On Listening

A lot of the time, when people ask me what my degrees are in, they think I dig up artifacts. And so I explain that no, I am not an archaeologist. But let's face it; many people have no idea what a cultural anthropologist does. I do uncover artifacts but they're in stories- the relics of people's lives that I dig up with conversations to create a map of how they got to where they are, where they're going next, how they see themselves, their lives and how they connect to those around them. I think you could understand the whole world through stories; why people choose to do what they do pretty much tells us why the world is they way that it is, no?

         Growing up I wanted nothing to do with people. I had a great deal of social anxiety. In high school I decided that I wanted to be a vet. I remember telling a friend that I wanted to work with animals and that people were not at all interesting. She protested, “but people are amazing Heather!” But I was unconvinced, and so I volunteered at the Toronto Wildlife Centre and made friends with snakes and falcons, and took math and physics and chemistry and biology in preparation to be a scientist. Yet, as life is apt to do, it derailed my plans as I discovered that I was not at all suited to work with numbers, and hence I struggled through those math and physics and chemistry courses, eventually realizing that caring for animals in the way I had imagined was not in the cards for me. As fate (?) would have it, however, my school also happened to offer a new course: introduction to psychology, sociology, and anthropology. And that’s how I fell in love with “culture,” and, subsequently, with people and their stories. And so, as my life appears to do quite often, it pushed me in a different direction from the one I picked out: towards people, pulling me from UBC to Guelph, and depositing me in a department containing the professor who has shaped my academic and professional careers, as well as my outlook on life and the human condition.

         The first stories that changed how I understood the world were Paul Farmer’s. In Aids and Accusation he told me all about how life and death and health and illness and suffering were about so much more than biology and chemistry; there is economy and geography and community and race and politics and history and so much more all wrapped up in what seems like those most basic aspects of existence. A physician AND anthropologist, he showed me that science is never just “science.” It cannot exist without people and their questions and challenges and ambitions, and hence nothing “scientific” exists without people and their stories. Thus began my journey into the anthropology of medicine and health, and all those stories of life and death that are defined by all that happens in between.

         My journey as an anthropologist has largely been a journey of listening, of learning how to ask questions and really listen to the answers; and how to listen to what isn’t said—what does the silence tell you? What can you learn by simply observing how people do the things that they do? And beyond that, my journey as a listener has been a lesson in privilege and humility. To let a complete stranger into your head requires a level of trust that I don’t always feel I deserve. In Paraguay I was a complete outsider; some strange North American girl who wanted to know about medicinal plants and the people who sold them and used them. And I asked for a lot. I wanted busy market vendors to lend me their time, usually while they were working, and to be patient with me as I stumbled through our Spanish conversations. There was really no reason why they should have pulled me up a chair (if they had one), and told me about their livelihoods, their families, their health and their histories. But they did. They gifted me their stories so that I could write about them and piece together some kind of deeper understanding of how the world works. I often think about them and how I can never adequately repay them.

         Since then I’ve continued collecting stories for degrees, for work, and for me, really, since it’s all ultimately for my own desire to understand life. But this week at work, I really struggled, for the first time, with being that listener. Although this time I wasn’t the gatherer of these stories, I was a permitted eavesdropper, sitting in on an emotional excavation for which I felt both underserving and unqualified. The mind is such a delicate space to allow others to set foot in, and I knew that, for those who sat next to me, I hadn’t earned my corner of it. As the stories unfolded a reoccurring question cycled over and over in my mind: who am I to be privy to these conversations? I was being ushered into these incredibly vulnerable alcoves of their minds; those spaces that are the most difficult to sit in. They were allowing me to sit there with them, for a time. There were no questions for me, no vetting process to determine whether I was worthy of that chair I was sitting in. I hadn’t earned this space and yet it had been lent to me.

         Stories are the key to what are, for me, the greatest mysteries. Through stories people have taught me all about the world, as it really is in the multitude of subjective perspectives that, I believe, are the true composition of reality. But at times being “I”, the Listener, is a conflicting and arduous role. What do I do with these stories that are being given to me? How can I possibly repay the storytellers for the piece of the world they’ve shared with me? This is an ongoing struggle that I experience both personally and professionally. It is my great hope that I will do good work in life, to somehow improve some of these spaces that I borrow. It is my challenge to sit in the discomfort of my unworthiness as I untangle my own impact on these many realities that compose the world.