Tag: Exhaustion

  • Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment

    Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment

    The conversation is over. My friend and I are sitting in the particular stillness that follows something hard, the kind where the next thing hasn’t become possible yet. I know how to be here. I’ve learned, over years of this kind of work, how to stay inside difficulty without flinching toward resolution, and that knowing didn’t go anywhere when I closed my practice. That was partly the point. The practice closed so that this could happen differently, in the register of friendship rather than the session note, the billing code, the annual registration, the showing up that doesn’t require an intake form.

    Which means I also know what comes next. I know how to locate a resource, how to identify which organizations are genuinely adapted and which ones will make someone feel worse for having tried. For this friend, this need, I reach for RÉZO, Montréal’s primary sexual health organization for GBQ men, before I’ve finished the thought. The body already moving toward the answer while the mind is still formulating the question. Something that becomes reflex when you’ve been inside a community long enough, when you’ve given enough of yourself to a particular ecosystem of care to know where things live inside it.

    I open the site. The navigation has changed. The page has moved, nested now under a sub-sub-section I have to locate before I can locate what I came for. I find it.

    Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment.

    My body receives this before I do. Something settles low in the chest: not sharp, the specific weight of something already known arriving as confirmation. The body has a grammar for this particular texture of disappointment, has developed it over years and in relation to this specific institution. I stay on the page longer than I need to. Dates à venir. I close the tab.

    My friend is still there in the way people stay with you after a difficult conversation. Still needing something. I sit with the quality of not having it to give, which is different from not knowing it existed, different from not having tried.

    I’ve known RÉZO since 2017. That summer, I was an outreach worker for their sex worker program, young, newly arrived in this kind of work, learning what it meant to move through communities the state had abandoned and then appointed institutions to monitor. The work itself was real. I was doing harm reduction with people who had built their own forms of survival inside that precarity, and something in me recognized that, was drawn toward it, was learning from it. That part I kept.

    There was a supervisor. His relationship to Black men’s bodies was legible to me that summer before I had full structural language for it. The institution had chosen not to have language for it either, which is its own kind of position. What surrounds that kind of behaviour inside a professional context is often more instructive than the behaviour itself. The silences. The way certain things circulate without being named, without anyone being required to account for them. The particular atmosphere of an organization that’s decided its progressive commitments are self-evident and therefore require no examination. I was a young Black worker inside that atmosphere, doing real work, learning two things simultaneously: what genuine care looked like when it reached people the state had abandoned, and what an institution looked like when it housed harm without naming it. You learn things from what an organization doesn’t say. I filed that knowledge somewhere and kept working.

    Training, supervised hours, three provincial registrations, insurance, continuing education requirements, documentation, all of it building toward a practice and toward a growing clarity about what the credential required in exchange for the legitimacy it conferred. It asked me to convert genuine care into something auditable, to route what happened between me and the people who trusted me through frameworks designed to make it legible to institutions rather than useful to people. I stayed inside that structure long enough to do real work and also long enough to understand what it was costing. I closed the practice deliberately in order to hold this differently. In the register of community, of friendship, of care that doesn’t require the state’s recognition to be real. I believed the infrastructure for that kind of work existed. That belief is what I was carrying when I opened the tab.

    In 2020 RÉZO hired me to lead a community needs assessment. The question was precise: why were Black queer and trans people structurally absent from the organization’s users, and what would it actually take to change that. I consulted 38 people, 21 in individual interviews and 17 through an online survey, with trans and non-binary participants deliberately over-recruited because the existing research on Black MSM health had excluded them as a matter of course. The consultation ran mid-COVID, which meant planned group discussions were cancelled, interviews moved to screens, and anonymity was compromised for participants who weren’t out because payment required a name attached to a cheque. These constraints are named openly in the report because that kind of transparency is part of what makes a document trustworthy rather than authoritative.

    What the community described was specific. They talked about walking into RÉZO and feeling immediately that the space had been built around someone else, that the staff’s frame of reference didn’t include the particular ways anti-Blackness and homophobia operated together in their lives, that being Black and queer in Montréal’s LGBTQ+ spaces meant being hyperlegible in some registers and invisible in others. They described the sexual fetishization of Black men as a documented harm operating not at the margins of those spaces but at their centre. They described needing something built from the ground up around their actual experience, not retrofitted from programming that had been designed around a different community’s needs entirely.

    The report that came from that process wasn’t a set of suggestions. It required a Board composition of minimum 33% racialized members including at least one Black person and at least one Indigenous person. It required anonymous CVs as standard hiring practice. It required mandatory anti-racism training built into onboarding for all staff and volunteers, with documentation, on a schedule the organization would be held to rather than one it could determine for itself. It required a dedicated support group animated by and for Black community members. A public awareness campaign against the sexual fetishization of Black men inside LGBTQ+ spaces, because the community had named that fetishization specifically and the report took them seriously. The specificity was deliberate. The consultation had been thorough. The report matched it.

    The document landed. RÉZO received it, the document they’d hired me to produce, and called it “un point-tournant dans l’histoire de notre organisme.” The report is still linked on the Kominote page. Still available to download. The organization’s own words about what this moment represented are still on the record, attached to the page of a program that’s no longer running, below a banner that reads: Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment.

    Kominote launched in 2021. Discussion groups, individual consultations, thematic workshops covering sexual health, discrimination, mental health, the specific experience of navigating LGBTQ+ spaces that hadn’t been built with Black queer people in mind. An awareness campaign against the sexual fetishization of Black men. RÉZO had asked what the community needed and they’d said, and then they’d come when something genuinely responsive was offered. The community showed up. Twelve people across twenty-five sessions in the program’s second year. Individual consultations running in parallel. People moving from one-on-one support into the group because the group was what they’d been looking for. They didn’t need to be convinced.

    Then political appetite shifted. Funding dried up. RÉZO’s own 2024-2025 annual report opens by acknowledging a reduction of sexual health funding. This is real. RÉZO has undergone significant restructuring in recent years, losing substantial staffing capacity across multiple intervention teams. People lost their jobs. Programs lost capacity. Communities lost services that had been built over years. The organization has been navigating a genuine crisis, not a managed inconvenience, and that context belongs in any honest account of what happened next. It does not, however, determine where the cuts landed. That determination is institutional. The funding landscape is genuinely difficult, and it does not explain what happened next. The Chemsex/PnP project expanded during this same period. It received more than 267 hours of individual accompaniment in 2024-2025, two support groups, multiple staff, detailed coverage across several pages of the annual report. Convive, the Spanish-language group for Hispanic GBQ men, is described in the same document as essential and thriving, 182 members, 12 meetings. Funding pressure is distributed unevenly and the distribution is legible if you read the annual reports alongside the Kominote page. Neither the 2023-2024 nor the 2024-2025 report mentions Kominote. Two consecutive years of institutional silence. In that same 2022-2023 report, the last one to mention Kominote, Chemsex/PnP appears for the first time: a new program still in development, four meetings held.

    The page stays up. The report stays linked. Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment. Dates à venir. The organization keeps the political currency produced by the consultation, the report, the community’s attendance, and sheds the obligation that currency was supposed to carry. This isn’t neglect and it isn’t bureaucratic failure. Neglect would be passive. What this is, is the active maintenance of a progressive reputation built on work the institution is no longer doing, for a community that came to everything Kominote offered and was not sustained. The box is ticked. The community member looking for a group session finds a banner. RÉZO gets to keep the turning point. The community gets dates à venir.

    The summer of 2017 is where this grammar comes from. Not a case being built but a way of reading being learned, through the body, before the language caught up. Black presence instrumentalized to produce legitimacy, to signal progressiveness, to access funding, and then the institution withdrawing once the currency has been extracted, leaving the community that produced it without the infrastructure their presence was used to justify. The needs assessment the institution commissioned and praised and didn’t implement. The program the community filled and the institution didn’t sustain. This isn’t a pattern of failure. This is a pattern of extraction, and it’s been operating at RÉZO for as long as I’ve known the organization.

    HoT and Kominote were built under the same federal project funding, the first phase of the Avancer alliance, which ran from 2018 to 2022. HoT followed a needs assessment, produced a guide for trans men and transmasculine people having relationships with men, and became a program. The community it was built for came to it. Kominote did the same. Federal project funding is always time-limited. When that first phase ended, both programs hit the same cliff and RÉZO had to decide what to sustain.

    The 2024-2025 annual report describes HoT as being in its fourth cohort, nine people enrolled, with plans to rebuild the group for 2025-2026. Its registrations are also currently fermées pour le moment. The difference is that HoT exists in the report: named, accounted for, assigned a future. Kominote doesn’t appear in either the 2023-2024 or the 2024-2025 annual report. Not to note a pause. Not to signal a rebuild. Not once. Two programs, the same funding origin, the same cliff, the same direction of travel while Chemsex/PnP expanded, while Convive grew, while the annual report filled pages with statistics about what the organization chose to sustain. A community’s needs don’t contract because a program’s enrollment does. The pattern isn’t about one program or one community. It’s about which communities RÉZO decided, in practice rather than in stated values, to keep building toward when the federal money ran out.

    Architectural decisions are decisions. Convive has its own dedicated portal in RÉZO’s primary navigation, built into the site at the same architectural level as the main sections. The site exists in three languages, structured partly around this portal. Where something lives in a navigation structure communicates institutional priority as clearly as anything in an annual report. Kominote sits under a sub-sub-page of the services section, below a banner that by now you know.

    This isn’t a critique of Convive or the community it serves. The contrast isn’t between those communities. It’s between what the institution decided to sustain and what it decided not to, and what that pattern communicates about where Black queer people actually sit in RÉZO’s hierarchy of commitments, as opposed to its stated one.

    In 2022 I presented Kominote’s findings at SMASH. Black queer and trans community members had said what they needed, I had documented it, and I brought it to the conference of the organization that had commissioned the work and called it a turning point. That’s the before.

    SMASH 2025. A presenter had used photographs of Black people throughout their slides on sex work and health access without once analyzing what being Black meant for the people in those images, for the statistics being presented, for the disproportionate rates of criminalization and healthcare exclusion the data was already showing. I asked, in the room, why racialization had been absent from a presentation that had used Black bodies as its visual evidence. The answer was that there hadn’t been time to get into everything. I said that was a choice, and that the choice didn’t align with the use of those images. The presenter, a white woman, became upset. A white man well known in the space went to her and said, “en tout cas y’était ben énervé,” offering her comfort by reducing what I had said to a matter of my affect. Not the presentation. Not the question. My affect. A Black trans friend who had been at the conference with me heard it and told me. I addressed him directly and in public. What followed was the organizers moving to calm me down — not to address the comment, not to address what any of it meant in a space organized, ostensibly, around the health and dignity of the communities whose images had just been used as backdrop. The angry Black body was the disruption. Everything that had produced the anger was not.

    RÉZO didn’t address what happened in any way the community would recognize as meaningful. Nothing reached the people who had been in that room. Nothing suggested the institution understood what the afternoon had revealed about the space it had built.

    SMASH 2026. No sessions on Black people. Multiple sessions on chemsex and PnP, across different framings and angles. The conference that couldn’t hold a question about anti-Blackness in 2025 found no place for Black-specific health content in the following year’s program. The 2026 program is the institution’s answer to the 2025 question, more complete than anything said in the aftermath of that afternoon, more honest about institutional priority than any statement of values on the website.

    I’ve been carrying what I know about this institution since a summer in 2017. The specific and accumulated kind of knowledge that builds when a body is right about something before the mind has language for it, that builds through years of acquiring the language only to watch it change nothing. I know what it means when an institution commissions a report, calls it a turning point, and files the turning point. I know what it means when a community fills a program and the program isn’t sustained. The body kept the record across all of it. So did I. The difference between those two things has gotten smaller over the years.

    My friend is still there. Still in the particular aftermath of a hard conversation, still needing something that should exist, that did exist, that was built specifically for them and for people like them by a process that asked the community what it needed and received an answer and turned that answer into a program and called the whole thing a turning point in the organization’s history. The report that produced Kominote is still on RÉZO’s website. Still linked from the page with the closed registrations. Still available to download. It describes, in the organization’s own commissioned language, exactly what RÉZO was asked to become and exactly what it hasn’t become. The turning point is still there. The program it turned toward is not.I don’t know what my friend will find when they look for support next. I know what I found when I looked for them. The report and the page are both still there, sitting on the same server, attached to the same organization, available to anyone who knows where to look. The evidence isn’t mine. It belongs to RÉZO. They hired me to write it, they praised it, they linked it, and they left it there, attached to the absence it was supposed to prevent. That is the record. It doesn’t require my anger to be legible. It is legible on its own.

    Fediverse Reactions
  • Place d’Youville

    Place d’Youville

    May 20th, 10 AM. Twenty-three degrees and the wind is moving through the field in a way that keeps changing its mind. I’m sitting near the old Customs House, just off rue McGill, in what is now a wide green space ringed with historical plaques. This is where the first Parliament of the Province of Canada convened in 1844. The building burned in 1849. A mob set it on fire the night Governor General Elgin signed the Rebellion Losses Bill. The plaques are careful about this.

    I came here without a book, which almost never happens. I’d nearly finished the nonfiction I’d been reading and realized it on the walk over, so I stopped at a nearby bookstore, bilingual, Francophone in its orientation. I wanted fiction for once. Something more porous, less argumentative. I asked if they had anything by Black Québécois authors in French.

    The question on the face.

    What followed was Dany Laferrière, of course, and then a migration story. When I said migration wasn’t the direction I was looking for, the category shifted without either of us naming the shift: non-Black Palestinian and Colombian authors. I clarified. Black francophone fiction, I said, broadening it, not requiring Québec specifically. That didn’t help either. The broader frame returned the same result.

    Each time I offered more information about what I was actually asking for, something tightened in the person’s jaw. At some point I watched her notice the same gap I’d been watching from the beginning. That must have done something to her. Being seen not to know by the person you couldn’t locate.

    The reflex is what I keep returning to. If I had walked in and asked for Québec literature with no further specification, I suspect the shelf would have looked different. The reflex showed it. If every Black Québec story is for you a story about arriving, you cannot imagine Black people as having always already been here. And if your frame for not-white is general enough that Palestinian and Colombian and Black are interchangeable categories, then Blackness isn’t what you’re reaching for. It’s a placeholder. It’s difference, undifferentiated, available to be filled with whatever the shelf has to offer.

    The presence precedes the Haitian immigration narrative by centuries. Black people were enslaved in Nouvelle-France. In this city. In the predecessors of these buildings. The Parliament whose ground I’m sitting on held its first session while that history was still recent and living in specific bodies. Charlène Lusikila and I traced some of this a few years ago, in a paper about why the intercultural frame in social work keeps failing Black Montrealers: treating Blackness as something that arrived, rather than something the city was organized against from the beginning.

    There are no plaques for that. The city decided what to mark. The decision is ongoing.

    Near the end of the conversation, the person pulled out a book by Rebecca Makonnen. Transracial adoptee, they said, with a slight shift in register, as though this were a different route to the same destination, more legible somehow. And I’ve been sitting with that grammar ever since. Laferrière gets to be called Québécois now. He’s Haitian, too, and I’m not taking anything away from what that means. But notice what had to happen first. The migrant who earns recognition through what the community decides is exemplary. The adoptee. Each route requires prior authorization from the same structure that just spent ten minutes finding me migration stories when I asked for Québec literature.

    I could claim Québécois. The claim would be legitimate. I’ve been here long enough, loved this place through several versions of itself and several versions of myself. What resists in me when I reach for that word is not uncertainty about who I am. It is the specific difficulty of loving a society that keeps showing you the conditions attached to its love. Loving it anyway. Both of those things are true and they don’t resolve each other and I’ve stopped asking them to.

    All I wanted was literature.

    The field is quiet. A few tourists reading the plaques with the careful attention of people who arrived this morning and will leave by evening. The St. Lawrence is so close to here, obscured by the Customs House to my left, the one that has been deciding what moves through it since 1838. The new book is in my bag, barely opened, bought because it was the least fraught option available.

    The city put a park here. The grass is doing its patient work over the ground where the Parliament burned and the river keeps moving past all of it, indifferent and uninterrupted. The wind is still changing its mind.

    I might return the book.

    Fediverse Reactions
  • Fort Street

    Fort Street

    May 9th. Sunny. I’m walking past the Winnipeg Police Service headquarters at 11 in the morning when I turn off Graham onto Fort Street and the timing is what it is. Two men coming from the gym, laughing, easy with each other and with the morning. They glance down at the man on the sidewalk as they pass, barely adjust their path, and keep moving. He’s Indigenous, wrapped in a Canadian Red Cross blanket, folded against the building at 11:15 a.m. The Red Cross blanket is the detail that stays with me. The disaster relief organization’s blanket, on a man on a sidewalk, on a weekday morning, in a city where urban Indigenous homelessness is not a crisis in the sense of something that arrived suddenly but a condition, the accumulated result of specific decisions made over a long time about whose life constitutes an emergency and whose constitutes a landscape. The two men are already half a block away, still laughing. They didn’t break their conversation.

    Disappointment but not surprise. I knew before I turned the corner. The body knew before the mind finished the sentence.

    I arrived on the afternoon of the 5th and went looking for the river almost immediately, dropping my bag at the hotel and walking out before I’d properly settled. I followed the Red River east, crossed the pedestrian bridge into Saint-Boniface with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights rising behind me, visible on the way over, visible on the way back, not demanding to be addressed.

    In Saint-Boniface there’s a mural large enough that you see it before you understand what you’re seeing. Louis Riel at the centre, the Basilica behind him, Red River cart to his left, flowers below all of it in reds and yellows that don’t apologize. The body stopped before I decided to. I had no claim on this image and stood in front of it anyway because it was asking me to.

    A few streets over I found a bookshop and was served in French without explanation required. I left with Gabrielle Roy, De quoi t’ennuies-tu, Éveline? suivi de Ély! Ély! Ély!, and opened her on a bench before I made it back to the water. She was doing something to me immediately, her descriptions of this land so precise and so felt that reading her while moving through it produced a particular disorientation, the prose arriving slightly ahead of the landscape, the landscape confirming it, the two things in a conversation I was overhearing.

    The Forks is where the Red River meets the Assiniboine, the reason the whole city exists where it does, and I sat near the water that evening trying to be honest about my relation to it. This is not my river. I don’t mean that as a dismissal: this is the only honest position available to me. The Red River named a people who built their identity from unresolvable multiplicity, French and Indigenous and neither and both, named after a river valley that named them back, and I can hold that without claiming it. I read Roy at the water’s edge as the light changed, her sentences about the prairie moving through me alongside the current, both patient, both older than anything I was bringing to them.

    I sat there unsettled in a way I didn’t immediately know what to do with.

    The conference was the next morning. A labour union, its members doing work the state has largely abandoned, had flown me out to speak about decolonizing gender and the kind of care built outside institutional frameworks. There was something clarifying about that specific framing, being brought here by people who already understand that the official structures don’t hold, to talk about the communities that build their own. The room was practical and attentive in the way of people who work with their hands and their relations and don’t have patience for abstraction that doesn’t land somewhere. I tried to land somewhere. I think it did.

    That night I went back to Roy. The hotel room, the flatness of the city pressing in through the window even in the dark, her sentences doing their patient work. She wrote about this land as someone who had been changed by it, who didn’t arrive with the landscape already interpreted but let it instruct her. I was trying to do something similar and was aware of how much further she had gone.

    The following evening, I went to a drag show at Club 200. Someone I’d met at a ball in Tiohtià:ke, one conversation on the sidewalk in the afterglow of the function, had said if you’re ever in Winnipeg. I was. The room was warm and specific and full of a kind of attention that felt continuous with the Forks and the conference and Roy and the mural, different surfaces of the same thing: people making something real in a place that doesn’t always make it easy to. I stayed later than I meant to.

    I carried Roy through all of it. On a bench, at a counter with coffee, back at the hotel. She kept describing the land with a care I was trying to learn from, the way she held the prairie’s scale without flinching, finding in its exposure not emptiness but a particular kind of honesty. Everything visible. Nothing apologizing for being what it is.

    Gabrielle Roy, *De quoi t'ennuies-tu, Éveline? suivi de Ély! Ély! Ély!*, face down and open on a marble counter beside a glass of water and a ceramic mug. A piece of darkly toasted bread in the foreground. The cover painting is a landscape, deep greens and blues, a body of water, land curving at the edge. The back cover text is partially legible in French.
    De quoi t’ennuies-tu, Éveline? suivi de Ély! Ély! Ély!  Somewhere in Winnipeg, between things.

    The Exchange District is right next to the Fairmont where I’ve been staying, neither of which I chose. I’ve walked through it almost every day since I arrived. The buildings are genuinely beautiful: ornate stonework, terracotta detail at rooflines, warehouse facades that speak to a moment of civic confidence, a city that built as if it expected to keep building. Many of the buildings now stand empty. I feel this as texture before I understand it as fact, the particular quality of a street where the architecture is present but the life isn’t quite, where you are aware of your own footsteps in a way that means something. There’s a gap between the ornamentation above and the sidewalk below and that gap is not accidental. Investment moved out of this city the way investment moves, quietly, structurally, with the consequences landing on specific bodies in specific places. What I keep returning to is not the emptiness of the buildings but the decision, ongoing and recursive, to leave them empty rather than house the people folded on the sidewalk beneath them. Anti-Indigeneity is not only ideology. It’s an allocation of resources, a determination of what counts as an emergency, a Red Cross blanket on a Fort Street sidewalk on a sunny morning while two men laugh their way past and the buildings above stand ornate and vacant. I walk through it and feel the logic before I can fully name it.

    Anti-Blackness is operating here too, on its own terms, and I’m not going to collapse them. What I’ve been watching for four days is both, simultaneously, on people whose bodies this city has decided are not the ones worth protecting. The weight of already knowing and seeing it anyway is its own specific exhaustion.

    I’m walking down Main toward Portage and asking myself whether I could actually live here. One of the positions I applied to was at the University of Manitoba. I never ended up visiting it. By the 9th, it doesn’t feel like the question it did on the 5th. The city has substituted a different one.

    The mural and Fort Street and the empty Exchange and the river that isn’t mine and Club 200 and the conference and the man wrapped in the Red Cross blanket are all the same place. They don’t resolve into a verdict. They accumulate into something I’ll be sitting with for longer than the flight home.

    I finished Roy this morning over breakfast. Her last pages, the land still doing its patient work on her, the sentences still making room for what the prairie keeps insisting on. I had been reading her as I moved through the territory she wrote about, and something about that had made the whole stay more porous, more available to being changed by what it actually was rather than what I had expected. I closed the book and walked out.

    The wind at Portage and Main hits you before you’re ready for it. Nothing interrupts it for miles in any direction. That’s the thing about this place: everything arrives at full force, unchanged by whatever it passed through to get here.

    I kept walking.

  • Peel Basin, 09:15

    Peel Basin, 09:15

    Under the Bonaventure Expressway. The Five Roses sign at an angle I hadn’t expected from here. REM trains to my right, sliding past without sound from where I’m sitting. Water. I’m always near water these days, and I’m starting to think that’s not incidental.

    A bus passes overhead and the whole structure hums. Rain making texture over the basin, fine and persistent, the kind that doesn’t announce itself. Black railings, rusted, graffiti-covered, dripping. Lines of water just waiting to fall. Sand. One of those public workout structures no one is using at this time on a Saturday morning. A group of runners in high visibility spandex and shorts run down the bike path. The city in every direction, and Griffintown beyond it, for rent signs on every building.

    I’ve been coming to this city as someone who’s leaving. I didn’t notice until I sat down.

    I developed a habit, somewhere in the last year, of waiting for the role that already speaks my language. The one where the job posting uses words close enough to mine that I can step in without translation. I projected myself so completely into those futures that when the doors didn’t open, I had to grieve whole lives I had never lived. And then came the questions, quieter and more damaging than the disappointment itself: I thought I was made for this. I didn’t even get an interview. What do I do with that?

    Yesterday, I applied for more jobs than I had in all of last year. Something loosened. I sat with the grief and then I just started applying. Not waiting for the role that already recognizes me. Apply, and release. The worth of the work is established in other rooms, by other accountabilities. A search committee is not the final word on any of it.

    I’m finishing a PhD in fields being actively criminalized south of the border, at a political moment that has shifted so much since I started that some days it’s hard to remember what the urgency was supposed to look like from the outside. When I began there was appetite. Now the appetite has moved, or curdled, or gone underground, and I’m here with a dissertation about fugitive care and speculative health and Black queer survival, graduating into a structure that is rapidly deciding this work is a liability.

    And yet. The peer review. The publications. The editor’s face at the ball. The collaboration still coming. Something has expanded inside the work that I didn’t plan for. The quality of attention is different than it was three years ago. I can feel it when I write, the way a sentence finds its own weight now, the way I trust the observation to carry more than it used to. I didn’t manufacture that. It accumulated through drift, through coming back to the same water in different weather, through learning to let the body lead and follow after it with language.

    I can’t be expected to always produce from what I carry in my body. That wouldn’t be research. That would be extraction.

    I also deserve care.

    I also deserve care.

    Not to break the fourth wall or anything, but I keep thinking about these posts. How they might eventually compile into something. A monograph, maybe, or the evidence of one: a methodology demonstrated rather than argued, drift as a way of knowing, the fragment as form. What I’ve been building out here, in public, might already be the work. Not preparation for the work. The thing itself, accumulating. That feels important to say out loud, even just to myself, under the expressway, in the rain. And then an Amtrak train rolls backward across the bridge over Wellington, toward Gare centrale, and I think about Avery Gordon, about haunting, about what it means to walk grounds that announce their own history on interpretive signs beside empty lots.

    This is one of the birthplaces of industrialization in Canada, the signs say, and the land they mark is largely vacant. The apartments going up in Griffintown are full of people who arrived after whatever the land remembers. Irish famine migrants came through here in 1847 carrying typhus, tens of thousands of them, and the ones who didn’t survive were buried in mass graves not far from where I’m standing. The Black Rock near the water marks some of them. The neighbourhood that bore their labour and their dying was eventually abandoned, then razed, then rebranded as a market for luxury condos with exposed brick and river views. The exposed brick is original. I’m walking through it, making my own record, adding my body to the account.

    The running club has crossed to the other side of the canal. I don’t know when that happened.

    I want to stay in this city. I have wanted to stay. But I know what it means to be this particular person at this particular moment in this city’s politics, and that knowing sits in my chest differently than the wanting does. They are both true. They do not resolve each other.

    I don’t have a job. I’m tired. I said that in my previous post and it was real and it needed saying.

    And also: I’m not stuck. I have a place to stay, for a few months or longer if needed, with a friend I love. The flexibility I’ve been reading as precarity is also, just barely, freedom. The frantic searching, the plans that keep changing because they always do because that’s the nature of these structures, maybe that’s what has been keeping me half out the door. Engaging with the city as someone already in transit. Already gone.

    I think receiving the news by the canal on that day unbraced something in me. The body did the work and the mind caught up later, slow and a little embarrassed. Maybe this is the same thing. Maybe I need to let myself unbrace again: to be here, in Tiohtià:ke, under concrete, watching water. To hold the basin, the railings, the grey of the sky, without requiring any of it to resolve.

    Maybe when I stop the frantic searching, direction makes itself clear. It has before. I have evidence of that. I can use it.

    Pacing and waiting and unbracing at the Peel Basin. The rain drips and the texture changes. A REM train speeds back toward the mountain. The water waits.

    Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that was always enough.

  • Eastward

    Eastward

    The ice is gone.

    I notice this before I’ve settled fully onto the bench, the oat milk moka still warm between my hands, the pines along the boardwalk doing their slow work in the wind. Habitat 67 sits in my peripheral vision the way it always does. The Jacques-Cartier Bridge. The amusement park still closed for the season, rides standing idle behind the fence. This is the same bench, the same eastward orientation I keep returning to without quite deciding to. The Grand Quai in late April looks like a different river than the one I’ve been sitting with all winter, and in some ways it is. What I’m looking at now is water that has finished its holding. The ice that was here, the particular piece I wrote about once, the one that had taken the shape of a perfect triangle and pointed east the day I submitted my application, is gone. The river took it. That’s what rivers do across a season, with what they’re given.

    I came back because the body knew to, before the rest of me had a reason.

    Yesterday the city was warm.

    I had finished a book on a terrasse on rue Saint-Paul, the last page coming the way last pages do when you’ve been living inside something long enough — not with surprise but with a recognition that the shape had completed itself. I sat with the last sentence for a moment before closing it, the way you sit with the last note of something before the room starts being a room again. Espresso. A crepe. The sun was doing what it had no business doing in the last days of April and rue Saint-Paul was receiving it without question, the old stone of the buildings holding the warmth differently than the glass towers do, softer, like the city remembering an older version of itself. People moved slowly. Faces turned up. I had nowhere to be and the body knew it and settled accordingly, shoulders dropping to a place they haven’t reached in months, the jaw unclenching, the particular luxury of a Tuesday that belongs entirely to itself.

    I walked to the Lachine Canal after. The streets through the old port were still carrying the warmth, the light coming off the cobblestones at the angle it only reaches in spring, low and honeyed, the kind of light that makes the familiar look briefly precious. The Daniel McAllister was sitting in the locks the way it always sits, red and massive and indifferent to what the afternoon was doing around it. I found a patch of grass near the water, soft from the recent thaw, and lay down with my backpack as a pillow and let the sun press into my face and chest and the fronts of my hands. The body settled into the ground. The canal moved beside me with the particular quietness of still-cold water in a warm month. Somewhere across the water a bird was doing something persistent. I closed my eyes.

    The body was already somewhere it recognized. Water, the eastward pull, the quality of attention that arrives in me when I’ve been near this city’s waterways long enough to stop performing being near them. I didn’t know I had brought anything. I thought I was lying in the sun on a warm day with a finished book and nowhere to be. The email came into that. I stared at the water for a long time after. Not thinking. Not yet. The canal kept moving the way it had been moving before the email arrived, indifferent to the reordering that had just occurred inside my chest. The sun was still doing what it had been doing. The Daniel McAllister hadn’t moved. I lay there with the phone face down on the grass beside me and let the body do what it needed to do with the information before I asked it to do anything else.

    Not even an interview.

    I knew it before I opened the email. Had known something was coming since morning in the way you know certain things through the body before they arrive as language — a low settling, a particular quality of stillness that isn’t peace. I had been waiting eight weeks. The waiting had lived in my shoulders, in the bracing I’ve been writing about for months, the compression that doesn’t shift with rest or movement. And then the day had been so good. The book finished, the sun, the terrasse, the city briefly being the version of itself that makes you forget you know better. I think now that the body had been preparing the whole time, had been carrying the knowledge forward through the morning and into the afternoon, had found the water and lain down beside it because it knew what was coming and wanted to be somewhere it could receive it.

    Four days before this, I was at a ball.

    The editor of a collection on queering research methods was in the city — they had already read the chapter I submitted, the one that takes ballroom as its methodological site, had held the manuscript in their hands and followed the argument through — and it happened, the way things sometimes happen in this work, that there was a function that weekend. Le National was filling up as they arrived, the air carrying that particular charge a ballroom space holds before the first category is called, sweat and cologne and anticipation and the low thrum of a sound system that knows what it’s there for. This is my place. The place where my body remembers things about itself it forgets in other rooms.

    The commentator was electric that night. It’s the girls I see, it’s the girls I know, it’s the girls I LOVE! — the chant landing and lifting and landing again, the whole room carrying it forward without being asked, the way a room becomes a body when the conditions are right. For Bizarre and Face the effects came out, light and smoke and the particular theatre of a category that understands spectacle as argument, and the walkers moved through it like they had built the universe the effects were gesturing toward, because they had. Then the commentator called for the DJ to cut the beat. Someone deserved their flowers. The praise came slowly and specifically, the way real recognition does when it isn’t performed but meant. I turned to them and said: imagine what a moment like that does for your self image.

    They were watching the room the way you watch something you’ve read about but hadn’t yet felt in the body. And I was watching them watch it, and I was also just there, inside the thing my chapter is about, the thing I have been trying to describe in academic language for years, and for a few unrepeatable hours the distance between the researcher and the researched was not a methodological problem I was managing but simply gone. They saw the work in its own element. Saw what the work knows that the chapter can only point toward.

    The hiring committee reviewed my file and moved on without making contact.

    These are not the same kind of not-being-chosen and my body knows the difference. It also knows the longer record. The tissue that received the email yesterday has received other decisions, earlier ones, ones that arrived before I had language for what it meant to be assessed and found not quite right for the available position. The committee doesn’t know that. The file doesn’t carry it. But the body holds the full archive anyway, and what lands on it now lands on everything already stored there — every room that looked at what I was and made its calculation, every process that moved forward without me, every form of not-being-selected that taught me, before I had words for any of it, that my belonging somewhere was conditional on someone else’s decision. The hiring committee is not the first institution to review my file and conclude I wasn’t what they were looking for. The body has been here before.

    What I know is that my work circulates. It reaches into rooms before I do. The professor who was hired for the anti-colonial social work position I applied for once asked me to lecture in one of their courses, on anti-Blackness, because of the strength of what I had built. The editor came to the ball. The work is not invisible. What it is, is illegible to the institutions that would need to legibly credential it in order to shelter it. There is a difference between being seen and being chosen, and I have been living inside that difference long enough to name its specific texture — the way it sits in the chest distinct from ordinary disappointment, distinct from failure. This is not failure. It is something more precise and in some ways more exhausting than failure, because it requires knowing the value of what you’re holding while watching the institution decide it doesn’t know what to do with you.

    I have to pay my bills. I don’t have a job. In a few months the PhD will be finished and the structure it provided — the funding, the timeline, the container — will be gone, and the practice is already closed, and the position didn’t come, and I am sitting at the bottom of every scaffold at once. I know the work has value because I have watched it have value, repeatedly, in rooms that received it on its own terms. I am also scared in a way that doesn’t care what I know.

    A triangular piece of ice, pointing eastward, on the surface of the Saint Lawrence in late February.
    A triangular piece of ice, pointing eastward, on the surface of the Saint Lawrence in late February.

    I came back to the Grand Quai this morning because this is where I picked it up.

    Eight weeks ago there was ice here. A piece that had taken the shape of a perfect triangle, pointing east, and I had stood at this water and let that mean something on the day I submitted the application. I know what I felt standing here, the particular quality of a sign you don’t go looking for, the way the body receives it before the mind has decided whether to believe in that kind of thing. I let it mean something. I carried it forward through eight weeks of waiting, through the compression and the bracing and the not-knowing, and I brought the weight of it with me to the canal yesterday and it was still there when the email arrived.

    The ice is gone now. The river took it back sometime in the weeks I was waiting, dissolved it into current the way it dissolves everything it’s given across a season. I’m looking at open water. The same eastward orientation, the same bench, Habitat 67 still on the opposite shore, the boardwalk’s pines still swaying slowly in the wind. The place hasn’t changed. What it was holding is gone.

    I’ve been watching this stretch of water long enough to know what it looks like when it’s finished holding something. This is what it looks like.

    So I put it down.

    Not the work. Not the knowing. Not the particular exhaustion of being this person in this work at this moment. Those travel with me. What I’m putting down is the version of the future I had been carrying in my chest since January: the particular mornings I had been imagining, the quality of quiet in a small town, the body that might exist there, less braced, more available to itself. The version of myself that had a title and a campus and a room where the work could happen on its own terms. I had given that version a lot of grace. I had let it become specific. I had let myself want it.

    The ancestors came from the direction this water runs. The shard of ice that pointed east is already out there somewhere, dissolved into the Atlantic, returned to the water that carried my people. I’m not the first one to sit at this river and give something to the current. I won’t be the last.

    The trucks are still beeping in the distance. The pines are doing their slow work in the wind. Habitat 67 and Île-Sainte-Hélène and the Jacques-Cartier Bridge still sit in my peripheral vision, the amusement park still closed, the rides standing idle. The oat milk moka has gone cold in my hands. The sky is the particular grey of a day that isn’t going to change its mind.

    I’m still here. I’m still undone. The water already knows what to do with what I’ve brought it.

  • Consequence as Weather

    Consequence as Weather

    The coffee shop near the Palais des congrès is already full of Liberal Party of Canada convention delegates when I join the line outside. Cop cars are parked down the street. Inside, every table has a staffer. Suits. Baseball caps. lanyards. Louboutins under a table where someone’s set a Prada bag on the chair beside her. Laptop messenger bags open across tables the staff need to turn. Pins with Mark Carney’s face. Meticulously curled hair. Khakis. The particular self-assurance of people who’ve decided their presence anywhere is appropriate. Then one woman moving through the room with an umbrella from the Fairmont, the red of her dress the party colour, coordinated, intentional. She passes a barista without looking at her and something tightens in my chest that’s been tightening for days.

    I’m wearing a keffiyeh and I notice the moment they notice it. Something shifts in the room that nobody names. A delegate near the door clocks it and looks away with a speed that’s its own kind of statement. I’m used to being read in spaces like this, used to the particular attention that Black presence draws in rooms that have decided they’re for everyone. The keffiyeh adds a layer. They know it and I know they know it and we all sit with our coffees pretending the room isn’t doing what the room is doing.

    The REDress Project places empty red dresses in public spaces to hold the shape of the women who are gone, the ones this government decided this week, this specific week, don’t require sustained investigation or resources. The woman with the Fairmont umbrella didn’t choose red for that reason. The colour was assigned. Coordinated. By a party that also welcomed Marilyn Gladu across the floor, a woman whose votes against queer and trans people are part of the parliamentary record, and called it coalition. This is the party that marches in Pride parades. That points to marriage equality as proof of its character. I’m a queer person in this room and I’ve known for a long time that the shelter had conditions. My body doesn’t receive Gladu as shock. It receives her as confirmation, one more piece of evidence landing on top of everything already stored, every previous moment the walls showed how thin they were. That’s how it accumulates. Weight settling into the chest and the shoulders and the jaw, invisible from the outside, carried forward into every room where you’re told to be grateful for the protection. The woman in red moves through the coffee shop. The barista clears a table. None of them look up.

    This is my coffee shop. At the counter there’s a different kind of exchange available, the kind between people who’ve been showing up for each other across enough ordinary mornings that the terms are established. We don’t have to say much. I make a joke. He laughs in a way that’s also an exhale. We talk briefly about what it costs to serve people who treat you like infrastructure, who order without eye contact, who leave without acknowledgment. Nobody says Liberal Party. Nobody has to. The room keeps doing what it’s doing around us.

    Three tables away a delegate checks his phone. This government is complicit in a genocide and has spent considerable resources avoiding that word, and cut funding for investigations into missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people this week, and has used every available tool to avoid the connection between those two sentences. The funding, the votes, the abstentions, the phrasing carefully chosen to avoid the words that would require action. Somewhere a family is in rubble. Somewhere a child is being pulled from concrete. Somewhere a woman is missing and the file’s been defunded. Here we are, here I am, here they are, in Tiohtià:ke on a blustery Thursday morning. The woman in red passes the window on her way to the Palais. The Fairmont umbrella catches the light.

    I finish my coffee. Close my book. The room’s still full when I push through the door and turn south toward the Palais des congrès, toward the metro, past the cop cars still parked where I left them.

    Around the Palais the police are everywhere. The apparatus arranged in a perimeter around the people who command it, who fund it, who’ve always been the reason it exists in the form it does. The woman in red moves through that perimeter without breaking stride. I’ve never been the person that apparatus was arranged to protect. The people I love have never been that person. The people whose deaths we mark and carry forward, the ones the red was supposed to hold, whose files were defunded this week, the ones in rubble whose names this government will not say, have never been that person. The police are at the Palais des congrès because the people inside it put them there.

    What stays in my body is the knowledge that nothing I feel or say or write will reach these people in any way that costs them anything. They’ll leave the Palais and return to their lives and the decisions they make will continue to land on the same bodies they’ve always landed on and they’ll sleep. That’s what impunity actually is. The ability to move through the world without your actions ever returning to your body as consequence. I’ve spent my whole life in a body where consequence is the weather. Where what I do and how I move and what I wear and who I am carries risk in rooms like this one. They’ve spent their whole lives in the other kind of body. The kind the police are arranged to protect. The kind that gets to feel frustrated about service at a coffee shop without that frustration being a threat assessment. We’re in the same city on the same Thursday morning and we’re not in the same world.

    These systems don’t hold forever and the people inside them know it even when they perform certainty. I’ve watched enough of these rooms to recognize the particular discomfort of people who’ve learned to read threat and have started to feel it coming from directions they didn’t expect. It’s in the way the delegate clocked my keffiyeh and looked away. It’s in the way entitlement requires an audience that keeps agreeing to the premise, and that audience is getting smaller and louder about its refusal. The collapse of these systems will be disorderly and the people with the least protection will absorb the most of that disorder on the way down. That’s not a prediction. That’s the pattern, repeating. The keffiyeh. The barista who laughed in a way that was also an exhale. The agreement these people depend on is breaking and they can feel it.

    The most honest thing that happened this morning was a small pastry set beside a coffee without a word, between two people the room wasn’t watching. I’ve been thinking about that on the walk down here, about what it means that the thing that held the most required the least. The police were outside the coffee shop when I left. They’re all the way down the street and around the Palais des congrès, the same apparatus, just more of it, arranged in a perimeter around people who’ve never had to think about what a small thing costs or what it holds. I’m still thinking about the pastry.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

    Fediverse Reactions
  • What the Credential Requires

    What the Credential Requires

    The process is specific. A recognized bachelor’s or master’s in social work. More than 350 hours of supervised fieldwork. Registration with a provincial regulatory body. Annual renewal. Professional liability insurance. Continuing education requirements that must be documented and submitted on schedules the regulatory bodies determine. In most provinces, certain activities are reserved exclusively for licensed practitioners, creating legal perimeters around forms of assessment and intervention that can only be practised by those the provincial order has recognized. The details differ by jurisdiction. The logic is the same across all of them.

    The stated mandate of professional regulatory bodies is the protection of the public. The mechanism for that protection is the control of professional practice. Those two things are presented as the same project.

    They are not the same project.

    To require that care be delivered through a licensed practitioner is to require that it be delivered through a person the institution has recognized, trained, insured, and made accountable to the institution’s own standards. The supervised fieldwork hours are not hours of learning how to be in relation with people. They are hours during which the institution evaluates whether the candidate’s practice can be named in its terms. Regulatory bodies define supervision as a formal, continuous process of reflection that integrates the values of the profession. The profession’s values. Not the community’s. Not the client’s. Registration is not a recognition of competence. It is an entry into a register. The register is a list of people whose practice can be found, audited, disciplined, and withdrawn.

    This is not bureaucracy failing to do what it promised. This is bureaucracy doing exactly what it was built to do.

    To require that care be standardized, documented, and reproducible is to require that it be made available on institutional terms. The institution sets those terms in relation to its own interests, which are not the same as the interests of the people most likely to need care. The session note is not a record of what happened between two people. It is a translation of that encounter into language an insurer can evaluate, a court can subpoena, and a regulatory body can review in the event of a complaint. Every translation involves loss. The losses here are not random. What falls out of the session note is precisely what made the session matter: the quality of the silence, the shift that happened that neither person could have predicted, the particular texture of someone’s survival. What remains is the presenting problem, the intervention modality, the plan. The care gets documented. The care does not survive the documentation intact.

    This conversion is the point. The credential is not incidental to it. The credential is the mechanism through which it happens.

    Licensed practitioners gain access to something specific: legitimacy within systems that were not built for the people most likely to need care. The ability to bill insurers. To work within institutions. To produce assessments that carry weight with courts, hospitals, employers, child protection services. That weight is deputized. It flows from the same institutions whose ongoing function includes the surveillance, regulation, and management of the communities those assessments are most often used against. To enter those institutions as a credentialed participant is to enter on their terms. The terms of participation are established before anyone arrives, regardless of what they intended when they applied.

    People still choose this. The choice is made, and the harms that follow from it belong to the people who enact them. The structure does not absorb individual accountability. What the structure does is make certain harms legible and defensible. It provides frameworks within which things can be done to clients that would, outside the professional context, be recognizable as violation. It provides language that converts those violations into documentation of professional practice. It provides discipline processes better designed to protect institutional authority than the person who was harmed. The credential is not incidental to this protection. It is how the protection works.

    The work that happened in this practice was real. Something moved between people in those rooms that was not reducible to the structure surrounding it. The quality of attention that accumulates in sustained therapeutic work, the particular thing that becomes possible when someone knows they will not have to start over next week, when the person across from them has been paying attention long enough to notice what has shifted and what has not. That is real in the way that relation is real. It happened, and the fact that it happened inside a structure organized to convert it into auditable service does not unmake it.

    What it does is make the contradiction sharp enough to become impossible to continue carrying.

    The practice is closing because continuing it would mean continuing to agree, in practice if not in belief, to what the credential requires. To keep routing genuine care through a structure whose function is to make it legible on institutional terms. To keep producing documentation that serves systems organized against the people sitting across from this desk.

    The care does not close with it. The obligation that came from being trusted with people’s survival does not dissolve when the annual registrations do. What those who were in those rooms carried here mattered, and it was received as mattering, fully, outside any framework the regulatory bodies provided for receiving it. That does not change. What ends is the agreement to deliver care through a mechanism that extracts something from it on the way, that requires it to pass through institutional translation before it can count as real.

    That extraction was always happening. This is what it cost.
  • Fool’s Spring

    Fool’s Spring

    The air is doing something it has no business doing in March.

    I notice it before I’m fully awake to noticing—something in the chest, a small release, the jaw unclenching in a way I didn’t realize it had been clenched. I’m already on the route when it registers. The cold that’s been structural for months, the kind that doesn’t ask permission and doesn’t negotiate, it’s just gone today. In its place there’s this softness, almost embarrassing in how good it feels, like the city decided to be generous without warning and didn’t tell me in advance so I could defend against it.

    People are outside. Not the usual bundled determination of Montréal winter movement, heads down, getting somewhere. Actually outside, taking up space, faces turned up. Someone’s dragged a chair onto the sidewalk in front of a café that has no business having outdoor seating yet. A man is standing on the corner doing nothing, just standing there, which you don’t see in February. A woman I pass makes eye contact and almost smiles and I almost smile back and we both look away like we almost said something too honest.

    The city’s doing the thing—I know the thing, I’ve watched it happen enough times to recognize it immediately—and I can’t do anything with that recognition because the body doesn’t care what I know. The shoulders drop anyway. The pace slows. Something lets go without asking.

    I’ve been coming to this route since November, which means I’ve been here long enough to watch the river do everything it’s done this winter. Not every day, not with any intention exactly. Just when the body needed somewhere to put itself that didn’t require anything back. The Old Port in winter is good for that. Nobody’s performing anything. The tourists are gone, the terrasses are stacked and wrapped in plastic, and what’s left is the river and the cold and whoever else needed to be somewhere that wasn’t inside their own head.

    I watched the freeze happen in pieces. First the edges, where the water slows against the bank and the cold gets a foothold. Then the surface thickening gradually, going from dark and moving to grey and uncertain to the flat white that means it’s held. There was a week in January where the ice looked almost translucent in the afternoon light — blue-green, the kind of colour that doesn’t seem like it belongs to winter. I stood there longer than made sense. I didn’t write about it. I just kept it. There was a morning in February where snow had covered everything overnight and the whole surface went illegible, no texture, no variation, flat white meeting flat white at the horizon. The river looked like it had stopped being a river. Like it was waiting for instructions. I remember thinking the cold that morning felt almost like clarity, which made no sense given that nothing was clear, but the body makes its own logic and I’d learned by then to let it.

    So when I come around the corner today and the river is moving—not fully open, there’s still ice out toward the middle, still that grey-white surface, but along the edges it’s dark water again, actual current—I stop without deciding to stop. I don’t know exactly what I’m registering. Just that it matters, the way some things matter in the body before the mind has caught up with why.

    What I understand now, that I didn’t know walking those winter mornings, is that I was memorising. It felt like the opposite—like emptying out, like just moving through cold air with nothing required of me. But the body was doing something the mind hadn’t signed off on yet. Storing details. Noting the specific quality of light on ice in January. Learning the weight of this particular stretch of waterfront at this particular time in my life. That’s what grief does before you’ve named it as grief: it makes you pay attention. It starts archiving without asking. It turns ordinary routes into records of something you’re not ready to call an ending yet. And then I look up, and the city is still here, doing what it does, and I feel it anyway.

    Montréal means it, though. That’s the part that’s always been hard to hold alongside everything else. When the warmth comes back and people spill out onto the sidewalks and strangers almost smile at each other, that’s real. There’s a genuine porousness to this place when the conditions allow it, a capacity for collective ease that I haven’t found anywhere else in quite the same register. I’ve loved this city through every version of myself. It taught me the pace of winter light and what care looks like when it’s built inside contradiction rather than despite it. The friends who showed up, the communities that held me, the particular way people here make room for each other in the margins of a place that isn’t always making room officially—that’s not nothing. That’s actually most of what I know about survival.

    And it’s all present today. I can feel it in how the city moves, the way the warmth loosens something collective and for a few hours everyone’s a little more available to each other. I’m not outside it. My chest opened on this walk the same as everyone else’s.

    But I’ve also lived here long enough to know the pattern. The warmth is real and then the policy conversation starts and the belonging turns conditional again. The city that holds you and then asks you to be less legible in certain rooms, to translate yourself into something more manageable, to accept that your safety is negotiable in the name of neutrality or order or whatever word is doing that work this season. The fool’s spring is the actual structure of what it’s been like to do Black queer abolitionist work here. The opening and then the slow close. The genuine warmth that never quite becomes something you can count on. You feel it every time. That’s not naivety. It’s just how it goes.

    What I didn’t expect today is that none of that would settle the question.

    I’ve been thinking of the leaving as something already decided, the walks a form of goodbye that was already underway, the compression becoming its own kind of instruction. And I still think that’s true. But today, in this light, with the river moving and the city briefly being the version of itself that I fell for, I don’t know. Not in a way that changes anything concrete. Just in the way that honest things are sometimes more complicated on good days than on hard ones. The hard days make the leaving feel obvious. The good days remind you what you’d actually be leaving. Neither one gets to be the whole truth.

    I keep walking. The warmth stays on my face. I let it.

    Somewhere in the middle of winter, I started reading job postings from small university towns.

    Not obsessively, not with a plan. Just tabs that stayed open longer than they should have, descriptions of places I’d never been that I kept returning to without quite knowing why. Towns I’d have to look up on a map. Departments small enough that you’d know everyone’s name by October. The kind of campus where the work would have to speak for itself because there’s no scene to situate it in, no institutional politics to navigate before you’ve even started.

    I told myself it was practical. The PhD is ending, the market is the market, you apply where there are positions. That’s true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t explain why those particular postings were the ones I kept returning to, or why imagining a smaller place felt less like settling and more like something the body was quietly asking for.

    I think my nervous system has started making cartographic decisions. The way this city lands on me now, the weight of it — some part of me has figured out that scale is something I can actually change. There’s a version of this work that happens somewhere I’m not already exhausted before I begin. I keep picturing a quality of morning more than a specific place. The kind where the first thing the body does is breathe. Where you can walk to work and the walk doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t pass three corners each carrying a different memory of who you were trying to be when you lived near there. Where the air is just air and the river, if there is one, doesn’t know your whole history.

    I know how that sounds. Like I think a different postal code is going to fix something that lives in the body and travels with it. I know the difference between changing your circumstances and outrunning yourself. But environment is not neutral, and it’s taken me years to trust that fully. Doing this work in a city where it’s legible but not exactly welcome, where every institutional conversation requires a translation tax, where you’ve spent years learning to make yourself understood in rooms architecturally designed not to understand you — that accumulates in the tissue. I’m not burned out in the generic sense. I’m tired in a specific and located way. Tired of the particular labour of being this person in this place at this moment in its politics. More rest isn’t going to fix that. Distance might.

    The teaching keeps coming up too. As something I actually want, in a way that’s become clearer the more depleted I’ve gotten here. Students who haven’t encountered this work before. A classroom where abolition isn’t the assumed vocabulary, where I’d have to find new ways in rather than spend energy defending the door. There’s a version of the work that gets lazy when it only ever talks to people who already agree, and I think I’ve been in that version for a while without fully admitting it.

    Small university towns have their own whiteness, their own particular loneliness for someone who looks like me. I’ve read enough from Black scholars at isolated institutions to know that the quiet I’m picturing can curdle — a different kind of exhaustion, the work of being the only one in the room following you into a different room in a different city. But there’s a difference between what I’ve been absorbing here and the difficulties I’d carry somewhere new. One feels like something the city does to me. The other would at least be mine to navigate on my own terms.

    I can go. That sentence is doing a lot of work. It’s a function of a passport, of citizenship, of options I didn’t earn so much as inherit through a specific geography of luck. Some of the people I love and do this work beside don’t have the same calculus available. The border that’s an inconvenience for me is a wall for others. There’s something uncomfortable about framing mobility as nervous system regulation when mobility itself is structural power. The leaving doesn’t stop being a privilege just because it’s also a need. That discomfort doesn’t get resolved by naming it. It just gets carried more honestly.

    The tabs stay open. The towns stay imagined, their particular quiet, the version of myself that might exist there. On the hard days that feels less like fantasy and more like information.

    I’m still walking this route. That’s the strange part.

    The body still knows every texture of this waterfront, every place where the pavement shifts or the wind comes off the water differently. I still stop at the same spots without deciding to. I still look for the light in the same places. Nothing about how I move through here has changed, and yet something is already gone. Not left exactly. Loosened. The way attention shifts before the body follows.

    I’ve been looking at this city too carefully for months. Too completely. Taking in details I never bothered with before — the particular colour of the light on Saint-Laurent in the early evening, the sound the métro makes pulling into Beaubien, the way snow sits differently on the mountain than anywhere else. It feels like love and it is love, but it’s also the beginning of an archive. You don’t memorise what you’re certain of keeping.

    The walks have been this. Every time I’ve come down to the river since November, I’ve been doing something I didn’t have language for until recently. Saying goodbye to a place I haven’t left yet, to a version of myself that is going to stay here even after I go. There’s grief in that and also something steadier than grief, something that doesn’t have a clean name. The body moving through familiar space one more time, not performing anything, just letting it register fully before the register closes.

    I’m still here. I’m already elsewhere. Both of those are true right now, on this same walk, in this same body, and I’ve stopped trying to figure out which one is more real.

    The warmth is still on my face when I turn back toward home.

    I didn’t ask for today. Didn’t need the city to do this right now, to be this version of itself while I’m in the middle of figuring out how to leave it. It would’ve been easier if March had just stayed March, stayed hard and grey and unconvincing. Instead it gave me this — the river moving, the strangers almost smiling, the chest opening before I could stop it. The kind of day that doesn’t argue with you. It just arrives and expects you to feel it.

    So I did. I let it in.

    I don’t know if I’m leaving. I know the tabs are open. I know the towns are still imagined, their particular quiet still hypothetical, the version of myself that exists there still unverified. I know Montréal is still the place that made me and that making doesn’t undo itself just because I’m tired.

    The river will freeze again next winter whether I’m here to watch it or not.

    The warmth will be gone in a few days. The cold will come back and close things over again. That’s fine. It got in while it could.

    The body knows the route either way.

  • The Body as First Register

    The Body as First Register

    My body has been the first place where things gather. A pressure sits in my back—a low bracing that has begun to feel structural, the kind of tightness that doesn’t shift with stretching or rest. It moves without ever fully leaving. Some days it settles between my shoulder blades; other days it spreads into my neck or rests heavily in my hips. The sensation is diffuse, hard to locate, yet immediately recognizable once it arrives. Everything feels slightly drawn inward, as if the body has deliberately narrowed its range.

    The ache doesn’t spike. It remains steady, more background than signal. Muscles stay engaged even at rest, as if something still needs holding and hasn’t yet been set down. There’s a readiness in it, though nothing immediate is forming. I notice it most when I slow down. Sitting brings it into focus. Pausing sharpens it. When movement stops, the pressure moves forward and the body organizes itself around it. The sensation doesn’t ask for attention; it simply refuses to disappear.

    Living this way has altered how I understand what’s been happening. The body feels occupied, involved in something ongoing—not injured, not malfunctioning, but engaged in sustained effort without a visible task. This is the place I’m writing from: a body compressed and alert at once, held together without a complete story yet for what that holding is preparing for.

    A Quiet Overwhelm

    Over time, it became clear this wasn’t random. The body was registering something before I had language for it. The tension built gradually, without a single moment to point to, accumulating over weeks and months and settling quietly rather than arriving all at once. What surprised me was the form this overwhelm took. There was little panic—no rush, no spike, no outward agitation. Instead, things slowed. Initiation became difficult. Small tasks grew dense. The body responded by becoming still, narrowing its range, holding position.

    I would sit in front of my laptop with the lid open, the screen dimming itself while I stayed there, hands resting on the keyboard without moving.

    This kind of stillness is easy to misread. From the outside, it can look like avoidance or delay. From the inside, it feels like containment. Energy pulls inward. Movement pauses. Output reduces. The system stays intact by limiting how much it releases at once. I began to recognize the pattern as it repeated. Each time something shifted—each time another layer of uncertainty entered—the body tightened slightly, not as protest but as stabilization, a way of staying upright, of keeping things from spilling.

    There’s information in that response. An early warning that doesn’t speak in sentences. The body adjusts first, marking change through sensation and letting the holding register before the story catches up. Over time, this read less like pathology and more like pattern recognition: the body noticing accumulation and responding in the only way it knows how—by slowing down and staying in place until the next shape becomes clearer.

    Loosening Frames

    At the same time, several forms of scaffolding have been loosening—not abruptly, but through gradual unfastening, felt before it was fully understood. The PhD is coming to an end, along with a structure that has carried weight for a long time. Its timelines and rhythms organized my days and sense of direction. As that frame thins, the body seems to notice first. The absence registers as space, and space carries its own pressure.

    The lease is ending too. The rooms I move through each day no longer feel fixed. Space has become provisional. The body responds by staying alert, keeping itself gathered. Even familiar corners take on a different texture when they’re no longer guaranteed. Beyond that, the next steps remain unformed. There isn’t a clear container waiting to take shape. This doesn’t arrive as a dramatic void. It appears as a background hum that keeps the body from fully settling.

    All of this unfolds within a broader atmosphere that never quite recedes: political instability, escalating violence, systems coming undone. These conditions don’t remain outside personal life. They enter the body like weather, a constant barometric shift that makes everything heavier and harder to place. None of these shifts stands alone. They layer, overlap, and accumulate. The body holds the sum of them, adjusting quietly as the ground shifts underneath.

    Where Things Stall

    As these layers built, freeze began to appear in ordinary places, in small procedural moments. Initiating simple tasks took longer. Messages lingered unopened or half-drafted. Anything requiring sequencing or follow-through felt dense. Often the body reacted before thought finished forming. A screen would open and something in my back would tighten. An inbox would load and the body would brace. Lists and calendars brought on a full-body pause—immediate and physical—as if the system had already shifted gears.

    Mail collected on the edge of the table, unopened, the same envelopes moved from one corner to another over several days.

    Stillness became common. Movement narrowed. Energy pulled inward. Attention shortened. The effort to move from one small step to the next increased. The body organized itself around slowing down, especially where accumulation was highest—administrative tasks, ongoing correspondence, anything requiring continuity across time. Engagement reduced. Output thinned.

    Seen closely, this freeze carried information. It mapped density. It marked where too many threads were being held at once. The system paused to stay intact until pressure eased enough to allow movement again. Over time, the stillness took on shape. It wasn’t empty. It occupied space. Muscles gathered around it. The pause held.

    What Can Be Held

    When several structures loosened at once, the body narrowed its field. When demands accumulated without clear edges, movement reduced. Fewer motions. Fewer decisions. The body stayed closer to itself. Engagement continued in some places and not others. Tasks requiring sustained attention stretched the system thin. The body responded by slowing initiation and working in short intervals.

    The pause had boundaries. It wasn’t total or random. It clustered around sequences that extended forward without a clear end. The body adjusted its pace to what it could hold without spilling.

    The narrowing had a threshold
    Enough.

    The Form No Longer Fits

    The decision to end my private practice arrived through the body. It showed up as contraction, as effort that no longer redistributed. The work remained meaningful. The form no longer fit. Capacity and structure stopped aligning in a way the body could negotiate. I noticed it in the preparation it took, the recovery afterward, the back tightening before language did. The work demanded continuity across time.

    And something in me would not go there again—not cleanly, not fully, not without paying a cost I could already feel.

    The body responded by pulling inward, signaling a limit that didn’t soften with reassurance.

    The decision wasn’t dramatic. It settled slowly through repetition. Each return to the question carried the same physical answer. There is grief here, low and steady—a grief for a form that once held something real, for relationships shaped through care, for a version of myself that lived inside that structure.

    Responsibility remains. It appears in careful timing, in communication, in how endings are handled. The body still holds that weight even as the boundary is set. Ending the practice feels less like rupture than closure—a form laid down because it no longer matches what the body can sustain. Care remains. The limit remains. Both are held.

    Work Beneath Stillness

    What began to make sense was the compression itself—the narrowing, the inward pull, the body staying gathered. There’s logic in that compression. When a form is no longer viable, work turns inward. Systems reorganize without consulting the calendar. Energy reroutes. What once moved outward turns back toward center.

    This phase doesn’t look spacious or restorative. It’s dense, pressurized, full of friction. Beneath the surface, the body works continuously—redistributing weight, testing configurations not yet named. From the outside, little changes. Movement slows. Output thins. Inside, everything remains active.

    There’s no timeline attached to this work. The body stays in it as long as needed, reorganizing around what can be sustained next. This isn’t rest. It’s internal labor.

    Care Finds Its Scale

    As this reorganization continues, my relationship to care and obligation shifts. The body responds differently to what asks for attention. Some requests land cleanly. Others stall before reaching language. Care feels more precise now. It gathers around what can be met without strain. Long arcs of responsibility register as heavier as they extend forward.

    Obligation has slowed. Urgency has thickened rather than intensified. Timing and pacing matter more. Commitment hasn’t disappeared; it has cooled. Energy collects before release. Attention stays closer to center, conserving what hasn’t finished forming.

    This doesn’t feel like withdrawal. It feels like recalibration. Care finding a shape that matches capacity. Responsibility adjusting its scale. The body setting a tempo it can maintain. What I’m allowing arrives quietly: accompaniment without translation, delay without panic, unfinishedness without collapse. Messages wait. Tasks unfold over days. Threads remain open.

    I’m allowing the body to set the pace, letting sensation determine when to move and when to stay still. I watch where effort gathers and where it drains. These allowances aren’t generous; they’re necessary. They create just enough room for the system to keep reorganizing without tearing.

    Orientation

    Where I am now feels specific. The compression remains. The pressure hasn’t lifted. The body stays alert, organized around holding. At the same time, there’s less confusion inside it. The sensations are familiar enough to be read. I move more slowly—not hesitantly, but attentively.

    I walk the same short route most mornings, past the same trees and parked cars, noticing how often I stop without realizing it.

    There’s steadiness here—not ease, but orientation. The body recognizes itself in this compression. It knows how to stay upright. I’m not waiting for resolution or trying to see past this moment. The present has texture: dense, close, manageable in small spans. The body stays with what’s here.

    This feels like a place rather than a passage.

    Arrival, for now, looks like remaining intact—staying in relationship with the body as it does this work, letting sensation lead without rushing it into meaning. Integrity lives here: in listening and pacing, in allowing form to change without demanding a finished outline. What comes next will arrive when it’s ready. For now, the work is contained in this holding. The body stays steady and attentive until the shape ahead becomes clearer.

  • Unmoored

    Unmoored

    The morning after the election, the city looks the same. Dry streets, brittle air, leaves pressed flat against the pavement. A jogger passes, breath clouding the cold, and somewhere, a car alarm starts and stops. Montréal continues its routine with the precision of muscle memory, a city that knows how to disguise grief.

    Inside, the kettle cools on the counter. I stand at the window, watching the light shift across the buildings. The light is hard, metallic, the kind that makes everything appear sharper than it is. The silence in the room feels heavy, almost physical, like something you could lift with both hands.

    Last night, Soraya Martinez Ferrada and Ensemble Montréal won the municipal election. The radio speaks of renewal, pride, stability. I picture the rented ballroom where speeches rang out: the clink of glasses, the smell of fabric softener and stage lights, laughter spilling into the dry streets, volunteers walking home beneath banners that promised progress.

    Progress, they say. But I can’t feel it. The air still carries the weight of something unspoken. Every party with a chance built its platform on the same foundations: language purity, economic austerity, the management of difference. Whether they spoke of pride, efficiency, or neutrality, the promise stayed constant: belonging for some, permission for others, surveillance for the rest. Strategic voting wasn’t the failure. The ballot was the trap.

    Some will say the vote split the left. They’ll insist that if we’d all lined up behind the same banner, things might have turned out differently, as if the problem were arithmetic and not ideology. As if the left they’re mourning hadn’t already increased police budgets, backed racial profiling, and dressed austerity in green. As if we were meant to keep voting for the same forces that have made so many of us less safe in our own neighbourhoods. There’s grief in watching people mistake management for care.

    Anger doesn’t erase love. It sharpens it. Even as the slogans collapse, I keep seeing the city’s face in the small things that once felt like home. I’ve loved this place through every version of myself. Montréal shaped my language, my work, my survival. It taught me the pace of winter light, the generosity of strangers, the way care grows inside contradiction. It held me through uncertainty and exhaustion. It’s where I built kinship, where I learned that love can live inside ruins.

    Lately, that love feels unreturned, and I know I’m not alone in feeling the distance widen. This loss feels like mourning in slow motion. What’s changing isn’t only the skyline or the slogans but the city’s sense of itself, the fragile coexistence that once made it possible to breathe here. Policies that promise safety and pride have become instruments of surveillance. Community centres lose funding while police budgets grow. Streets that once felt like gathering places now echo with a quieter kind of fear.

    I watch it happen and recognize the pattern. The same language of order and belonging spreads far beyond Montréal, across the provinces, across the border. It’s a choreography of control disguised as care, a politics that tightens around what it names as protection. Each new measure asks again and again: who gets to belong, and who must disappear? I grieve not only the policies but the narrowing of imagination they bring, the loss of what this city once taught me, that people can make worlds together even when institutions refuse to.

    The city that once felt expansive has begun to fold in on itself. The word values fills the news, followed by neutrality and order. The province denies systemic racism even as its laws rewrite language, dress, belonging. Policy takes the form of open arms that never quite reach. Every speech about inclusion carries the faint scent of repetition. This isn’t a sudden change. It’s the slow drift of habit, hardening like ice across the Saint Lawrence. The denial of injustice has become an everyday reflex. What I feel now isn’t surprise, but recognition. The city mirrors everything beyond it until reflection itself becomes suffocation.

    That reflection doesn’t stay on the glass; it settles beneath the skin. The air thickens around conversation. What begins as policy ends as posture. The city lives in the body: in the jaw that tightens before speaking, in the breath that hesitates before it leaves. Doing Black queer and abolitionist work here means learning to breathe within narrow margins, shaping language that can move through corridors built for silence, carrying whole conversations in the space between what’s said and what’s permitted. I’ve written reports no one read, proposals that came back without comment. Each silence taught me another dialect. I’ve learned the rhythm of translation, not of language but of self, a fluency in shrinking. That quiet labour settles deeper still. The lungs forget how to widen. The skin learns to anticipate tension. The body absorbs every moment of being misunderstood.

    And yet, grace persists.

    A friend leaves soup at my door. A neighbour cracks a joke, and we both laugh longer than expected. A kiki ball fills the night with sound, and laughter becomes a kind of heartbeat. These gestures don’t repair anything. They make living possible within a structure that resists it. The tenderness of this city lives in the people who refuse to stop loving it. They keep planting, cooking, teaching, dancing, writing. They hold each other through exhaustion. They create small interruptions in the machinery of forgetting.

    Love keeps me here. It isn’t safety. It is endurance, and endurance has a cost. I’m tired of pretending that staying is a choice. They say patience. They say progress. They say it takes time. But time is what they’ve stolen.

    I’m nearing the end of my PhD, standing in the quiet between endings and beginnings. I’ve started reading job postings from other cities, looking for roles that might let me live and work at a distance. I read slowly, careful not to look too far ahead. I tell myself that leaving could continue what began here, that movement could be a form of care. Still, there’s guilt in mobility. Even leaving is a privilege, though it doesn’t feel like one. I’ll cross borders others can’t, carrying a passport built from contradictions. But staying has its own kind of disappearance.

    Lately, I’ve been imagining what life might feel like elsewhere. The thought arrives gently, without certainty: rooms with different light, mornings that move without hurry, work that grows without needing to explain its own worth, air that feels generous. Beyond this city, there’s no clear refuge. Borders reopen old wounds. Fires, floods, droughts, storms, fear. Billionaires call their escape routes progress while governments trade care for resilience.

    I keep hearing the same logic in every headline. The slogans change, but the project’s the same: control the language, control the border, control the breath. What’s happening here isn’t local; it’s the rehearsal of a world learning to survive its own cruelty. Everywhere, the same sentence repeats: you’re on your own.

    And yet, even in that sentence, I hear an echo — the sound of people refusing to let the world end quietly.

    I think about the scale of this unravelling, and about the people who still find ways to love. I think about how living with honesty feels like defiance. I want to spend what time remains building something that holds life, like a room with open windows. I want to work with intention, to write with purpose, to live without apology. I want to move through a world that gives instead of withholds.

    Montréal stays inside me: the bagels on Saint-Viateur at two in the morning, the smell of snow, the hum of the métro at night, church bells layered with ambulance sirens, the sound of languages mingling in a café, the sight of people helping each other carry groceries through the rain, laughter and smoke drifting from balconies into the dark. These memories form a pulse. They remind me that a city isn’t only its institutions; it’s the gestures that persist. I hold those gestures close. They’re what keep the city alive when the headlines fail it.

    When I walk to the river, I listen. The water moves without hesitation. It carries the weight of the sky and keeps going. I think of other seasons: the river in thaw, in flood, in stillness under ice. The city has always tried to contain it, yet the current keeps finding its own line. I stand at the edge and feel the cold reach my fingers. Behind me, the city hums. Ahead of me, the current folds into itself, steady and endless.

    Movement feels like a kind of truth. I don’t know if I’ll leave, or when, or where I’ll go. I only know I’ve started to listen for motion. Montréal lives in me: the rhythm of its languages, the tension of its contradictions, the lessons in its beauty and its harm. I’m still here. I’m already elsewhere.

    I want a life that breathes. I want to find places where care isn’t a performance, where living doesn’t require permission. I don’t know if those places exist, yet I move toward them, in thought, in hope, in practice.

    The river keeps its rhythm. The wind carries the scent of cold. I whisper gratitude for what this city has given, and for what I’ve learned in its arms. Then I turn toward home, where the kettle waits on the counter, and the light settles once more across the window.