Storm Pilloff

Gravity

I am so tired of reading pieces about everything that’s happened since March 2020 that begin “this last year has been so tough on everyone” or “we all know how unsettling this past year has been” glossing over multiple national and global traumas as if they were mere pop culture events. It’s become an annoying email greeting. Almost 3 million deaths from a pandemic that disproportionately harms our most vulnerable communities, some of those same communities consistently under fire from our police state, global civil uprising in support of Black lives, an insurrection on the American capitol, mass shootings, unprecedented wildfires and snowstorms displacing and killing more Americans, and millenials’ third economic crisis in our short lifetimes all wrapped up into a sardonic phrase we can smirk at each other. I know it’s because everything is too much—too sad, too heartbreaking, too heavy—to acknowledge. I’m just tired of that unifying phrase signifying to readers we’re all in the same boat because we’re not.  

I did this thing two and a half years ago. I blocked some of my abusers on social media. This led to me being forced to reorient myself to my commitments—what was I doing for their approval and what was I doing because I believe in it, because it’s who I am, who I want to be? Am I a femme lesbian or did I want them to think I was pretty? Am I athletic or did I want them to be impressed by my achievements? …Do I want a PhD or did I want them to be impressed by my achievements? This reorienting back to myself has been a great healing experience falling in love with things I already loved all over again: being femme, running, etc. One thing I couldn’t quite convince myself of, though, is why I continue to commit my abolitionist politics to the ivory tower.  

Spring semester of 2020 I was already teaching online and I was dissertating so I’d been pretty academically isolated for a couple months by the time we started #WFH in America. Most dissertators will say that it’s hard being isolated and it is. Being immersed in our “community” inside the university keeps us invigorated with its ideals, its conversations, its moves. This isolation also forced me to reorient myself to my academic and professional commitments—what am I doing because I believe in it, because it’s who I am, who I want to be?  

When we had the long overdue and far too temporary #BLM uprising last summer a constant refrain I heard and read was that if you’re white and think you’re doing enough, you’re not. I constantly shirked that idea every time I came across it. I thought, I’ve already had a rough life, I teach for resistance, I write in support of anti-Black racism, etc. I absolved myself of my responsibility by settling for doing the abolitionist work “I believe in” in academia. I found safety in the University setting, escaping a precarious background for the security I found in the school environment. In short, I was cloaking myself in my whiteness.  

When I blocked those abusers on social media, I became very disoriented. I felt untethered to people, place, and reason. Like Sandra Bullock’s character in Gravity. Because my background is so fractured and disparate, I also felt like I had no responsibility to anyone… The danger with that is when it started feeling like not having responsibility for myself.  

In choosing to maintain responsibility for myself, my own life and body, I chose to accept that there are people to whom I feel responsible, to whom I feel committed to. These people are not often (welcome) in academic spaces. 

So I have been re-introducing myself to feeling a gravitational pull, an orientation (Ahmed).  

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Storm Pilloff is a PhD candidate at UWM and has been 102 coordinator and a mentor. She is first generation and her research focuses on embodiment, race, disability, and feminism.