I walked into a room from my past. It looked exactly the same as before. The harsh fluorescent lighting made my skin appear sickly pale. As I walked to the front of the room, I had to concentrate harder and harder on each step, insisting that my body continue moving forward, despite feeling like the floor was collapsing underneath me. My sense of direction slipping away from me, I had to keep focusing on the chalkboard directly ahead to orient myself. My heart was pounding as I tried to not recall what happened to me in this room, in the hallway right outside, in the upstairs of the building. I finally reached the front of the room and set my backpack down, moving slowly in an attempt to appear calm. I pulled my notes out, and panicked as I felt like I had lost the ability to read. I looked up and saw a room full of eyes staring at me. My throat constricted, and I was suddenly grateful that I was wearing a face mask that might hide my nervous swallowing and facial expressions. How can I possibly teach advanced mathematics in this state? What have I committed to? I felt so disabled by panic and out of control, and I had no idea how I was going to survive the next four weeks.
I have CPTSD, complex-post-traumatic-stress-disorder. It is an anxiety disorder and many people of marginalized identities develop CPTSD in response to repeated negative social interactions, such as daily micro- and macro-aggressions. While PTSD is caused by a single, traumatic event, CPTSD is caused by frequent traumatic events, though they may seem more minor in nature and often may be dismissed as not a big deal. Many people with CPTSD may not know they have CPTSD because they are not aware of experiencing a singular traumatic event, such as an assault or fighting for their life while serving in the military, for example. I did not know I had CPTSD until I was diagnosed with autism, and my neuropsychologist noted that I also have a trauma response.
CPTSD, as well as PTSD, can cause physical changes to your brain that could be classified as a type of brain damage. For example, the brain of someone with (C)PTSD struggles to differentiate past dangers from present dangers, so if they are reminded of a past traumatic experience, their body will respond as if that danger is currently present. That’s why asking someone to describe a past trauma can be very difficult (bordering on harmful) for them because they may feel like they are reliving it, and their body is physically preparing to relive it. (C)PTSD brains also struggle to regulate emotions due to changes to various parts of the brain. This can make it seem like a survivor of trauma is overreacting, but their body is telling them that danger is present. Third, trauma survivors also may struggle with memory, problem-solving, and processing speed because their brains have adapted to be more “reptilian” so they can react quickly to survive dangerous situations.
Unfortunately, our Western culture largely ignores and even dismisses mental health issues, despite much evidence of how mental health can cause physical changes as well. When I’ve talked about the things that happened to me that are at least partially responsible for my CPTSD, most people tell me I’m strong and that I can persevere. They believe in me, and they want me to pave the way for others like me. These people think they are supporting me and complimenting me. While I appreciate their belief in my abilities, this is a dangerous attitude. In some ways, this could be likened to telling someone with lung cancer to continue smoking! If you get anything from reading this, please don’t ever encourage someone to continue placing themselves in a space that is harmful for them. If you’re not a mental health professional, you do not have the expertise to give this recommendation. So many of my friends and colleagues encouraged me in this way, and despite a small voice in my head warning me that I knew better, I wanted to be strong, and I listened to others instead of myself despite not having any professional help. For all I know, my brain has been further changed by the last four weeks that felt like hell. I don’t fully know how to describe what I went through, but I constantly felt like my brain was melting, at least that’s the phrase that bombarded my thoughts incessantly. My nervous system is completely shot from being constantly in a sympathetic state. I still don’t feel back to normal. I’m constantly exhausted. My depression, which I had been managing pretty well before, has returned full-force, as well as suicidal ideations. Some of my past eating disorder issues were triggered. I often find myself uninspired by things that normally would excite me, such as pole.
I have gone through a number of traumatic experiences, and gender-based discrimination while I was in grad school is one of them. I’ve written a little bit about what happened in a previous blog. During this time, I also was assaulted, and there was something else that happened that I won’t publicly share but it’s very unusual, horrific, and haunts me daily. I’m sure all of these things contributed to my CPTSD.
While I was wrapping up teaching during Spring quarter, a friend from grad school asked me to co-teach a math summer program for kids hosted at UCSC. I had heard of this program before, and I’d always wanted this opportunity. The class that I would be teaching would be number theory, which is also my favorite type of math. I desperately wanted to be able to do this, but I immediately felt uneasy about returning to UCSC. Despite my reservations, I agreed to this assignment.
In academia, degrees are used to rank people. Considering how inequitable universities and traditional assessments are (just look at university demographic data- who’s graduating, who’s getting the highest degrees, who are the administrators and faculty, etc.), this is one way current systems of power sustain themselves. A faculty member’s highest degree determines how much money they can make and university professorships are reserved only for people with a PhD. While this might sound fair to an outside observer, it isn’t equitable when sexist and racist practices are allowed to continue in classrooms, which serve to disadvantage marginalized students and even prevent or actively discourage these students from participating in PhD and other programs. I was not able to finish my PhD due to sexist practices. You can read about some of my experiences here. It still enrages me that there are white men finishing their PhD’s in math at UCSC who have never even written a paper with their own research (I wrote two). I often find that I can solve math exercises that my male peers (with PhD’s) struggle with. Also, it’s worth noting that doing math with my CPTSD brain now often makes me feel like I’m working with half-a-brain, and doing math now never feels as easy as before grad school. Since my brain was likely changed due to CPTSD, I am working at a disadvantage compared to my male peers who don’t have this type of trauma. It clearly isn’t just about merit, despite what the university wants everyone to believe.
While I was preparing for this class, I received my pay offer which was 70% of what my friend was offered. I knew it was because of my degree, and it made me so angry and yet also reinforced my insecurities about not being good enough (this is also a part of CPTSD since marginalized people are often discredited or told they just aren’t good enough when really the playing field was never fair). I almost declined the offer right then because I felt like I wouldn’t be seen as an equal. However, my friend really wanted me to do it, and he thought I had a lot to offer. It was important to him that the kids see someone like me doing math. At the time, I wasn’t sure if my summer assignment at my community college would work out (due to enrollment), so I also felt financial pressure to accept.
I prepared like crazy for this course. I put in countless hours writing projects for the kids and researching interesting number theory topics and resources. If pay was actually about labor and effort, I should have been paid more than my friend. Here are some of the projects I wrote, if you’re interested: Gaussian Integers; Fermat & Mersenne Primes.
Right before the course started, we had a meeting with all faculty, course assistants, and other staff. I met my CA, a white male PhD student. I dreaded our first conversation, because I’ve had this conversation many times with UCSC math grads. First, they are often surprised at my appearance. Depending on the context of where we are meeting, they usually assume I’m there for some other reason rather than being a UCSC math alum. Next, they always ask who I worked with for my PhD. I did have an advisor, but I often feel like this question is difficult to answer without noting that I didn’t finish my PhD. I only finished my master’s (and an additional year of studies), and thus, I am a failure, at least that’s the thought that goes through my head. I am immediately ranked and classified after responding to this question. As I had anticipated, this was essentially how our first conversation went. After noting that I did not finish my PhD, he stopped talking to me. I was not worth it. I was not good enough. I did not belong. Why had I returned to this toxic place?! It didn’t help that my CA’s advisor was the person who treated me the most unfairly while I was a grad student. I wanted to quit right then. A part of me kept wishing that I’d get Covid so I’d have an excuse to back out. But I persevered.
That first class, and most after that, were immensely difficult. I have no idea how I was able to get through it without seeming “off.” I felt like I could barely use my brain. I spent hours preparing and making notes to help me when I was most triggered. I often “flipped the classroom” so my students could practice solving and explaining exercises and I didn’t have to speak as much. I put quite a bit of effort into writing instructive exercises for this purpose. While I would have done things differently had I been able to, I did try to simulate the math classroom experiences that were most beneficial to me as a student (struggling through interesting problems on my own instead of watching an instructor solve problems at the board). We didn’t get through much content, but my students seemed to like what we did. I often found my annoying autistic traits to be worse than usual (words switching on me while speaking or writing), but I tried to make the best of it and encourage a safe learning environment where mistakes are treated as just a part of the learning process.
While I suppose it was the best I could do, the perfectionist in me was frustrated because I know I could have done so much more had I been able to use my brain like normal. This definitely contributed to my depression.
The extra prep time that I needed as well as my anxiety made eating very difficult. I lost weight. I don’t weigh myself because that triggers my eating disorder, but my clothes got looser and numerous people commented on my size. While I often forgot or ran out of time to eat before class, after class my stomach would be in knots and I didn’t have any energy to make food. Once I realized I had lost weight, my eating-disordered brain didn’t want me to put weight back on. However, I felt like I lost muscle because I often felt weak and exhausted while training during this time, and that encouraged me to find a way to eat. I ended up asking others for help, and I was able to start eating more after that.
For the final week of class, I decided to talk about inequities in math spaces. I wasn’t sure how to best approach this, partly because my students were minors, and I hadn’t talked about this topic to minors ever before. Many people will also push back about equity talks because they feel like it’s not related to the course content and it’s a waste of time. However, I knew it was important. There were only six female students out of 24 students. During the first week, the female students all sat together in the back row. It was interesting to watch all of this play out, and I was not surprised. The students who easily came to the board were almost exclusively male, though a female student came up a few times.
As I prepared for this lecture, I was so anxious that I began to worry that I would lose the ability to speak (selective mutism is common for people with autism). I asked my friend and co-teacher to join me for this class because of this. Because he is aware of what happened to me during grad school, he knew how important this was and was very willing to help however I needed him to. Fortunately, I was able to find my voice. I ended up sitting at the front of the classroom, which was easier than standing. It felt very natural and my students didn’t seem to think anything was different about me. I began this talk with some definitions and national data showing the gross inequities in math departments, and then I shared some data about UCSC’s math department (there’s only one female professor, and she is paid 70% of what her male peers are paid, which is the same as what the male associate professors are paid). The students were surprised and recognized this clear inequity. We talked a bit about various privileges, and some students shared some of their own experiences. One student’s comment really stood out to me. He is Latino, and he said that White instructors at his school in Watsonville take advantage of the fact that some parents of Hispanic students aren’t able to speak up against blatant discriminatory practices due to language barriers. I am not surprised (due to other conversations I’ve had), but it impacted me and I want to think about something that I could do about this. After this part of the talk, I prompted them to read someone’s story about studying math as a marginalized identity. It was my story, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to share it anonymously or as my own. Almost immediately, the room went silent and the mood changed. A student whispered to ask me if the story was mine, so I acknowledged that it was. A few minutes later, she asked “Why did you come back?” It was so direct and showed her understanding of what I had been subjected to, though I hadn’t been prepared for that question. I responded, “I don’t know. Bob [my friend] asked me to,” which was an attempt at a joke to lighten the mood. Then I said, “I wanted to come back and have a better experience here.” While I wasn’t sure how receptive my students would be to my story (many people try to excuse unfair treatment and microaggressions), they were incredibly moved by it. It made everything else we had talked about real. A couple of the female students were on the verge of tears (I wondered if it encouraged them or discouraged them). After class, many students, even the youngest male student, came up to me to thank me. My CA even told me my lecture was “great” and he treated me differently (and better) after that. While it was difficult for me to do, I’m glad I did it, and I hope my students learned something that they can put into practice to fight inequities in math. One of the female students wrote me a thoughtful letter aftwards, which I will treasure and in a way, it validated my efforts.
One thing that I want others to understand, those who either haven’t experienced trauma or those who have not had the experience of being marginalized, is that it is so difficult to make progress. The system of power and privilege that exists sustains itself easily. Consider this: I went to grad school to study math because that’s what is required to get an academic job in math, not to mention just having access to resources to promote learning in math. I was marginalized and discriminated against due to my gender, to the point that I was not able to finish my PhD, and I developed CPTSD as a consequence. Not having a PhD means that I am not eligible for university teaching positions, so the most prestigious and highest paying jobs in academia that I am eligible for are community college positions. Living in the bay area means that my income as a community college instructor pays my bills but it would be difficult to ever take any time off on this income to either recharge or to focus on my research again. My college generally doesn’t have funds to send me to math conferences and things like that, at least not to the extent a university does (I’ve been sent to a couple teaching conferences, but I have not seen any similar opportunities focused on math research). My CPTSD impacts me constantly. I mentioned some of the consequences, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do math at the same level that I was able to do prior to grad school. My brain just feels different, and it is cluttered with negative thoughts and anxiety. I am often triggered just by being in math spaces, even at community college, and sometimes I know I could do better if my past were different. Sometimes my students may notice something off about me which could result in negative reviews, which are used to advance as an instructor and attain job security. Note also the many studies providing evidence that female instructors are held to different standards than male instructors and that they do not receive as high of reviews. Words like “genius” are also often reserved only for male instructors. I often feel like I have to prove myself at the beginning of every class. I also usually feel that I am unable to perform to the best of my ability, but it has nothing to do with me and everything to do with how I was and how I am treated as a marginalized identity in math. To some extent, the system breaks those of us who could challenge stereotypes and best White men in math, but by breaking us we will never be able to reach our potential. It’s hard feeling like I’m constantly under-performing, and I often feel pushed into other disciplines or spaces because I know I will feel better and be able to perform better elsewhere. And thus, not only does the system sustain itself this way but ignorant people see this as “evidence” that White men are better than others at math or that White men are just more interested in math. Gee, I wonder why it appears this way.
I want to finish with some advice for others who may be facing similar situations. Everyone’s experience is different, of course, but here are some things I learned and some things that helped me get through the last month. First, get professional help. Seriously. CPTSD is a health issue, and if you wouldn’t treat cancer without a medical professional, don’t think you can treat a mental health disorder on your own either. Don’t listen to all the people who think they can give mental health advice if they are not mental health professionals. Besides that, there were a few things I tried to do once I realized that I really was struggling. First, I tried to manage my water, food, and sleep better. This one was challenging, but I eventually asked others for easy, healthy food suggestions and I had a serious talk with my partner about what was happening. I bought pre-made salads and some instant meals that felt healthy (full of veggies, fish, nuts) so that I would want to eat them and feel good about it. Next, I didn’t have time or energy to train circus arts like I usually do. Training often takes mental energy too, especially when I’m creating. I went through some of my old pole workouts as well as workouts created by some of my coaches so I could feel better by moving while also not having to think about what to do. If I had time for nothing else, I focused on mobility, especially thoracic mobility. I found that just doing one thoracic mobilization drill before teaching made a huge difference, especially since I hold stress in my upper body. Lastly, I haven’t mentioned this before publicly, but I started learning gua sha (a traditional Chinese medicine practice) at the beginning of the pandemic for stress relief. I’ve found it to be incredibly helpful and almost meditative, and I try to do it most days. At first, this summer, that practice completely went out the window. About halfway through, I realized I needed to add a few minutes of something everyday to chill out my nervous system, so I made an effort to schedule in five minutes before teaching, and when I stuck to this, it helped immensely. These things worked for me, so I thought I’d share, though everybody is different and there are many other practices that would help with stress. If I’d had time and had planned better, I would have always benefited from regular acupuncture sessions.
All-in-all, do I regret my decision to teach this class? Sort of. I really hope what I shared sticks with my students because that would make it worth it, but I definitely feel like I sacrificed my well-being for this job. At the very least, I should have worked through my trauma before returning to UCSC knowing what I know now. If you have trauma, I really hope you take care of yourself. If you don’t have trauma, I hope my story helped you understand a little bit of what some people around you are going through.