Habitus in the fall

Hey Ya'll - happy fall! By far, my favorite season. These days, clear, crisp 60 degree days, cool, 40 degree nights, perfect. Rich colors, rich air. School is well underway, C and I are looking at houses, a time of change. It's been a very busy few months. Health-Wise everything is going smoothly - dialysis has become part of my routine. At first I was pretty hesitant to have any visitors there and I turned down some offers, but I changed my mind on the matter. It still isn't a great place to visit, but if you're interested in what this aspect of my life is like, I'd love for you to stop by for a chat. I struggled with sharing myself on dialysis with folks, like seeing someone right away in the morning before being ready for the day. After spending some time there, now I kind of want to introduce all of my friends to the staff at the clinic. As accustomed as I am to spending afternoons there, I anticipate the spring. 

Day by day I get closer to being eligible for a transplant. Mostly I try to not think about it. It can be challenging to embrace the life I'm living now, even when I'm able to do pretty much anything I care to do, knowing that I will feel healthier and have more freedom in a few months. Mostly I still resist knowing myself as a person on dialysis, or rather the baggage that attends to a person being on dialysis. There's one or two other young guys (mostly guys) at the clinic, but generally it's folks I don't consider akin to myself. I wrote a paper for a course on Sociocultural Theory I took in the spring, finally finished late August, about this disconnect. That continues to be a challenge. Another thing I try to not spend much time thinking about is the donor process - but I'm gonna put this out there once more. There are a number of wonderful people being tested, but nothing is set. If you're interested in or curious about donation, please give Suzanne a call (612-863-8886). 

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.