Reviewing the last few updates, I can say that my life feels much less like a shit show, which is nice. I just got a flashy new bike, and I've been biking to school - and occasionally dialysis. I think I'm the only person to bike to dialysis. Maybe ever. Still great being alive. I posted the paper below - as always I'm curious to hear what you might think about it, and as always I'm self-conscious that it's not as great as it could be. Thanks for reading!
My
dentist, a family friend, told me at my last check up that I looked great,
never better. He said this because he knew I have a chronic illness – kidney
failure – and to him I looked good. He said this to me a few months ago as my
transplanted kidney was failing and I was sicker than I had been in 10 years.
But he was right; I looked great. I’ve always been able to pass as healthy,
oftentimes even to myself. Yet every time I share my health history, even with
doctors, I am reminded by their reactions of how extraordinary my life has
been.
For
years I inhabited the social world of a healthy person. There were small tells;
a conservation of movement, a deeper patience, along with periodic hospital
stays, but these hardly registered even to those who knew me well. A few months
ago my transplanted kidney failed and I began dialysis. For the first time in
ten years I felt off, un-centered – tired but not sleepy. I wrote the following
in a blog entry, “I had a hard time making decisions and wanting things, or
knowing what wanting things meant. … I would say things that weren’t true,
which I would call ‘jokes.’ It felt like someone else talking. Sometimes I
would feel cornered. I was more just a body, ungoverned, lurching from thing to
thing without consideration.” I was misaligned; my sick body didn’t make sense
in my healthy social world.
Pierre
Bourdieu describes habitus as a way of being in relationship with the world
(Bourdieu, 2000). According to Bourdieu, social influence inscribes itself upon
the habitus, which he describes as “a memory pad” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 141). Our
habitus responds to and is created by our social environment; it is an implicit
collusion of those with similar conditionings (Bourdieu, 2000). As a person
passing as healthy to everyone including myself, my habitus formed similarly to
the healthy people around me. I understood myself as someone who could move and
work as I liked. My hopes for my life mirrored the hopes of the healthy people
around me.
Because
I was able to enact a healthy lifestyle, my habitus as a healthy person was
comfortably situated. Happiness, according to Bourdieu (2000), is the alignment
of our surroundings, or habitat, with our habitus.
Since the desire for fulfillment is roughly
measured by its chances of realization, the degree of inner satisfaction that
the various agents experience does not depend as much as one might think on
their effective power in the sense of an abstract, universal capacity to
satisfy needs and desires abstractly defined for an indifferent agent; rather,
it depends on the degree to which the mode of functioning of the social world
or the field in which they are inserted enables his habitus to come into its
own. (p. 150)
I
understand sickness and wellness as an axis of social life. As a straight, cis,
white, male, and, importantly in this context, healthy, person living in Minneapolis, my habitus has aligned
smoothly with my habitat. When the body and society align, the body doesn’t
need to want, it just does; it moves and acts knowingly within its social
bounds. Living was easy. Sure, I wrestled with the ordinary dilemmas of life –
I should exercise more, relationships can be hard, what movie should I watch –
but I did not encounter the world as a foreign place.
Bourdieu
(2000) first understood habitus where it was misaligned with its habitat;
colonial North Africa- for example (p. 159). Habitus is an embodiment of social
influences, but it also has inertia, and can lag in a shifting environment. Environmental
changes can challenge us. “In crisis or sudden change, especially … too-rapid
movements in social space, agents often have difficulty in holding together
dispositions … some of them, often those who were best adapted to the previous
state of the game, have difficulty in adjusting to the new established order”
(Bourdieu, 2000, p. 161). My situation is the reverse of this – my social order
didn’t change, I did. Still, I, as Bourdieu, became most aware of my habitus
when it fell out of alignment with its environment.
Falling
out of alignment was difficult for me in part because the shift didn’t, on the
surface, seem dramatic. I spend 14 hours per week on dialysis, but it is not
painful. I experience less swelling in my legs, and I feel better than I did
before I started. I have a stronger appetite and I have more energy. Yet I feel
paralyzed; the world has become a foreign place.
I
had been on the lookout for certain types of struggles while at the mercy of
the medical institution – surgeries, tests, painful procedures, waiting rooms.
What laid me down wasn’t any event or episode, it was the dull recurrence of
dialysis, and the minute, insistent physicality of kidney failure. As Bourdieu
(2000) wrote, “it would be wrong to underestimate the pressure or oppression,
continuous and often unnoticed, of the ordinary order of things” (p. 141).
Habitus constructs the world by orienting itself to it, by responding to it. My
sickness oriented me to the world in a certain way. My response to this health
trauma displayed itself in my day-to-day physicality; how I entered a room, or
how I sat in a chair. Again, Bourdieu (2000):
It is likely that those who are ‘in their right
place’ in the social world can abandon or entrust themselves more, and more
completely, to their dispositions (this is the ‘ease’ of the well-born), than
those who occupy awkward positions, and the latter are more likely to bring to
consciousness that which, for others, is taken for granted, because they are
forced to keep watch on themselves and consciously correct the ‘first
movements’ of a habitus that generates inappropriate or misplaced behaviors. (p.
163)
As
a healthy person I was able to move without thinking. I would casually bike 10
or 15 miles to a social event, or run up a flight of stairs. I was invited to a
beach recently and declined, for no reason other than I felt disembodied. As I
became a person with kidney failure, action without thought seemed impossible.
I struggled to shift from a person who biked and stayed out late to someone who
drove and went home early. Even moving from the couch to the kitchen, or
deciding whether or not to wear socks required consideration. As my habitus
shifted against my habitat, my struggle was not against an illness; it was
determining what to do next.
There
are obvious pedagogical implications to Bourdieu’s work with habitus. Students
struggle as much with when to raise their hand as using correct punctuation. The
‘how’ of schooling: how students move in the hallways; they interact with their
teachers; how teachers address the students; these questions are as relevant as
the learning content.
Schooling
is not a neutral environment. It is a specific habitat – content, physical and
social structures, and learning outcomes – which are often white, middle class,
hetero and euro-centric (Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Gee, 2009). Students
whose habitus – ideological backgrounds, learning styles, social mechanisms –
misalign with this habitat can be positioned as at-risk or failures (Gee, 2009;
Richardson, 2003; Street, 2003). I believed that I could maintain my
comfortable, dominant access to my healthy habitat even as I lost the healthy
habitus that allowed me to enjoy it. There is power associated with being
healthy, as there is with being white, male, cis, etc, and I didn’t recognize
it. That is the clearest mark of privilege. As a high school teacher, it is
incumbent upon me to recognize the same power differential in my students whose
habitus similarly misaligns with their habitat, and work to create an
environment where they can more closely align. Like me, even students who look
great could be struggling.
