Pacific Wave - Wellness Magazine 2020 by The Daily UW

A SUPPLEMENT TO THE DAILY

Autumn 2020

A Dream Deferred

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The

harlem what happens to a dream deferred ? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore — And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

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THE DAILY

editor's note

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

SALES MANAGERS

Mac Murray

Emma Koehler Preston Bingley

editor@dailyuw.com

admanager@dailyuw.com PACIFIC WAVE EDITORS Charlotte Houston Chamidae Ford PUBLISHER

paciﬁcwave@dailyuw.com

“What happens to a dream deferred?” writes Langston Hughes in the poem “Harlem.” Most of us have had to put our desires and regular lives on hold in the past seven months, and as we round the seven-month point of the pandemic, it’s beginning to drag on. So what happens to moments of love and laughter that got cut out of our 2020? Do they sit in waiting, stale, or is there a way for us to repurpose our energy we spent planning our old life into something new? This issue explores the idea of dreams: what we dream about, what we

dream of, and who we dream to be. This year we have been forced to grapple with the uncertainties of our futures; our once solid and dependable dreams become distant memories of our old lives. As with everything, it seems our dreams are changing.

Diana Kramer PACIFIC WAVE DESIGN EDITOR

dianakramer@dailyuw.com

Abigail Dahl pawavedesign@dailyuw.com COPY CHIEFS Diana Davidson Trevor Hunt copy@dailyuw.com PHOTO EDITOR Nicole Pasia photo@dailyuw.com

Chamidae Ford and Charlotte Houston

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Greta DuBois illustrations@dailyuw.com

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I don ' t love this college anymore By Brooke Kaufman The Daily At the reception of my father’s funeral, my uncle Robert, who isn’t my uncle but was my father’s closest friend, gave a eulogy that remarked on the elasticity of time. He said: There are moments to which we attribute great expectations, and they punctuate our histories, our relationships, like impenetrable ink blots. It’s far more difficult to recall the time in between, where people are less memorable and it’s all very mundane, and so, within our minds, “the film roll speeds up.” I often wonder, now, as a third-year student, if college belongs to another judgment entirely. Popular opinion would have us believe that the years we spend as undergraduates are nothing short of life-altering. It’s here that our adult selves are no longer hypothetical, but a role we’ll soon fulfill. The identities we’ve prophesied take shape or fall apart, as college becomes a protracted effort to determine just how much of what we thought we wanted will come true. I imagine, for many of us, college is the placeholder or dreamt empty space into which we painstakingly construct our future selves. College is the easily built dream; it is time spent and time deferred in search of self-improvement and distance from an unrecognizable past. Is it fair, then, to place such an abundance of trust in a capitalist-driven institution that cares little for the quality or success of our experience?

Narrative psychology suggests that our lives are not merely a lineage of what happens to us, but a retelling of events we substantiate with meaning. Cognitively, we exist in “narrative mode,” naturally imbuing our interactions and experiences with their relative importance or disregard. How our undergraduate years present within the narrative is a matter of choice, relying heavily upon the extent to which college is seen as a means to an end. Two years ago, at the beginning of it all, I was preoccupied with one salient fear: that over winter break, I would be the only member of my high school grouping with nothing to share. I hadn’t joined a sports team, a sorority, or become actively involved in social clubs. I didn’t go out and wake up in strange places, miss classes, and bungle major assignments, or, in any large way, abandon the same routines I’d just assumed I’d outgrow. I conﬂated my sense of achievement with my willingness to accept the vision of college as transformative. If I couldn’t escape old habits, why was I here? This is largely how I remember that ﬁrst year. I found a major and department, met the close-knit group of friends I now call roommates, and joined The Daily as a staff writer, then section editor. Yet, I continued to feel like I was walking in place, like age hadn’t made me any older, and this new place was so disappointingly indistinguishable from the last. But it’s my second year of college that underlines the ethos of

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this essay. Mid-fall, on a Wednesday afternoon, my father died. In the wake of this loss, my mother, my sister, and I sought to reconstruct an incomplete, but livable life. Once you move past the immediate formalities of death, it’s unclear what you’re left with. There’s grief counseling and reminiscing, rearranging of household tasks and familial roles, or studying abroad — which is what I chose. I didn’t relocate to Rome thinking it would bring me closure. Instead, I imagined, with a fantasized presumption of fairness and resolution, that it would deliver the long-awaited transformation promised by college. I tried to believe this even as the real indications of change began elsewhere, outside the landscape of school, and largely beyond my control. Then it was March and the pandemic, so I came home to San Diego where I’ve been ever since. I don’t typically believe in signs, but there comes a point when the evidence is overwhelming. By both choice and circumstance, it is likely that the bulk of my undergraduate years will be spent outside Seattle. I wasn’t able to create a home here, and I can’t say I’ll stay after graduation. This is no fault of the school, my friends, coworkers, or really anything the city has done to compel such apathy. It’s just that, while waiting for college to live up to all those great expectations, it became so obvious to me that this dependency on my environment was wholly unnecessary and worse, that it obfus-

cated the ability I already had to accept or abandon the prophesied identity. In her novel “Conversations with Friends,” Sally Rooney grapples with the concept of misplaced reliance, writing: “Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.” My expectations for this moment won’t be met, but it’s not disappointing; it’s far more interesting to entertain the notion that I never needed college at all. To say I don’t love college anymore is not about things that went wrong or any one fault in particular. The “love” is a way of synonymizing this endeavor with the feeling of being let down. I bought into the egregiously idealized perception of college, only to be confronted with its utter banality. The time I spent as a student, in the academic and social sense, did not determine, did not have a lasting impact on how I, a 20-year-old with questionable abilities to maintain friendships and cope with loss, will handle what’s to come. Through mundane and distracting tasks, I did that on my own.

Reach Arts & Leisure Editor Brooke Kaufman at paciﬁcwave@ dailyuw.com. Twitter: @bkaufmanLJ

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The crusade for the dream body Preaching vs. practicing body positivity

By Deborah Kwon The Daily

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I don’t think I’ve ever really loved how my body looks. I’ve been critical of my body and of how I view myself since elementary school. This only increased after I started using social media when I was 11, and over the many months of quarantine, I’ve been thinking a lot more about my relationship with my body and how society grapples with body image. I have written about fatphobia and body shaming, but I don’t think I allowed myself to accept those words for myself, in the practice of loving my own body. Despite all the body positivity and fat positivity I generally espew, the expectations of an “ideal” body still creep into my everyday thoughts thanks to the small digs that my friends and family make regarding non-thin, non-“fit” bodies. It’s no wonder that it took until graduating high school for me to actually feel somewhat confident in posting a photo of myself on my Instagram account. “Body positivity requires individuals engaging with where they stand in many different power dynamics, which is lost in the popularized vision as it centers thin, white bodies claiming body positivity while ignoring the input of BIPOC and fat individuals,” Ruby Harlin, an officer at the UW’s Body Love in School Society

(BLISS), said in an email. The mainstream body positivity movement promotes acceptance of all body types. That much is true. But acceptance is miles from positivity. I think all of my friends would consider themselves body positive — but they’re positive about just one body type. I guess I would describe myself as chubby, not really fat nor thin. I see how my friends and mutuals hype each other up for quarantine weight loss and six-packs on their Instagram posts. And I definitely see how they’ve been not-so subtly talking down at quarantine weight gain. Even though it’s not directly aimed at me, it still hurts because it’s something I’ve been trying to come to terms with for 10 years: honestly loving — or even just liking — my body. I always tell people that I feel happy in my skin, but for as long as I’ve been conscious about body image, I’ve still been on a bit of a crusade to try to achieve that “ideal” body type. While I was OK with my body, it was on the condition that I’d eventually be able to attain the “dream figure” I so desired. I think many of us who struggle with our self-image feel this way. People love to hype up those posts of someone displaying their fat rolls that are typically hidden in your standard, aesthetically-pleasing Instagram photos, accompanied by a wide glowing smile and a relatively vulnerable caption. Both sentiments have something in common: these are just temporary moments. Sure, “body positivity, fat is beautiful, love yourself, rah, rah,” but most of us still want the typical dream body for ourselves. Fat positivity in particular is oftentimes a matter of being positive for others but being absolutely terrified of actually being fat ourselves. So, maybe the issue isn’t necessarily one of needing to be positive about all body types. Can we learn to just be neutral about all body types, to not focus so much on the body? Though easier said than done, it would be nice to just, be; for all of us to be in different bodies and feel fine, to not give a s--- about how we look in that regard. Why fixate so much on our bodies because of how they are perceived by others

and ourselves? Regardless of shape or size, our bodies just exist, and it doesn’t help anyone to be obsessed with them. That’s what I’ve been spending a lot of time grappling with as I’m staring at myself on Snapchat, as I’m stuck inside with only my chaotic thoughts to keep company — what the f--- even is a dream body? Part of that Barbie and Ken doll depiction of what to aspire for comes from what we see represented in the mainstream, whether it’s via social media, movies, or those magazine covers. But it’s also stemming from the idea of fat being unhealthy, and y’know, we only want to lose weight because we want to be healthy, right? Well, the history of fat politics has also debunked that association. “It is harmful to try and change our bodies to look like ones we see in the media, especially because this idea is always changing and what signiﬁes ‘health’ today could be the opposite in the future, and vice versa,” Sydney Steele, an ofﬁcer at BLISS, said in an email. So, as with all the other issues in this broken world, it comes down to social, systemic constructs and expectations. Fat bodies can be healthy, and skinny bodies can be unhealthy. “You can literally see the difference in, say, Instagram com-

The

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Our bodies shouldn’t be about desirability in the first place. We should be learning to love and exist in our bodies, without bounds, conditions, or the goal of an “actual” dream body.

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ments, where people uplift thin, often underweight women, but then tell larger women that their photos are problematic and that they’re automatically unhealthy,” sophomore Ciara Gormley said in an email. “I think we need to encourage people to be healthy, but have that be focused on lifestyle choices, not a weight one, and to encourage all aspects of health, mental and physical, instead of striving to achieve a certain physical appearance.” The body positivity movement is lacking because it’s made up of superﬁcial positivity, whilst not actually desiring all bodies, thus creating harm and inequity. And our bodies shouldn’t be about desirability in the ﬁrst place. We should be learning to love and exist in our bodies, without bounds, conditions, or the goal of an “actual” dream body. To honestly be positive about all bodies means feeling happy in our skin — our fat, love handles, lack of curves, and everything else — without aspirations of thinness living rent-free in our heads, on Instagram, and throughout broader society.

Reach writer Deborah Kwon at paciﬁcwave@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @debskwo

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If you aren’t wearing Patagonia… are you even from the PNW?

Decolonizing the Outdoors

By Nicole Pasia The Daily With seemingly no end to COVID-19-imposed quarantine in sight, one of the few places in which we can find respite is the outdoors. Escaping the onslaught of Zoom fatigue for a hike in the picturesque Pacific Northwest is a luxury, but for whom is this luxury accessible? I didn’t experience planning my first real camping trip until well into college. My roommate and I, both members of the Husky Marching Band, were about to embark on an annual camping trip with the rest of our section. As we debated which snacks to bring and who would control the aux cord, we realized we were missing an important camping essential: a tent. Although we eventually found a tent to borrow, it was a painful reminder that even though I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, home to its sweeping mountain ranges and coastal forests, I was painfully out of my depth. I went to a predominantly white high school where my social media feed was always filled with posts from my classmates trekking through the woods on weekend camping trips or snowboarding in Snoqualmie Pass, decked out in Patagonia gear, Hydroflasks in hand. I wondered why my own family never spent much time outdoors. My parents, who immigrated from the Philippines in the late ‘90s, were unfamiliar with the camping culture of the Pacific Northwest. When they took me to REI to buy me a sleeping bag for outdoor camp in sixth grade, we gazed at the endless aisles of outdoor gear, not even knowing where to begin. The idea of outdoor recreation is heavily romanticized: Images of experienced explorers embarking on lengthy expeditions to remote wildernesses often come to mind. Sadly, not everyone can be Bear Grylls. Furthermore, the demographic represented in outdoor recreation does not accurately reflect the general population. According to the most recent survey from the National Park Service, minorities make up roughly 20% of outdoor recreation participants, despite accounting for nearly 40% of the U.S. population. “If the outdoors are inclusive or exclusive, it’s because we’ve created them that way,” Dr. Jeff Rose, an assistant professor in the department of parks, recreation, and tourism at the University of Utah, said. The path to making those spaces more inclusive involves breaking down economic and transportation barriers, he continued. Brands such as Patagonia and REI benefit from the capitalization of the outdoor recreation industry, worth $427.2 billion in 2017 according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. With images of expensive outdoor expeditions heavily portrayed in

Carina Bixby @cbixbyart

social media and corporate advertising, it can be easy to think that this is the only way to legitimately enjoy the outdoors. However, these experiences are unattainable if you don’t have access to resources or established knowledge about outdoor recreation. “A lot of my white friends that have camping gear of their own, their parents took them camping,” Mo Jackson, one of the organizers of a BIPOC camping gear fundraiser based in Tacoma, said. “Not only do they have the gear from their parents, but they also just have the knowledge of what they need from having gone with their parents.” The idea for the camping gear fundraiser, which since its inception in July has raised over $90,000 (equivalent to about 600 camping kits), first struck Jackson when they needed to roadtrip across the country to pick up a friend. “I had to get a tent and some camping gear, like a cooler and my own sleeping bag,” they said. “And it was the first time that I’ve ever owned my own camping gear.” BIPOC and people with disabilities disproportionately receive a lower income than white, able-bodied people which limits the ability to purchase camping gear. According to Jackson’s fundraiser, a basic camping kit, which consists of a two-person tent and sleeping bags, costs about $180 to $250. More specific gear, such as larger tents and camping supplies for children or those with disabilities, amounts to more expenses. Then, campers would need a vehicle to travel to an outdoor location and transport the gear, which isn’t feasible for people who rely on public transportation. Not to mention, several parks impose entrance fees or require paid passes. Money isn’t the only challenge, either. As much as finding affordable camping gear and building a knowledge base for enjoying the outdoors negatively affects certain demographics, so does racist and classist gatekeeping of outdoor spaces. “A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, well, we don’t want everybody to know where this spot is, or only certain types of people,’” Jackson said. “Let’s be really honest [about] why you’re wanting to keep this knowledge from other people.” It is important to acknowledge that BIPOC and other groups not traditionally represented in the outdoor recreation industry still participate. Affinity groups such as Unlikely Hikers and Seattle-based Black People Hike, popularized through social media, provide inclusive spaces for people of shared identities to connect and experience the outdoors together. Brands such as SlimPickins Outfitters, the first Black-owned American outdoor gear shop, and NativesOutdoors, an Indigenous-owned outdoor

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apparel company, empower BIPOC to explore the outdoors. Even with groups such as these, there is much work to be done in diversifying the world of outdoor recreation. So how do we ensure that the outdoors is truly for everyone? Of course, immediate actions include providing resources for underprivileged groups, as in the case of Jackson’s fundraiser. And these resources don’t necessarily have to take the form of camping tents and sleeping bags. “One of the ways that people can donate to what we’re doing is with information about hikes and the type of accessibility that’s there,” Jackson said. “Other things would be giving people f---ing rides. If you know people that probably want to go camping [but] they don’t have a ride or whatever, give them a f---ing ride somewhere.” Systemic, long-term change involves “diversifying what we mean by outdoor recreation,” as Rose put it. “Where do we place value on outdoor activities?” Anne Morrison, a director at the Northwest Outdoor Bound School, which encourages character development through various outdoor education programs, said. “And who’s deﬁning that value?” The romanticized image of white, able-bodied people on remote expeditions with thousands of dollars’ worth of gear is not the only narrative when it comes to exploring the outdoors. Rose explained that participating in the outdoors at the lowest level of consumption — whether that’s enjoying an afternoon in a city park, or organizing a group hike with carpools — is just as valid. “It’s celebrating things like just going for a hike in your local park,” Morgan Oyster-Sands, a diversity, equity, and inclusion specialist for the Northwest Outward Bound School, said. “Just

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A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, well, we don’t want everybody to know where this spot is, or only certain types of people,’” Jackson said. “Let’s be really honest [about] why you’re wanting to keep this knowledge from other people.

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as much as celebrating doing [Mount] Everest.” At the industry level, Oysters-Sands also stressed the importance of fostering partnerships with different demographics, such as BIPOC affinity groups and school districts so they have the opportunity to voice needs that specifically apply to them in a collaborative manner. As individuals, sharing knowledge and keeping each other accountable via social media has proven to be a cornerstone for change as reflected throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. So, while you can continue to follow high-profile outdoor enthusiasts on their next adventure, consider learning about and supporting your local outdoor recreation organizations too. “We are creating those spaces,” Rose said. “We are populating those spaces with our ideas, with our bodies, with our intentions and we should be doing that regularly. I think when we do that, then we create public spaces that want to be lived in.”

Reach Photo Editor Nicole Pasia at paciﬁcwave@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @nicoleapasia

If you aren’t wearing Patagonia… are you even from the PNW?

Decolonizing the Outdoors

Carina Bixby @cbixbyart

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Reach Photo Editor Nicole Pasia at paciﬁcwave@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @nicoleapasia

The uncertain future of international students in the US

By Estey Chen The Daily According to the 2019 Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange, over 1 million international students studied in America’s higher education institutions in 2018, contributing $44.7 billion to the U.S. economy. Around 7,800 of those international students attended the University of Washington — a number that increased to 8,100 by 2019. However, with the current global pandemic, many of those international students feel more estranged — both literally and figuratively — from their lifelong dreams of studying in the United States than ever before. After all, the unmatched global prestige of an American education lies not only in textbooks and lectures but in immersion in U.S. culture and person-to-person relationships. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------In a typical year, September marks a reset in the internal mental clock of UW students. Any other time, lounging on lush grass under the swaying cherry blossoms, or strolling across Red Square surrounded by anonymous faces hurrying to their next classes, instills a sense of anonymity and smallness. But for that brief window on the precipice of fall, new students flitting from one orientation event to the next warm the air with their palpable excitement, drawing the campus of 48,000 closer together. As part of the festivities, the Foundation for International Understanding Through Students (FIUTS) and the office of International Student Services (ISS) would usually partner to host International Student Welcome Week, a 10-day series of events introducing students to Seattle, each other, and the peculiarities of American life (think Health Insurance 101). Campus administrators, faculty, and U-District business leaders began FIUTS in 1948 with the goal of cultivating cross-cultural, personal relationships that encouraged, as stated on their website, “global peace and understanding.” That looks a lot different this year, testing FIUTS’ commitment to person-to-person diplomacy. Instead of hosting in-person events with attendance numbering in the hundreds, FIUTS is now leaning into social media, deepening its engagement with storytelling to elevate the work of students around the world. Other programs, like its language exchange, are more popular than before. Still, Era Schrepfer, executive director of FIUTS, reflected that while she and her staff feel anxious to meet in person, students she spoke with feel a stronger sense of loss. “There’s so much sadness about what they’re missing out,” Schrepfer said. The challenges international students face this year extend beyond lost opportunities. According to Schrepfer, some international students — Chinese students in particular — returning from winter break last January experienced incidents of bias while speaking their native languages or wearing masks on and around campus. “We’re seeing so much American fear of what’s different and fear of people from different backgrounds,” Schrepfer said. “Our country is really built by immigrants, and to push against that is really unfortunate. Sounding to international students that they’re not welcome is hurtful economically, culturally, and, in terms of the [United States’] role on the wider world stage, is incredibly frustrating.” One such student, Summer Ai, a 2020 graduate now pursuing a master’s degree in data science, recalled the sense of unease amongst her friends in late February as cases emerged in Seat-

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tle while the habit of mask-wearing, the norm in many parts of the world, was not yet widespread. Part of the pattern of rising hate crimes against Asian Americans, the hostility prompted by early adoption of protective wear came as a surprise to many international students. “Some Asian people I knew were really panicking about wearing masks because they might encounter racism on the street,” Ai said. Soon, Ai’s parents in China were the ones to call her daily to ensure her safety. To make matters worse, unpredictable immigration policies out of the Trump administration sent international students and ISS, the ofﬁce responsible for assisting students navigate the bureaucratic maze of U.S. immigration policy, reeling. “There was a lot of confusion among students but not a lot of answers,” ISS director Kim Lovaas said of the chaotic end to winter quarter. “It was really hard for us because we too didn’t know. We were waiting for the U.S. government to provide some kind of guidance.” Students breathed a sigh of relief when that guidance arrived in late March, allowing remote international students to maintain their immigration status, but policy changed yet again in July as the U.S. government revoked the policy for any new international students. Given this whiplash, some international students’ perceptions of the United States are changing in ways that may leave lasting effects on the country and its global reputation. Though the mishandling of the pandemic alone did not change their minds, the cumulative effects of rising xenophobia and hostile policies reveal a side of the United States that was previously easier for international students to ignore.

“Before I came to the [United States], I thought it was a perfect country,” Khanh Dinh, a 2020 UW graduate from Vietnam,

Grace Sturlaugson @craftedgrace

said. “This pandemic really revealed how capitalistic, individualistic, and selfish it is and how much more important money is [in the United States] compared to people’s lives.” Though Dinh initially hoped she would find a job in the United States that would sponsor her to stay, she currently feels less committed to her original plan and is looking at graduate programs elsewhere. She’s not alone. Ai still hopes to gain several years of work experience in the United States but feels uncertain about her long-term prospects. “I definitely shifted my mindset that I have to for sure stay in America,” Ai said. “Not necessarily because of COVID but because of what Trump did to the international student community. Among my friends, I see a decrease in the number of

students staying in America.”

Continue reading at dailyuw.com Reach Paciﬁc Wave Assistant Editor Estey Chen at paciﬁcwave@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @esteychen

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No drama in your life? Pay more attention to your dreams! The road to your unconscious is paved with flannel sheets and REM sleep

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This summer, my roommates and I clocked about 100 hours of “Love Island” (UK). I was going to say I’m not proud of it, but actually, it feels like an accomplishment. So why did we permanently give ourselves terrible British accents, you ask? Because our day-to-day life is boring and we needed something to gossip about. In the wake of actual things happening to us, we talked at length about Jonny’s emotional abuse of Camila and Georgia not actually being loyal. If you’re like us, you miss interpersonal drama and conﬂict. Luckily, there is one other place, besides “Love Island,” that we can access this: our dreams. Nothing peeves me more than when people tell me they “don’t dream.” If you aren’t ever entering REM sleep, where most dreaming takes place, you aren’t consolidating memories, you’re going to have a hard time learning new skills, and you’re probably shaving years off of your life. Everyone dreams, scientists think, for about two hours each night. Now, it’s when you start remembering your dreams that the fun really begins. My friends tell me I have dreams that are unusually vivid, but I believe anyone can access their dreams (unless you smoke a lot of weed) with the right amount of interest. Keeping a dream journal to record them right when you wake up can help you remember them before they slip away, but even just telling people about them tends to open you up more. Michael Brown, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area who uses dream analysis in his practice, says he never brings up dreams with his clients, but lets them bring the stories to him. Oftentimes, once they start talking about them, they’ll start having more and more to share. Once they do, he unpacks the dream with them by exploring the associations they have with the people, objects, settings, and even the words they use to describe it. Thankfully, dreams shouldn’t be taken literally. Though there are ideas out there about the meaning behind set symbols — like teeth falling out or pregnancy dreams — Brown says he doesn’t rely much on those. “The thing with dreams is that it’s so associational, it’s not a matter of creating equivalencies, it’s a matter of creating relationships. Creating relationships between these different parts of yourself from different periods in time. It’s not just a snapshot of right now, but this may be a part of you from when you were like a small child, and there’s a part of you from when you were a teenager. And it’s all kind of coming together now as if it were happening right now. That’s one of the tasks of dreams to pull out those different parts.” Even the most absurd dreams can be explored symbolically. For example, lately my house has been dealing with a lot of discussions about our boundaries with who we can see outside the

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house and, more specifically, how to date. In the wake of one of these conversations, I had a dream that I was hanging out with this random girl and a frog. The frog was disgustingly barfing and ejecting strange liquid all over me and I was trying to help it out. Finally, the girl confessed that she and the frog were secretly dating and they both had an STD — which was why he was sick — and that I had probably contracted it as well since his fluids were all over me. I distinctly remember being angry and revolted; if she had just been honest and told me they were dating, I wouldn’t have gotten sick. There’s some very obvious parallels here to living with people during the pandemic and the importance of just being honest, but I’m not sure what the whole gross frog imagery was playing into — probably some deep sexual shame that I’m still unlearning. See? Dreams are revealing. I’ll often be describing a seemingly innocuous dream to a friend when, halfway through, I’ll realize the meaning is crystal clear, and just the act of putting it into words has revealed it to me. I use my dreams to answer questions about what I want or need, to reveal things about myself, and just for plain entertainment. They are a path to explore your unconscious and to see what you need to face, and they’re overall a fun template to access these things. One question I like to ask people who are in relationships is if they have dreams about them cheating on their partner or their partner cheating on them. Usually, the answer is unequivocal, and reveals a lot about the role they play or the fears they harbor in their relationship. One time, my best friend told me she had a dream where her bloody internal organs were spilling out onto a pristine, white tile floor. In it, I pointed to them and said, “Those are yours.” She told me this when we were already having an intense conversation about the issues we deal with in our relationship, and that spoke pretty clearly to me about fears she has. There is also, of course, the whole notion of lucid dreaming which I have occasionally achieved but ultimately pulled back from because of my fears of sleep paralysis. Brown, too, admitted that he attempted it when he was younger, but we both agreed that we preferred to keep our dreamscapes untouched by our conscious minds. I’m happy to keep using them as windows into my subconscious, a place I don’t have many other avenues to access. “There’s real value in nightmares,” Brown said. “The nightmare’s telling you something too. I think a lot of times, people don’t want to pay attention to the nightmare. The nightmare is more vivid and it says, ‘Hey, pay attention to me.’ And I’ve often found that with folks who have been experiencing nightmares for some time, that just by beginning to unpack them and talk about them, the nightmares start to go away and start to diminish in their intensity, because you’re dealing with what’s driving them.” Maybe, the two of us came to realize on the call, the same reason that people seem to be hesitant to remember, explore, or believe in their dreams is the same reason people are resistant to therapy: It’s human to want to avoid our problems, desires, and whatever else is swirling around in our psyche. “That’s the thing about the unconscious is that this is going to be there, whether you like it or not,” Brown said. “And if something is painful to you, better to deal with it than to ignore it. Because when you ignore it, it’s going to keep knocking on your door.” Maybe it’s because analyzing a dream feels like reading a book with particularly obvious symbolism, and maybe it’s not for everyone, but if you find yourself bored inside, you can skip the reality TV and just take a nap.

Reach Paciﬁc Wave Co-Editor Charlotte Houston at paciﬁcwave@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @lilgarlicclove

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The ‘dream job’ under capitalism

Maybe we should find some better things to dream about

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By Hannah Krieg The Daily In ﬁrst grade, I was obsessed with “American Idol.” I even wore an American Idol Halloween costume (ruined only by the additional layer my mother required for modesty and warmth), and I hung up magazine posters of Kelly Clarkson on my bedroom wall and kissed them goodnight (which in retrospect should have tipped me off for some later discoveries). Independent of the early policing of my body and my unabashed childhood queerness, my dream job was to be a singer. Imagine: the fame, the money, the attention. As I got older, “American Idol’s” ratings ﬂatlined, and I

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hopped from dream to dream. None of them were ever particularly lucrative or realistic (I want to be a journalist, after all), but I watched my peers’ dream jobs go from astronaut to accountant, dolphin trainer to dental hygienist. Not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to crunch numbers or polish teeth, but something changed. There are two cultural messages that aren’t always compatible: pursue your passion, and chase a check. And we feel a pressure to do both through a “dream job,” a job that achieves this individualistic, American view of success that hinges on flimsy, meritocratic logic. Since all your future time and energy will be focused on your career, this job had also better bring you joy. To make matters worse, your life literally depends on this career. From food to shelter to healthcare, we live to work and work to live. Personally, I do not dream of centering my life around a career. “We have this distorted view of success, and the odds are stacked against us to reach that view,” UW history professor Margaret O’Mara said. Capitalism conflates money with success. In a nation of neoliberal “bootstrap” values, we understand that to make money, you have to work hard. However, due to generational wealth and other advantages some people are born into, equal work does not lead to equal outcome. “Stories of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg tend to downplay the fact that they were coming into the game with some advantages: Elon Musk’s family was very wealthy, and Mark Zuckerberg’s parents gave him seed money for Facebook,” O’Mara said. And because of the way we have conceptualized, revered, and propagated the “American Dream,” we believe that this success fulfills our destiny as people entrenched (consciously or otherwise) in American culture. Labor fulfills you. These ideals keep you a cog and, further, excited to be one. UW graduate student Preston Sahabu began to find his lucrative job unfulfilling. His love of math and direct admittance to the computer science program as an undergraduate put Sahabu on the path for his stint in programming. “The more I was in the industry, the more disillusioned I became,” Sahabu said. “Capitalism goes to what’s profitable and not what’s needed. I wanted to do something more meaningful.” He returned to the UW to pursue a master’s in transportation engineering, hoping to find fulfillment within his career by making a more direct impact on people’s lives.

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Reach Engagement Editor Hannah Krieg at news@dailyuw. com. Twitter: @Hannahkrieg

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I am a cog in the capitalistic machine and I hate it, but I also love shoes... The road to unlearning our capitalistic ways By Chamidae Ford The Daily It isn’t that I always dreamed of being rich. I never laid in bed at night imagining living in a mansion or owning five cars. But I did spend the majority of my life dreaming of wealth. It wasn’t the flashy displays that drew me in, but rather the little things that an average person does not buy because they are unnecessary and expensive. I dreamed of being a person who was able to order appetizers and multiple drinks when I went out to dinner. I wanted to be able to get facials regularly and actually buy the 10 items in my online shopping carts rather than just staring at them. The reality is I grew up in a very comfortable home, one my mother worked tirelessly to provide for. I lived in a slightly large, suburban, middle-class house. I never worried about having above my basic needs met. In fact, I lived a very privileged life, unbeknownst to me. My family went on vacation once a year and I always went back-to-school shopping. I played club sports and got a car when I turned 16. But because I viewed this as the bare minimum of how most people lived, I always desired more. Having grown up surrounded by many people who were much wealthier than I, especially once I got into high school, I joined activities and clubs that tend to cater to a more wealthy population. I spent most of my days longing to be like them. I lived in this bizarre bubble of kids who had even more excess than me which left me feeling unbelievably poor in comparison. This misconception of me having to possess the cheaper version of whatever my peers had often made me crave wealth in a way that I still am trying to understand. It’s built into our society to desire success and money. We often equate material goods with happiness, which in certain cases that may be true. Not having to fear about money adds a great deal of peace. In fact, a study done by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir found that poverty can actually impede a person’s cognitive function due to stress. That being said, studies have also found that being rich only makes a person’s

emotional well-being better up until their basic needs are met; after that, it is relatively similar to a middle-class person. In recent years, I have become more and more frustrated with the capitalist model that most of society subscribes to, including myself. I am frustrated with how we are forced to participate in a business model that screws us to survive. I have worked in the service industry for nearly four years and have only received a raise when it was state-mandated. Mind you, I have asked for a raise and I was always met with the same response: that because I make tips, it was unnecessary. The urge to argue boils deep inside me, but I always push it down in fear of losing this job that doesn’t appreciate me. The simple fact is we work to make the rich richer because if we didn’t, we would starve and lose our homes. And while I gripe about being a cog in the capitalist machine, I can’t deny the fact that on some level, a part of me fully participates in it. I get a rush from buying new shoes; I really enjoy wandering the aisles of a store and putting things in my cart. I want to not have to feel concerned about my impending credit card payment or if my career path is ultimately ﬂawed because I could never make good money as a writer even if I was relatively successful. I yell to redistribute your wealth but I feel great anxiety about pulling any money out of my savings account, regardless if it would beneﬁt others. I have waxed poetic about maximalism, vowing to never give into the Marie Kondo craze, deeming minimalism deeply overrated. In reality, I am just deeply blinded by a sea of consumerism. These dueling mindsets that I am constantly trying to wrangle and understand have left me wondering how to break away from the only thing I have ever known. I talked to Ricardo Hidalgo, a mental health counselor at Hall Health, and he made some interesting points about changing the way you think. He often referenced language as a sort of analogy for capitalism and socialism. “Every [monolingual American] is speaking and thinking in

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English, because that’s how we’ve been conditioned,” Hidalgo said. In the same way that most Americans have grown up immersed in the English language with little opportunity to learn more than that, it’s the same with capitalism. From a young age, we are taught to go to higher education and figure out our career as soon as possible. We have almost zero exposure to any other forms of government structure, and the ones that are mentioned are generally painted in a negative light. “That’s how we’ve been, you know, brought up,” Hidalgo said. We can’t blame what we had no control over, but moving away from this mindset isn’t necessarily easy. “I would say not retrain the brain, that’s like trying to say, forget thinking or speaking in English, it’s not going to happen,” he said. But you can learn a new language. It just takes dedication, time, and belief in what you are doing. The same applies to learning a new way of life and thinking about the world. There are benefits to leaving that structure behind, beyond what is beneficial for society and the planet. There are individual benefits that you can immediately experience. “We become much more satisfied with much less,” Hidalgo said. “We become much more secure with much less. In other words, we no longer invest our sense of worth and our sense of security in how much we have.” Hidalgo mentioned how there is an innate stress in not taking a path that guarantees wealth, including opting for a more creative career rather than a financially secure job. He chalks it up to the fact that “our society doesn’t value these other endeavors.” Referencing his daughter, who chose a path of theater, he talked about how she “never questioned her sense of worth or

her self esteem, because she knew she was following what was true to her heart.” Leaving the capitalist mindset is learning to look beyond your immediate thoughts that push you to prioritize wealth over creative joy and self fulfillment. A 2007 study by Lan Chaplin and Deborah John found that people with higher self-esteem had less materialistic tendencies, suggesting that investing in yourself and valuing yourself can lead you to find joy in a less capitalistic way. The Happiness Hub, referenced in a study by Joseph Chancellor and Sonja Lyubomirsky, found that living a thrifty lifestyle “concerned with strategic underconsumption” led to hedonic benefits. So, while the studies have proved minimalism is inherently better for you and pursuing your dreams builds your self-esteem, the journey is not a straight path and the reality of living in a capitalist society demands that we must practicipate in it in the most basic form to survive. While I’m a long way from a minimalist lifestyle, I am committed to moving away from those tendencies. My first goal is to start replacing my hobby for shopping with less materialistic activities such as cooking and painting. Ultimately, believing in your desire to give way to what you’ve always known is a simple way to start a different way of life. Like a new language, you just have to begin and be open to learning more.

Reach Paciﬁc Wave Co-Editor Chamidae Ford at paciﬁcwave@ dailyuw.com. Twitter @Chamidaeford

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UW PARENT & FAMILY WELLNESS WEEKEND NOVEMBER 6-9, 2020

Join us for a wellness break. Bring your uwfam.

Schedule at

uw.edu/parents/virtual-events UW Parent & family programs | uw Student life