Reclaiming my voice

I.

For twenty-five years, I have been treated for asthma. I’ve lost count of the inhalers, nebulizers, prednisone, and various other pills I’ve tried.

None of them worked. I wheeze all the time. Perfume, scented products, hairspray, smoke, and air pollution trigger attacks. On multiple occasions, I’ve landed in the emergency room with chest pain and breathing issues. At one urgent care visit this spring, I was prescribed prednisone, which led to a long night of vomiting and dehydration, and then yet another trip to the ER.

All of my adult life, my health and fitness narrative has centered around the limitations imposed by uncontrolled asthma.

That story is wildly inaccurate.

 

II.

If you’ve met me in person in the past 15 or so years, you may have found me disarmingly, and perhaps even hilariously, transparent. In conjunction with deep listening, it’s my strategy for connecting with people, making them laugh by revealing bits of the “real” me—and thereby, I hope, putting them at ease.

In fact, there’s very little space between the person I present to the world and my authentic self. And yet, although I’m extroverted and talkative among people, I’ve become much more circumspect about what I write.

Some of this caginess emerges from my day-to-day work as director of a campus unit that sits at the intersection of academic technology and faculty development. That kind of work requires a good deal of authenticity, yes—but also tact, persuasion, and political savvy. I need to work with faculty and staff from across the university; I dread having something I wrote be misinterpreted and lead to tension or misunderstanding.

Sometimes I convince myself I don’t have anything useful to say; I tell myself everything has already been said, or I let myself succumb to impostor syndrome. There are so many brilliant historians and insightful academic technologists—what can I contribute?

And then—I suspect like most humans—there are things I’d like to say but can’t. It’s not that I have a dark hoard of secrets. It’s simply that I don’t want to hurt anyone or injure friendships by speaking or writing with imprecision.

Sometimes I can’t put these things in writing, lest they be stumbled across. But these days I can’t even speak them aloud when I’m alone. At such moments, thoughts catch in my throat—literally.

 

III.

You see, in recent months, I’ve become aware of a tightness in my neck, a painful constriction of my throat. My larynx feels swollen shut, and sometimes I have difficulty getting words out. My voice can get downright gravelly; I’m hoarse for at least part of every day.

I’ve always been a terrible singer—I’m probably tone deaf—but I used to enjoy singing when I’m alone. That’s not the case now. My current vocal range is approximately half an octave. I can’t sing “Happy Birthday.”

 

IV.

My son’s Taekwondo studio teaches its students their voices are their most powerful weapon.

It was at the studio, during a game to see whether parents or kids could demonstrate greater enthusiasm through achieving greater volume, that I realized I had lost control of that weapon, that most important tool.

I could no longer shout.

 

V.

Late this spring, after a quarter-century of medical professionals not asking quite the right questions about my wheezing, my current doctor asked, “What if it isn’t asthma?”

 

VI.

My new asthma and allergy specialist tells me that in the early 1980s, at National Jewish Hospital in Denver, a multidisciplinary team of medical professionals brought together a group of patients whose asthma didn’t respond to treatment.

They named, and crafted a treatment regimen for, the condition they discovered these patients shared: vocal cord dysfunction (VCD). (Other things VCD patients were likely to have in common: depression and anxiety.)

My specialist happens to have done his residency at National Jewish.

 

VII.

In a few weeks, I’ll see a speech therapist who specializes in getting stubbornly closed vocal cords to unclench. Meanwhile, I’m hyper aware of my inspiratory wheeze, how difficult it can be to begin talking, how awful I sound when I attempt to sing along with even the simplest songs playing on the car stereo.

 

VIII.

Many times on this blog, I’ve deployed metaphors to illustrate some of my (mostly mild) existential angst. At first, I thought my VCD was a perfect, if almost too literal, allegory for my inability to blog, and for the glacial pace of my scholarly writing the past few years.

But the VCD isn’t metaphorical. I refine my ideas through conversation, and conversation has come to be painful. It wears down my (literal) voice. A limited physical voice has led to a similarly constricted writing practice.

 

IX.

Through talk therapy, meditative walking and gardening, and reading, I try to demystify the cause-and-effect of my depression. As in my throat, I find a constricted tangle. I’m grateful I’m an exceptionally high-functioning depressive, though I confess the effort that takes can be exhausting and painful.

Writing has always eased that effort. And just as I now know the cause of 25 years of physical suffering and have committed to pursuing therapy for it, I’m recommitting to my writing practice. There’s a practical aspect of this, yes—I need to be assembling a portfolio of meaningful scholarship so I can apply for full professor in a few years. But I’ve always found writing restorative and cathartic; it’s a way to blow the gunk out of my mind and clarify ideas.

I’m calendaring defensively to ensure I have time to write at work and at home. I’ve set up my home office to be more conducive to writing. I’m reading more poetry. I’ve set deadlines for myself.

I’m doing all the things I can do ensure I use my voice, and use it well. Expect to see more of my writing, then, here and elsewhere.

This election, choose your own adventure—or Trump will choose Westworld for you

You can have Trump’s Old West fun times or Clinton’s new frontier. Spoiler alert: One ends badly for most of us.

I’ve become an avid watcher of the new HBO series Westworld. The show takes place in a “Wild West” theme park that sprawls across miles of what appears to be the American southwest. Wealthy guests visit the park to live out their fantasies — from sex to bounty hunting to murder — with the “hosts,” cyborgs who have largely moved beyond the uncanny valley and seem genuinely human.

Westworld’s viewers become acquainted not only with the hosts and guests, but also with the people who run the park — the programmers, roboticists, scriptwriters, management, and one of its founders. The park’s staff craft intricate, interwoven story loops through which the hosts run; the rancher’s daughter, for example, visits town each morning, interacts with guests and hosts, and returns each night to almost inevitably fall prey, with her family, to homicidal rapists. The prostitutes in the saloon charm guests until they die in an armed robbery.

Guests insert themselves into these stories, as literal black- or white-hat characters, saving hosts’ lives or taking them. As the guests sleep each night, the park staff repair the hosts and wipe their memory before setting them back on their narrative loops.

Every once in a while, however, through a glitch (or feature?) in her programming, hosts flash back to previous trauma. Sometimes these memories manifest as nightmares, but increasingly the hosts’ flashbacks happen during the day. Occasionally an external stimulus causes the hosts to short-circuit; in one case, a rancher finds, half-buried in the dirt, a photo of a woman on the street of a modern city. He cannot comprehend this woman.

Throughout Westworld, we see men gaslighting women: the park’s programmers ensure the cyborg women question their own memories, and men on the staff try to persuade two human women that their perspectives — including things they have observed — are not valid. According to these men, the explanatory narratives the women employees have crafted for themselves as they seek to understand the park and its hosts lack the proper perspective.

Read the rest of this post at Medium.

Applying critical instructional design

This is the final assignment for Critical Instructional Design. The prompt: How do you design an exercise, create content, open a discussion, or build an assessment that is truly critically pedagogical in its design? What you create as your final project is up to you. But some guidelines include: Create something practical, something that can actually […]

[Continue reading...]

Bloom’s Taxonomy

A rainbow-colored diagram of Bloom's taxonomy

This post is another response to an assignment in Critical Instructional Design. This week’s prompt: This week your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to dismantle and re-mantle one common assumption about instructional design. We encourage you to tackle one of those assumptions that you hold most closely—because discomfort can often be terrifically […]

[Continue reading...]

Is instructional design activism?

I wrote a long post for a discussion forum for the online course I’m taking in Critical Instructional Design, and I thought I’d share/archive it here as well. The prompt asked: Is instructional design a form of activism? How does what we think about what we do can influence how learning happens across our institutions? What do Audre […]

[Continue reading...]

Critical, Instructional, Design?

I’m taking a brief online course, Critical Instructional Design, through Digital Pedagogy Lab. This blog post constitutes my response to the first assignment. Here’s the prompt: For this assignment, consider the problem of the definition of critical instructional design. What do you think critical means? What does instructional mean to you? What is design? What do […]

[Continue reading...]

Founding fathers poem, draft 2

Let’s begin today with Robert Penn Warren‘s poem “Founding Fathers, Early-Nineteenth-Century Style, Southeast U.S.A.” It begins, They were human, they suffered, wore long black coat and gold watch chain. They stare from daguerreotype with severe reprehension, Or from genuine oil, and you’d never guess any pain In those merciless eyes that now remark our own time’s […]

[Continue reading...]

Welcome to my brain gym. Today’s exercise: a sonnet.

Background: I’m finding poetry—reading and writing it, mulling it over—helps with the brain fuzz. I’m going to keep myself accountable for this particular variety of brain exercise by posting here about what I’m reading and writing. What follows is a very rough first draft of a poem inspired by my recent obsessive listening to the soundtrack of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s […]

[Continue reading...]

Lyrical delight in an elegiac moment

  I. I recently happened again upon W. H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” It’s been a favorite of mine since high school, but somehow it had fallen off my radar. No matter what one thinks of Yeats—I happen to be a fan of his poetry, but not his later politics—Auden’s poem is a tremendous […]

[Continue reading...]

Finding and Using Open Educational Resources

[With some of my staff in the IDEA Shop, I’ve organized a one-day institute on using Open Educational Resources in higher ed. I compiled this resource for the institute, and I thought it would be of use to some of this blog’s readers. You can also view it in Google Drive, download it, and revise […]

[Continue reading...]