a great deal of comfort that I feel while I am there, and it isn’t for the reasons that I think people would expect. I am not filled with gooey feelings of warmth because I think I am doing a good thing – in fact I still very much feel the same guilt that I did when I initially started there, because I know for a fact that I am getting more out of this than I am giving back. But I feel good about being there because it is an environment that makes sense to me. All the mindless social crap that we are expected to fit into day in and day out gets checked at the door. I don’t have to deal with politics, or diplomacy or red tape – I can just be. There seems to be this thought that if you go to university you are somehow higher on the invisible social hierarchy ladder – we are the leaders of tomorrow, the smartest of the smart, the “civilized”. I for one think this is absolute garbage. There is nothing particularly dignified or civilized or smart about bureaucracy and politics – which is a reality if you move up the ladder. To me, I associate this sort of thing with dishonesty and a lack of integrity – which even a 5 year old child can tell you are bad things. But there is this expectation that we be diplomatic so as to not offend, that we be fake and hide what we really think, no matter how much you might just want to cuss out that person who just mindlessly makes inappropriate comments. And I am guilty of doing it – like I said, I play the game when I need to, but I am frustrated by the underlying suggestion that somehow doing these things makes you “civilized”. To me, there is something so raw, and so honest about St. John’s Kitchen, and the people who use the service. They may not be diplomatic, or what most would consider particularly dignified/refined, and sure some of them may even lie or steal, but you can trust them to be human - to feel emotion and pain, and to react to it in a real way. And it’s this innate sense of honest humanity that just makes me feel comfortable there. I will give you an example. The last Wednesday of every month is when patrons receive their social assistance cheques. And often the last Thursday and Friday of the month you tend to see some patrons come in really drunk or high. It’s easy to put two and two together on this one, and it’s probably easier to make superficial judgements about this sort of thing – they are responsible for their own poverty, they are just lazy and refuse to work hard, they deserve to be where they are. I don’t see it that way however. To me, underneath all of this is just a lot of pain. It is a manifestation of a life lived in poverty; a manifestation of structural violence, and for whatever reason, it clicks with me (not in the sense that I can relate based on my own lived experience – my intention isn’t to marginalize their experiences - but just that I can understand where it comes from). It saddens me to see this sort of thing, and I can’t say it doesn’t frustrate me at times, but my frustration lies in the fact that it is incredibly shameful that poverty is a reality that we allow and accept as a society. I also get frustrated that we look down on this type of behaviour and call it “uncivilized”. But those who live in poverty often react this way, because that’s how they have learned to survive – what’s the excuse for those of us who don’t? We lack integrity and lie so we can get ahead, consume, oppress? I for one am exhausted by it. So I spend time at St. John’s Kitchen. I go as much as I can during the week, because most of the time I would rather spend time with honest strangers, then with dishonest people I know. The atmosphere at St. John’s is so different from that at UW, that I can let go of my frustrations because they aren’t relevant there. When you are being present in a place like that, what matters is giving a smile, and making connections, not diplomacy and politics. It makes sense to me, and I feel like I fit there. I was expecting to be freaking out and be really out of place, because I was working in a new environment with issues I had never dealt with before. And that discomfort is what learning involves, right?! But it’s not like that at all - no disasters, or reflections, or huge revelations. And so I don’t write about it. Perhaps because it scares me how much I do identify with it there – kinda puts a wrench in those life plans – or because I know that people I have talked to about it don’t seem to get it. Or maybe it’s because I feel like I am cheating a little, because being at St. John’s is not so much challenging as awesome. Perhaps it all of those things, who knows. What I do know, is come May, I am going to be rather sad to leave St. John’s. But I hope that Nairobi offers the same sense of comfort for me.

Cheers,
Cathleen

I’m going to come clean with you folks. While I have been honest in my posts thus far, I certainly haven’t been pushing myself outside of my comfort level. I typically only share things on the surface, and nothing more. These superficial things still bother me in a general sense, but they only last a day or two and I get over them. It’s those things that have cut deep that I don’t talk about, and I essentially do everything I can to ensure that I don’t talk about them. Well, my intention for this week’s entry is to try and break this habit...a little...baby steps (and thank you Lara for the push that I needed).

This past week was reading week, and I had a million and one things to do, because all of my midterms and major assignments are scheduled after reading week, and March at the Women’s Centre is event madness. My good intentions towards productivity fell through however, when on Sunday I developed some sort of unpleasant stomach sickness which lasted most of the week. Not to get too graphic, but I spent most of my week curled into a ball on the couch with a bucket on the floor beside me. And even after the worst of it subsided, I was still not able to do a whole lot – surprisingly things become a little more challenging when you haven’t been able to hold anything down for a couple of days and the room is spinning all around you.

I am no stranger to stomach illness in general. I have spent the past 10+ years going through bouts of what I experienced during reading week – some lasting much longer than a week, and sometimes more intense than that too. I like to tell people I have the stomach of an 80 year old man, or that I am just high maintenance, but I joke because it’s easier then telling people that I have struggled with my health for a really long time, or even worse, that I don’t dream the same way I used to because I know that I am limited by my health. It’s not really something that people pick up on with me because I seem pretty healthy – I am physically fit, I eat fairly well, and I don’t make a fuss when I’m sick (most of the time I just grab a magazine and wait for the worst to be over). But truth is, I don’t feel well all the time. Every moment of every day I have a stomach ache. I can keep it at a manageable level when I avoid eating/drinking certain things, getting enough sleep, avoiding stress, and taking lots of Tums etc. but it’s always there. And sometimes it’s definitely worse than others. My third year of university was probably the worst it has ever been. I spent 16 hours a day sleeping because I had no energy. I was so nauseous that I couldn’t eat, and when I did I couldn’t hold anything down. On top of that, I was losing my hair. I struggled to walk around the block most days, and I had to give up driving because it became too unsafe. I ended up dropping my on campus classes and moving back to Ottawa after a week of school. From then on, I was at the hospital at least once a week, and I had every possible test imaginable; always yielding different diagnoses – internal bleeding, stomach/pancreatic cancer, and at one point I was even accused of being a heroin addict (to which I responded with laughter, something they very much didn’t appreciate – gotta find humour in something though). In the end they never did figure out what it was or why it had gotten so much worse that year, and I was told there wasn’t anything that could be done. They extended the list of things I couldn’t eat, and I was sent on my way. I continued to make the jokes and shrug things off around friends and family because I could see how hard they were taking things, but truth is there were moments I was just as deflated by the news. What I had didn’t have a name or clear symptoms – which to me meant it didn’t have a way for me to fight it. I knew that this stomach thing, whatever it was/is, would forever be the defining thing for me in my life.

Eventually, I stopped feeling sorry for myself though. I decided that things could always be worse and I was going to stick it to those doctors who said I was stuck. I did everything I could to get things under control, and after many months my system finally started to level out. And for the past 2 years I have been pretty good, but that being said, my health still dictates a lot of basic decisions I make in my life – I avoid group meals or going out to dinner with people, I don’t go out to the bar often, and when I do I never have a drink in my hand, I always make sure that I have Tums on me, and a (vegan) granola bar in the event that I get stuck somewhere I can’t eat, I avoid scheduling things after 8pm because being out after this time guarantees me stomach pain, and I usually have the quickest way to the bathroom (or at the very least a garbage can) figured out no matter where I am. Besides making me the worst date/least fun person ever, these things are a small nuisance compared to being curled up in a ball unable to do a whole lot. After my third year, I know what it means to be “healthy” – I’m not at 100%, nor do I think I ever will be, but I have come a long way from where I was, and I can tell you for certain that I don’t want to go back to that. And this past week was a nice reminder of that. Well not nice, it was a rather unpleasant reminder...but you get what I’m saying.

So, you are probably wondering what the point is to this lengthy (and somewhat narcissistic) story, and how this relates to Beyond Borders. Well, here goes. I am absolutely terrified of going to Nairobi. And not because I think that I can’t handle the culture shock, or that I will be lonely and homesick, or even that I will be robbed – these are all things I know I can deal with, and have the support of many to help me through. I am terrified because I know that this trip is going to be incredibly challenging for my physical health. I won’t be able to control what I eat to the same degree, I will be tired and worn down and stressed, I will be exposed to nasty microbes which my weak stomach is more susceptible to, and I won’t be able to stay physically active to the same degree either. When I can’t be in control of these things, bad things happen – potentially third year bad...maybe worse. I keep telling myself that it will be ok, a little stomach sickness is easy peasy, and there is a part of me that still legitimately believes this, but I also know that there is a huge difference between a week of feeling gross in my cushy western home, and feeling like death in a foreign country where I know no one and they don’t know anything about my medical history. I got my physical this week and my doctor cleared me for the trip, but I know that the people who have been with me through the worst, who have helped me up stairs when I was too weak, held my hair back as I was sick, and watched helplessly time and again as I whimpered doubled over in pain, are not at all supportive of this trip. I signed up for this program knowing my health would be an issue, and knowing that this was a risk I was willing to take, but at the same time it still really scares me. Because if I can’t complete this placement, something I have wanted for a really long time, then whatever this health issue is, it has won. I know that not trying isn’t the answer, because there is a good chance that I CAN make it through the summer without things being a total disaster, but there is still a possibility I can’t. And it’s that “what if” that still has me extremely worried. Unfortunately for me, the only way to tackle that “what if” is to make it to the other side. It’s moments like this that I wish I had a crystal ball....

So there you have it, the band aid has been ripped off, and a little piece of myself put out there for the blogging world to read. I don’t particularly enjoy sharing this part of my life with others, but I’m hoping that owning it will make me a little more at peace with it. In any case, thanks for coming along for the ride. I promise to talk more about St. John’s Kitchen next week.

Cheers,
Cat

This is my last year at the University of Waterloo. After 5 long years of hammering through my degree, I have finally made it to the home stretch. I always imagined that somehow my last year would be the most amazing year ever. I truly thought it would be the year where I would be encouraged to fully engage with the material we were learning, and be intellectually challenged. But to tell you the truth, it’s not like that at all, at least outside of the Beyond Borders program that is (that's not me sucking up - that's the truth!). In all honesty, my entire experience at Waterloo has not been like that in the slightest. In my first three years, I assumed that you needed to learn the basics before you could really engage with the material, so I wasn’t all that concerned about the lack of intellectual stimulation. Instead I just memorized those facts and spewed them out on request; wasting time until my 4th/5th year where I believed things would be different – I would finally be challenged in a way that was designed to foster original thoughts and creativity. Let me tell you, I am still waiting for that to happen. When I was in high school I was a bit of a misfit (not so shocking for those of you who know me, I’m sure) and I was always told by teachers that university would be the place that I would finally fit in. It would be the place where I would get the challenge that I needed and where I would find people who had the same desire and drive for knowledge. And I really did believe that would be true. But now that I am almost done, and I have time to look back on the past 5 years, I feel like it’s been an incredible let down. I was having a discussion with a friend of mine last week, and we were chatting about how regurgitating information on tests can hardly be called learning. And I had said to him, that besides the Beyond Borders class last term, and WS 205 that I took in my fourth year, I literally have learned nothing of value in any of my classes. Many would probably call that an exaggeration, but I don’t think it is. None of my classes have really made me think, or reflect. None of my classes have encouraged me to move outside of my comfort levels. And none of my classes have inspired me. And are these things not what education is about?! In fact this week, in one of my classes (which is mostly discussion based) I found the exact opposite happening. Students were being rewarded for giving superficial answers, rather than discussing the problem fully, and expanding on their understanding of issues of oppression. It was a rather frustrating experience for me, because when I tried to raise a point that the professor didn’t agree with, I was shrugged off as if what I was saying didn’t matter or have any validity (which I would like to point out is fairly contrary to the “personal is political” model that WS always preaches). In any case, while I was certainly being challenged in this class, it was neither my intellect nor my boundaries that were being put to the test – it was my patience. How is any institution supposed to create the best and brightest of our future if we don’t allow anyone to learn and explore new ideas? Over the past couple of years I have learned more from discussions with students in the Women’s Centre or patrons at St. John’s Kitchen then I have from my fancy textbooks and lengthy lectures. So what am I doing here? I realize that the piece of paper I will get at the end of this term will being meaningful in society, but I am having a hard time seeing the value in it. Don’t get me wrong, I value education, quite a bit actually, and I think that is why I am so frustrated. I want to be challenged! And I don’t think that is unreasonable to expect that from an institution of higher learning. Something is definitely wrong if we reward mindless memorization over creativity and ingenuity. The Beyond Borders program has been amazing, and I have a lot of passion and excitement for what we have been doing over the past 6 months, but it’s pretty difficult to find an entire degree program that operates in this manner. I know that realistically for what I want to do after this degree, I will need additional schooling. But if this is the experience I can expect next year, I am not sure that I am all that interested. I remember a time when I used to be really excited about school – where has that intellectual inspiration gone? And how do I get it back?!

-Cat