I propose to read passages from my dissertation, which mixes the genres of memoir, self-help, and critical theory. I pay special attention to the expanding and contracting spatialities that came with the pandemic lockdown, and its effects on my mental health. For me, exploding global crises became imminently interiorized through the experience of isolation. Being alone so much while so much else was happening forced me to look squarely at my place in the colonial-capitalist system. In this, a mix of urgency, stasis, despair and even optimism proved a potent cauldron of affects, one so overwhelming that it culminated in a major onslaught of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). By relating my mental health journey, I explore rupture and transformation as transversed across personal and social scales. Following Davis (2009), I understand OCD as the breakdown of the need to know (e.g. how can I be certain the stove is off? – let me check indefinitely). Departing from most OCD literature, I explore how my own need to know (in the disorder) may be the product of socialization in a white supremacist society, in which certainty and control are normative ideals also used to oppress people (McKittrick 2006). To heal this reflex, which OCD dramatizes so painfully, I use memoir to relate the techniques I pursued for building trust in my body; for relinquishing the need for mental certitude; and for developing compassion as a ground for navigating crises. Storytelling is the gentler and more supple mode of exploration I pursue here for sharing geographical knowledge (Moss and Besio 2019)._x000D_
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Davis, L. J. (2009). Obsession: a history. University of Chicago Press. _x000D_
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McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. University of Minnesota Press._x000D_
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Moss, P., & Besio, K. (2019). Auto-Methods in Feminist Geography. GeoHumanities, 5(2), 313–325.

Luke Leavitt
University of Wisconsin-Madison

 
ID Abstract: 780