Building and breaking walls

Talk of the Quad: Bubble vision

“Topsham Fire stand-by for a page,” hails the omnipotent voice of dispatch, bringing to life the pager on my bedside table. Time to go save the world. I pull on the closest pair of pants as the tones go off, ending my post-dinner, pre-homework Netflix session a little earlier than planned.
“Sagadahoc County dispatch for Topsham Fire, respond to 33 Redacted Avenue for a water leak and ceiling collapse. Time 19:48.” I jog down to my car—passing roommates now accustomed to routine emergencies—and speed off to the station.
I became an EMT after my first year at Bowdoin, and joined Topsham Fire-Rescue shortly thereafter. Although I’ve never really figured out why, it seems like a natural combination of vague pre-med aspirations, repressed urges to drive quickly and loudly through traffic and—as observed by a friend—a persistent hero-complex. Whatever that means.
In two years, I’ve gone through additional EMT training and Basic Fire School. I now function as one of the youngest and least experienced members of the 50-person department. Everyone should spend some time on the lowest rung of the ladder for a while—it’s a remarkably humbling experience.
Despite the title, modern firefighters spend very little of their time actually fighting fires. Most of our work involves car accidents, various cleanups and medical emergencies. Chicago Fire and Grey’s Anatomy don’t do reality justice—it’s far less glamorous and far more predictable.I arrive at the station just in time to pull on my turnout gear and climb onto Ladder three before we go screaming down the snowy road. We arrive at a thoroughly ordinary and uninteresting house, the lieutenant starts assigning roles and we get to work. As we enter the house, one of my co-workers ahead of me instinctively withdraws and gags before continuing inside. Never a good sign. Sure enough, the house is straight out of “Hoarders.” We’ve discovered a domestic jungle of unknown plastic objects, food waste and piles of garbage. What A&E fails to capture about these situations, of course, is the smell. The horror, the horror.
Compounding these problems is the fact that a second-floor water leak has caused the entire living room ceiling to collapse onto detritus mountain, leaving behind eight inches of greyish water, a lot of dry wall and an especially offensive odor. Tasked with finding and stopping the leak, my partner and I trudge up the stairs only to find more of the same situation. We eventually attribute the flow of water to a leaking heating pipe that’s buried under about five feet of trash and debris. It’s time to start digging.
Afterwards, we chatted mindlessly as we loaded the overhaul equipment back onto the truck. It turned out that the owners hadn’t been able to pay the heating bill, so the pipes had frozen and burst.
“Not the kind of place you’re used to seeing at Bowdoin, I imagine,” said the lieutenant as we drove away.
I made an off-hand joke about the first- year dorms, but he was absolutely right. It’s hard to imagine abject poverty anywhere within a 10-minute drive of Thorne Hall.
The one element of my job that I’ve never quite gotten used to is the abrupt and unexpected transitions between the Bowdoin bubble and the “outside world.” This world, for me at least, offers a sharp contrast between the liberal arts minded and the vocational minded. In general, Bowdoin students are blissfully unaware of the hard work, stress and logistics that go into public safety, and how an entire community of people in our area devotes their lives to this field.
“Do you have EMT friends too? Is that even a thing?” asked one concerned teammate.On the other hand, the work environment is completely detached from academically rigorous and socially progressive Bowdoin that we all know and love. At any given time, this can be a welcomed break from the intensity of school, or a valuable source of thoroughly non-Bowdoin perspectives.
I’m not trying to make a value judgment on either community—hard work and compassion are the common themes here. Their manifestations are completely different, however, which can be a little jarring when you experience both worlds multiple times per day.
I drive home from the station, pondering how I can put off homework for just a little longer. And then it hits me: ping pong and milkshakes. Never have I been luckier to have a friend like Katherine, who is invariably down for pong and shakes.
Hoping I don’t still smell like work, I navigate the crowded Union to the beacon of procrastination—the Café. After chatting for a while about classes and parties and how abroad stress is “objectively the worst,” Katherine and I proceed to the game room and prepare for battle. We’re mutually unskilled. It’s perfect.
“I’ve never actually asked you this,” said Katherine, returning a mediocre volley wide right of the table, “but what’s, like, the worst thing you’ve seen while EMTing?”
I get this question a lot. As much as I want to be honest and forthcoming, discussing tragedy and death has never seemed like it fits into Bowdoin’s nurturing and comfortable environment. I don’t want to burden my friends with all the nasty stuff, and I definitely don’t want to fish for sympathy.
“Well, I’ll tell you about some of the funniest things.” I reply, hitting the net for the third consecutive time. We talk about the old drunk guy who thought it would be a good idea to fire up the grill in his closed garage and the car accident where the uninjured kids were—to their parents’ dismay—exposed to their Christmas presents one month early. These are the easier stories.
The ball sails over me and rolls under the mountain of furniture, jackets and backpacks we’ve left in the corner. Katherine’s finger immediately finds her nose, and I turn to the pile.After three years, I still haven’t come up with a good definition for the Bowdoin bubble.
Beyond the obvious ideological and financial differences between the average Bowdoin student and the average Midcoast resident, what gives us such a strong sense of enclosure? I have no answer. I’ve noticed, however, that there’s a camaraderie of determination and hard work in both groups. If nothing else, having one foot firmly on either side of the bubble has demonstrated how artificial it really is. Superficial differences ultimately keep us apart.
Facing the pile, under which our precious ball is trapped, I ponder questions like “Why did I pick the furniture side of the table again?” and “Who decided to buy this heavy-ass coach?” Regardless, it’s getting late and there’s work to be done. It’s time to start digging.

Talk of the Quad: Pushing my buttons

My sophomore year, I went to a crowded party in a Harpswell apartment. Squished in the sweaty room, I was standing next to a couch. The insulin pump clipped at my waist was exactly at the eye level of the boy sitting there. He, probably confused that some girl was wearing a pager to a party in 2014, reached up and started pushing the buttons. Not wanting to cause a scene, I asked him to please stop and turned back to my friends. A few minutes later, he started again. I freaked out. He was drunk, I was drunk, and he was quite literally pushing my buttons.
That night I went home crying. I have no wish to shame that person or to make him feel bad. I honestly don’t know who he is, and it really doesn’t matter. He had no way of knowing that I am a type one diabetic or that the buttons he was pushing could send insulin into my body. He was unaware that what he thought was a pager or a weird cell phone was actually the machine that allows me to live.
I wasn’t really upset about the medical repercussions his actions could have had. Rather, I hated that he had called attention to my disease in the middle of a typical Friday night, and I was shocked by just how vulnerable that made me feel.
Since my diagnosis with type one diabetes ten years before, I had convinced myself that it was no big deal. My first year and a half at Bowdoin was no different. If prompted I would happily explain my routine to anyone that asked. I never hid my pump or my disease. I thought that meant I had accepted it.
Any time I have explained diabetes, I have invariably used the same line: “I’m so used to it. I don’t even think about it.”
Half of that statement is true. Yes, I am used to it. But I am constantly thinking about it—I have to be. In truth, what I mean to say is, “I’m so used to it. I don’t want you to think about it.”
Every day, I prick my finger to test my blood sugar six to eight times, a test that I fail more often than I’d care to admit. Every time I eat, I take insulin, and every few days, I have to move the port that connects my insulin pump to my body. My fingers are covered in calluses and wearing an insulin pump for ten years has left little scars and little red marks all over my thighs.
I’ve had diabetes for over half of my life now, and as the clichéd posters hanging in my doctor’s office promised, it really hasn’t held me back. But sometimes it does slow me down. Some days, no matter how closely I watch my blood sugar and take insulin, my blood sugar won’t stay where I want it to be. Sometimes, no matter how much effort I put in, I can’t get the desired result.
And then there are the little things. I worry that my professors will think I’m texting on my cell phone when I bring out my meter in the middle of class or that needles and blood will make the person sitting next to me squeamish.
And there are petty things. When I buy clothes, I have to think about where my pump will go—dresses are a particular challenge. I worry that having a machine attached to me, or even telling someone I have a disease, makes me less attractive.
I tell myself that these things are trivial, that it could be so much worse. And I am grateful; I am so lucky to have the support system and resources that I do. But by calling this “no big deal” and brushing my worries off for so long, I’ve unknowingly come to resent diabetes, something I’ve always prided myself on avoiding.
I was so embarrassed that night sophomore year. I hated that something so small could make me the girl sobbing outside the party. I didn’t want to admit that my disease had that power over me. I thought I had accepted diabetes as part of my life, but really, I had never let myself feel anything about it.
I write this now because November is Diabetes Awareness Month, so it seems like an appropriate time. I could list statistics about how many Americans, or even how many people on this campus, are affected by diabetes. Part of me would love to give a lecture on how type one and type two diabetes are so incredibly different or how saying your sugary dessert is going to give you diabetes just isn’t funny.
But I share this experience instead because how I deal with the medical side of diabetes hasn’t changed much in my time at Bowdoin, but my emotional relationship with my disease has changed entirely.
Before Bowdoin, I went to a small school for seven years. I lived with my family, who were intimately aware of my disease. I spent a lot of time trying to convince them not to worry about me, and somewhere along the line, I stopped telling my parents when my blood sugars were off or when I was having a hard time juggling diabetes, track practice, classes and teen angst. It seemed to hurt them more than it hurt me, so I kept it to myself.
For most people, college is a fresh start. For me, that meant that almost no one knew about my diabetes. I could decide who to tell and how I wanted to tell them. I was a little surprised by how few people seemed to notice, and in a way, I was proud of myself for that. I told people it was no big deal, and they believed me. I just wasn’t doing such a great job of convincing myself. At home, I knew that even if I didn’t say anything, there were people that worried about me, that knew how hard I was working just to maintain normalcy. I didn’t realize how important that was to me until I successfully convinced everyone around me that my diabetes wasn’t worth a second thought.
In my determination to maintain a casual attitude, I never used to let anyone know when I got angry or upset with my disease. I kept those emotions to myself until I literally couldn’t anymore. So now, I admit that it is a lot to handle, and it is a big deal. Being diabetic is hard, and sometimes it gets to me. But the biggest thing I’ve learned in the last three years is that’s ok.
Margaret Webster is a member of the Class of 2016

Talk of the Quad

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

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Contributor

October 30, 2015

I don’t remember dialing my sister’s number. It was the Saturday of Ivies, and under whatever influence I was under, I unintentionally came out to her. So when she told me she was coming the next week to talk, I was afraid—I had let my walls down for half a moment and didn’t know what the repercussions would be.

My sister and I don’t talk regularly. We realized we were very different people early on and it’s not unusual for us to go months at a time without speaking to each other. When she arrived in Brunswick that rainy Wednesday afternoon, she said she had known all along and asked for explanations—what other things did I keep locked inside? I felt helpless and exposed, in a way that makes me still cringe. I wasn’t used to the words coming out of my mouth—honest, open and vulnerable. After 20 minutes—the longest conversation we’d had in five years—there was a silent and mutual understanding that the process of opening up had been hard for both of us, and she dropped me off before I realized I had forgotten to tell her how much her visit meant to me. To be honest, I didn’t really know how.

This weekend is Family Weekend and I’m thinking about how my family is 3,000 miles west. This weekend, I’ll see countless pictures of families smiling against a backdrop of autumnal colors. I’ll meet parents and tell them my major, my ambitions, how I found Bowdoin. This weekend will be another quiet reminder that my dad doesn’t even know what my major is and that the last picture my mom took of me on campus was in 2012, on move-in day. This weekend I’ll be thinking about when, and how, the communication broke down.

I was 12 when I first started developing feelings for other boys. I was entering a new school and at the age when being different resulted in being excluded, I masked how I felt with fake female crushes. I was an obedient and good kid—my grandma’s favorite, the young artist of the family—and I didn’t want to cause any unnecessary drama in my devoutly Catholic home, so I chose to keep quiet. I was young, I was confused and I was alone.

I came to terms with who I was by the time I entered high school, a feat that was emotionally and mentally taxing. I believed that unless I was strong, everything would fall apart—happy home would be no more. I understood strength as having tough skin and thought that if I evaded my emotions, they wouldn’t bother me. So in turn, I piled on the extracurriculars and coursework and built an image of myself that was composed and collected. I built walls in an attempt to protect myself (and my family) from the truth—and I shut my family out.

It’s hard for my Bowdoin friends to believe that my parents don’t know I’m gay, and I can see why. Bowdoin was a fresh start, in every cliched sense of the phrase: I was free, for the first time, to openly be whomever I wanted and could write my sexuality in capital letters onto my identity. I could walk around campus confident and proud, and I think my friends will agree that my footsteps are loud and my opinions are even louder. I didn’t have to hide.

I’m always nervous before boarding the transcontinental flight home for breaks. Family get-togethers are nice, until family members begin disparaging same-sex marriage and relentlessly asking what kind of wife I want. In my youth, I shrugged these things off. But recently, my strength has failed me, and their anti-gay sentiments have began seeping through the cracks of my tough exterior. I’ve recently begun feeling guilty and a little lost whenever I see the Out Peers list on a bathroom stall, wondering what my parents would think if they saw my name on there when they come for graduation in May.

It took leaving home for four years to understand the importance of being open with the ones you love. I once thought that the continual act of suppressing emotion after emotion and not talking about how I felt would make me more resilient and stronger, but it made me callous, cold and silent. I didn’t know how to converse with my family anymore because I was always fearful of revealing something and being disowned. There were no thoughtful discussions over meals, no heart-to-hearts for nine years and slowly, the periods of time between check-in phone calls and texts grew.

There will always be things certain families do not discuss—how much junk food you actually eat, what you spend your money on, mistakes you make on the weekends. But my family has been shut out of too many things for too long. They don’t know what I did this summer, where I want to be after college, or that I had my first art show this year. In the nine years I spent hiding myself, I stopped being a member of my family.

There’s still a lot I don’t tell people, and I’m certain everyone on campus has secrets and issues they don’t want to or don’t know how to talk about. But I’m starting by breaking down the walls I built when I was 12 and allowing myself to be vulnerable and open. In doing so, I’ll finally confront the pent-up feelings and take the right steps forward.

If love inherently comes with acceptance, then I’m grateful that my sister made that visit. I’m grateful that my parents still call to check in every few weeks. And I’m grateful that I’ll have the community I’ve made here when the process of coming out and returning to my family gets difficult.

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