Ubyssey Magazine 2018

How we live

U

THE UBYSSEY MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2018

LETTER FROM THE EDITORs With the theme of “how we live,” this magazine is about the unique stories from each student’s life and the recurring themes in our community.

It is the collective voice of students of all backgrounds, beliefs, ambitions and ideas — something that belongs to them and everyone else who has ever called UBC their home.

We could not possibly hope to examine every idea or give a voice to every student who might have something important to say, but we tried anyways. In this magazine, you will find as many voices and perspectives as we were able to fit into 52 pages. And what we couldn’t fit in here, you can find online.

The people who helped write, edit, draw, photograph and build this magazine are some of the most talented and interesting people that we have had the pleasure of working with.

To everyone who contributed in whatever way you could, thank you for the immense act of courage in entrusting your work and your experiences to us. To everyone at The Ubyssey, thank you for your brilliance, dedication and care. And to everyone who reads this, thank you for your time and your consideration — we hope that this magazine inspires you to share your experiences of how you live at UBC. Your 2017/18 Ubyssey Magazine editorial team

Cover artwork by Lua Presídio

Business Manager Ron Gorodetsky business@ubyssey.ca

Editor-in-Chief & Illustration Editor Samuel Du Bois

Account Manager Adam McQueen adam@ubyssey.ca Senior Web Developer Peter Siemens peter@ubyssey.ca

First-Person Editors Emma Hicks & Jack Lamming

Web Developer Atsushi Yamamoto atsushi@ubyssey.ca President Sebastian Miskovic president@ubyssey.ca

Analysis Editor Sophie Sutcliffe

The New Student Union Building 6133 University Boulevard Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1 Online: ubyssey.ca Twitter: @ubyssey Snapchat: theubyssey

Features Editors Moira Wyton & Zak Vescera

Short-Form Editor Alex Nguyen

Coordinating Editor Jack Hauen coordinating@ubyssey.ca Design Editor Natalie Morris printeditor@ubyssey.ca News Editors Samantha McCabe & Alex Nguyen news@ubyssey.ca Culture Editor Samuel Du Bois culture@ubyssey.ca

Design Editor Aziz Sonawalla

Sports + Rec Editor Lucy Fox sports@ubyssey.ca Video Producer Kate Colenbrander video@ubyssey.ca

Photo Editor Saman Shariati Land Acknowledgement: We would like to acknowledge that this paper and the land on which we study and work is the traditional, occupied, unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl ̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

The Ubyssey Editorial Office: SUB 2208 604.283.2023

Business Office: SUB 2209 604.283.2024

Opinion + Blog Editor Emma Hicks opinion@ubyssey.ca Science Editor Nivretta Thatra science@ubyssey.ca Photo Editor Partick Gillin photos@ubyssey.ca Features Editor Moira Wyton features@ubyssey.ca Content warning: Some of the works featured in this magazine contain material relating to sexual assault and eating disorders.

Hearty Biscuits // Samuel Du Bois

Ingredients:

Samuel Du Bois

Eating these biscuits on Saturday mornings is one of the oldest memories that I have. Even now, they are a staple of weekend breakfasts at home and a perfect recipe for me to make when I’m feeling a bit homesick.

The recipe is my dad’s. It probably came from somewhere else, and then he changed and tweaked it over time. He’s not one to measure out ingredients; preferring a handful of oats to a half cup and a dash of cinnamon to a teaspoon. That kind of method is by far the most exciting way to cook. While it leaves you open to invention and creativity, it also usually means that no two batches of biscuits are the same. I’ve made these myself several times now and, no matter what, they never turn out the way I remember. Your version of these will be very much different from mine and I encourage you to leave out or add whatever you want to these biscuits. The creativity of it is

2 cups white flour, or combination of white and whole wheat (¼ cups max) ½ cups rolled oats Cinnamon Cloves Orange zest 1 ½ tsp. baking powder 1/3 cups brown sugar ½ cups butter Pecans or walnuts Raisins or any dried fruit 2/3 cups milk Directions: Preheat your oven to 375oF. Add all of the dry ingredients into a bowl and mix. Sugar and spices can be adjusted to taste or preference.

Make sure that the butter is cold and cut pieces of it into the dry ingredients.

Stir the butter into the dry ingredients until everything in the bowl has formed a crumbly mixture.

Once this is done, add in the nuts and dried fruit. It is better to cut the nuts into small pieces so that they mix well. Larger pieces are also more likely to burn when cooking. Add the milk and mic until your dough has formed.

Turn out the dough onto a work surface and pat into a ¾ inch thick circle. From this cut two-inch wide circles and place them on a parchment-lined baking sheet.

Cook for 16 minutes or until golden brown.

half the fun. U

" CUT OUT AND KEEP THIS RECIPE FOR LATER USE!

While UBC is significantly more affordable than a comparable school in the US, the cost of tuition and living can add up. The Ubyssey looked at how affordable it really is to attend UBC, and how trying to afford it impacts people’s university experience. The data below was taken from two surveys we distributed through Facebook groups to UBC students, which had 111 and 227 respondents, respectively. This is only a small sample of UBC’s population, but we hope it will give some insight into how students afford their education.

// Data: Joshua Azizi & Sophie Sutcliffe, Artwork: Rachel Cheang

Making ends meet: UBC’s graduate students strike complex financial balances // Sophie Sutcliffe Mackenzie Walker

Addyson Frattura, a student in her final year of an educational studies masters program at UBC, estimated that she works from 45 to 60 hours per week, not including other activities she does in order to fill up her academic portfolio.

“The part time jobs I’m working now are mostly just for financial means, not necessarily experiential,” said Frattura. “For the most part, it’s just to pay for rent and food.”

Frattura had a partial department scholarship for her first year, plus a couple hundred dollars for the international tuition award. But this year, she doesn’t have any funding.

“My department ... I believe it does not have the capacity to fund masters students,” said Frattura.

Frattura is forced to finance her degree creatively through a cocktail of loans, intensive summer jobs, research assistant positions and whatever she needs to do to fill gaps for rent and food. She is one of many grad students who receive little or inadequate funding from UBC, meaning that simply making ends meet becomes a calculation.

The Ubyssey took a look at the funding available to graduate students and how these students afford their degrees.

Funding the foundation When students are unable to receive the amount of funding that they need from provincial loans, the university does step up and help.

“Our bursary program is guided by Policy 72, [which] states that for any domestic student who is eligible under the policy, they won’t be prevented from continuing or commencing their studies at the university for financial reasons alone,” said Darran Fernandez, an elected member of the UBC Board of Governors, associate registrar and director of the student support & advising unit in enrolment services. “But what

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THE UBYSSEY MAGAZINE

the policy also states is that students who are eligible need to do everything within their own capacity to fund their studies.”

Fernandez said that eligibility for the program is tied to provincial loan assessments, meaning that students can access the funding if they take out the maximum amount of provincial funding, but still need additional support.

“The part time jobs I’m working now are mostly just for financial means, not necessarily experiential. For the most part, it’s just to pay for rent and food.”

- Addyson Frattura “[Let’s say] there’s a graduate student who has… tuition of $6,000 annually but overall expenses of $23,000 and they apply for a BC student loan. So the BC student loan program will give just under $11,000, maybe they have about $3,000 that they’re able to contribute on their own … there’s still a gap between everything that they’ve been able to produce [and their costs],” explained Fernandez.

“If that student were to apply for a bursary during the timeline for the bursary program and we were to calculate that they do have a net need of $9,000, they would receive $9,000 in bursary.”

Fernandez said that for 2016/17 research-based programs, of the 439 students that applied for the bursary, 201 were eligible and an average of about $5,500 was given to each. For designated graduate

programs, such as a masters of business administration or a masters of journalism, 59 of the 171 that applied were eligible, with an average award of $3,800.

Fernandez elaborated that students pursuing their law or medical degrees can also access this bursary funding and that there are other resources available for students in these programs. Because these programs are often among the most expensive and the maximum amount of provincial funding is around $11,000 regardless of tuition amount, UBC has “worked on with certain loan providers … to provide feasible and competitive line of credit rates so that they can borrow through those means,” said Fernandez.

The bursary program also supports students who have childcare concerns and takes into account dependents when assessing financial need.

“With our graduate students [or] students who are maybe at a later stage in life … they’re dealing with different issues than a first or second or thirdyear undergraduate student who may be 19-years old, and may be living at home or still has support from family,” said Fernandez. “With graduate students … they’re coming with a great level of complexity to their financial situation.

“So we try to style our financial programs to acknowledge that.”

A large portion of the UBC Operating Fund that is allocated to graduate programs goes

towards the four-year doctoral fellowship program — which provides some students in the PhD — doctor of musical arts and combined MD/PhD programs with financial support of at least $18,200 per year, in addition to tuition, for up to four years of their studies. According to UBC’s 2016/17 Annual Report on Student Financial Support, this “allows UBC to continue to attract and support outstanding domestic and international doctoral students, and to provide those students with stable, base-level funding for their doctoral studies and research.”

Advocating affordability There are several lobbying efforts that the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, which includes UBC Vancouver’s Graduate Student Society (GSS) but not the AMS, is taking towards the federal government.

Canada Student Grants (CSGs) are up-front needsbased student aid from the federal government that do not need to be repaid, but are currently only available to students at the college and undergraduate level — not grad students. Graduate students are currently eligible for Canadian student loans, but these must be repaid. CASA recommends that the federal government create “an up-front, non-repayable Canada student grant for graduate students with financial need,” a fund which they estimate would cost the federal government $58 million per year.

AFFORDABILITY | MAKING ENDS MEET

The Canada Student Loans Program (CSLP) also offers the CSG for Students with Permanent Disabilities, a grant worth up to $2,000 each year. This grant however leaves out students whose disabilities while still debilitating are not permanent, including episodic conditions, mental health problems and temporary illnesses.

As well, while the federal government increased the value of the CSG by 50 per cent in its 2016 budget, unlike other grants, the CSG for Students with Permanent Disabilities has not gone up in value since it was introduced in 2009. CASA is asking that “the CSLP undertake an official review of its definition of permanent disabilities to ensure that it meets the diverse needs of students” and that the federal government increase this grant by 50 per cent as well, a move which they estimate would

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come with an additional cost of $42 million.

Making the cut The UBC Vancouver Senate approved the establishment of a university-wide minimum funding level for all full-time PhD students in May 2017. The policy states that PhD students, domestic and international, will receive at least $18,000 for each of the first four years of their program, excluding any official leave of absences.

This funding can come from a variety of sources, including external or internal scholarships, research assistantship, teaching assistant positions or other academic work at UBC such as lecturing.

However, only students who will commence their PhD studies after September 1, 2018 are eligible and it remains unclear how the program will affect these new students.

Josh Curran

“It’s just what the capacity was on campus. So in terms of what was doable for some of the programs that would have more challenges [than others] meeting the minimum.”

– Brendan Morey But while the sources of PhD funding are comprehensive, the policy’s reach isn’t. Left out of this policy are students enrolled in part-time programs, as well as students in educational leadership and policy or doctor of musical arts programs. The minimum funding program also only applies to PhD students, leaving those pursuing masters degrees without this safety net.

This policy requires that graduate programs only admit doctoral students that the graduate program and supervisors have the means to support, considering factors such as support from supervisor’s grants, internal and external scholarships, availability of research and teaching assistantships, as well as financial commitments to existing students. This means that while students pursuing their PhDs at UBC will be more supported, it may become harder to be admitted, especially for low-income students.

Even if students are lucky enough to receive school funding, it might not be enough.

It is questionable whether this fund will cover everything, as the cost of living in Vancouver may mean that students

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cannot live on the $18,000 of minimum funding alone — something even UBC admits.

The UBC Graduate School’s website features a cost of living calculator, where many of the costs calculated are well above the minimum funding level.

The Ubyssey used this to determine the cost for single, childless, domestic students living on-campus in shared accommodations and not owning a car in every program covered by the minimum funding policy, and found that the average cost was $23,189.50. For international students, the figure was $26,896.33.

“There was lots of discussion about what was the appropriate level. I think one reason we ended up with $18,000 is there’s the four year fellowship program, which is one of the largest programs for PhD students, award programs, and it’s at $18,200. That’s been in place for a while, and so that gave us a ballpark number,” said Brendan Morey, the assistant dean of student administration and awards for UBC’s Graduate School.

“It’s just what the capacity was on campus. So in terms of what was doable for some of the programs that would have more challenges [than others] meeting the minimum.”

A note underneath the calculator also notes that “UBC expects you and your family to assume primary responsibility for covering the cost of your education,” and that while many

THE UBYSSEY MAGAZINE

students may receive funding for four years — such as students under the minimum funding requirement — it often takes longer than that to graduate.

“The majority of students don’t finish in four years … And that is a topic of significant conversation and has been for years in terms of the duration of funding,” said Morey. “It’s always a case of, ‘do we offer funding for a longer period of time and less funding for students?’…

But again it’s a sense of starting somewhere, and the university is hoping to kind of nudge programs to finish sooner.

“It’s going to take a long time for that to happen.”

Despite this difference in funding and her concerns with the application process, Frattura said the minimum funding policy would “definitely” influence her decision of where to study if she had her choice of PhD programs.

“I think there are pros and cons to the minimum package funding policy … [I’ve heard of] PhD students who are working full time and doing PhDs, which makes it really difficult to do the level of research that you’re trying to do when you’re working all the time,” said Frattura.

“I think it’s a great thing that the department has to provide a minimum package so that they can focus on research and do what they’re there to do … but then I think it also is tricky for the arts and humanities, because a lot of arts departments … already have less resources.”

Who gets to go?

While Frattura acknowledged that carrying this much money in student loans and having to work through her degree program is difficult, she also acknowledged that it is a privilege to even be able to take on these loans.

“[I’ve heard of] PhD students who are working full time and doing PhDs, which makes it really difficult to do the level of research that you’re trying to do when you’re working all the time.”

- Addyson Frattura “I had the privilege to access these resources, and to put myself in a situation that was financially not secure because I had a lot of privilege coming into that,” said Frattura.

While the new minimum funding policy may be helpful in making getting a PhD more accessible, it is unclear to which degree this will be. With cost barriers still in place for masters degrees, it may be hard for these students to get the qualifications they need to get into a PhD program at UBC. “I think that’s a huge note on how people fund their programs because there’s so many people in the United States and in Canada who aren’t able to make those decisions like that and are very limited in their academic professions and where they’re able to go,” said Frattura. U

Baba Ghannouj // Kate Colenbrander Ingredients:

Kate Colenbrander

When I tell people I’m part Syrian, it’s usually met with either shock, confusion, doubt or a mixture of the three. My greatgrandparents came to Canada fleeing Christian persecution, and because of the nature of their arrival and of the time, assimilation was mandatory. The pronunciation of their surname Aziz was anglicized, their language was dropped and a majority of customs were forgotten. But one thing that continues to be practiced in my family today is the cuisine. Hummus, labneh, kibbie, baklawa, sfeeha and more all became staples of my childhood. A favourite being the eggplantbased dip, baba ghannouj.

If you pick up baba ghannouj and the first ingredient is mayo, this is actually glorified eggplant ranch and you should cease any contact with it immediately. If you’re still craving some sweet, sweet eggplant dip goodness after this subsequent cleansing, here is the recipe passed down to me from my Syrian grandfather. U

" CUT OUT AND KEEP THIS RECIPE FOR LATER USE!

1 large eggplant ¼ cup fresh lemon juice 4 tbsp. tahini 1 clove garlic Olive oil Salt and pepper to taste Parsley (optional) Sauteed pine nuts (optional).

Tip: these are expensive as hell, sunflower seeds are not, both of are available in bulk at Safeway where there just so happens to be a self checkout. Do with that information as you please.

Directions: Preheat broiler. Place whole eggplant on baking sheet and prick thoroughly with fork. Broil eggplant, turning frequently until skin is charred and eggplant collapses (15-20 min).

Place eggplant on paper towels and peel. Remove pulp into mixing bowl and add a few spoons of lemon juice to prevent discolouration. Mash pulp, add tahini, the rest of lemon juice and salt and pepper. Mix well and adjust seasonings if necessary — for added refinement, place mixture in food processor for a few turns.

Rub shallow bowl with garlic clove. Discard. Place eggplant mixture in bowl, garnish with parsley, a few drops of olive oil and sauteed pine nuts as desired.

When we played ducks // Saakshi Patel There floats a cloud beneath my feet I’m hugged by an old grey parka hood up that packs in heat. My palms sweat, it’s numbingly wet and icy outside, but you walk towards me anyway.

Any day this will end, I say.

I’m allergic to your aftershave.

The pianist in my head hammers away violins play while you chuckle I’d like to scream.

My eyes overflow with the emotion that drinking too much Old Monk brings.

Lost in a maze of acceptance, These things won’t end, you say.

It rains all the time in the place I flew away to.

Yesterday, I locked up our pictures, our books.

I don’t wear the necklace it looks beautiful kept aside in the red suitcase you helped me carry out my door on the 30th of July.

You swore.

We won’t be broken apart.

April.

I’m afraid I made many promises at the start that I cannot seem to keep.

3:17 a.m.

I only wonder how you sleep.

Shivangi Sikri

COMMUNITY UBC’s motto is “Tuum Est” — it is yours. But how true is that? You share this campus with 53,999 other students from all parts of the globe, studying any number of things and aspiring to be all kinds of people.

Forging a community from so many people who have so little in common should be impossible — yet here we are. It’s often not easy: this section includes stories of students clashing over everything from the mechanics of sharing a room to contentions on freedom of expression. But good things are rarely easy. Whether it’s your horror story of a roommate or the prof whose class you never skip, your favourite cashier at Loafe (all of them, right?), or your hungover peers shuffling into morning lecture, we’re all here on the edge of Vancouver, trying to make it work. Ironically, the university experience that is so individually poignant is created entirely by other people. A more appropriate motto might be “Nostrum Est”— it is ours.

Where do you live?

Were your parents born in Canada?

ALONE (3%)

ONE WAS (17%) OTHER ON-CAMPUS (5%)

WITH FAMILY (27%)

UBC RESIDENCE (46%)

WITH ROOMMATES (20%)

What type of program are you in?

PhD (1%)

OTHER (5%)

YES (32%)

NO (51%)

What year of your program are you in?

FIFTH YEAR (5%) FOURTH YEAR (11%)

UNDERGRADUATE (95%)

THIRD YEAR (28%)

SIXTH+ YEAR (4%) FIRST YEAR (34%)

SECOND YEAR (19%)

What gender do you identify as?

NOT SURE (0.3%)

What sexual orientation do you identify as?

AGENDER (0.3%)

ASEXUAL (3%)

NON-BINARY (0.3%)

QUEER (0.6%)

UNSURE (1%) MALE (38%)

OTHER (1%)

BISEXUAL (16%)

GAY/LESBIAN (9%)

QUEER (4%) PANSEXUAL (1%) FEMALE (60%)

OTHER (0.3%)

HETEROSEXUAL (65%)

MAN-ISH (0.3%)

NO (73%)

ARE YOU RELIGIOUS?

YES (27%)

WHAT IS YOUR RELIGION?

// Data: Joshua Azizi & Sophie Sutcliffe, Artwork: Aziz Sonawalla

A day in the life of UBC We asked, you answered — 193 of you, that is.

What we write 67 per cent of students said their highest word count for an essay last term was under 3,000 words.

18,000

Longest reported word count, reported by a business student.

*Those who indicated a page limit were automatically assigned 250 words per page.

56

42

28

14

0

25

20

15

5

10

e nc ie sc

of respondents drink 0 cups of coffee a day

0

d lie

e ts ss er ar ine ienc th o s sc bu

48% 25% 1

With whom?

p ap

How we study

of respondents drink 1 cup of coffee a day

respondent, a forestry student, drinks 7 cups of coffee a day

in groups

alone

Where we study Of those faculties with more than four respondents, here is where students like to study most.

Business: Henry Angus

Kinesiology: Woodward

Science: Residences

Arts: Buchanan

Applied Science: McLeod or Residences

Forestry: Forest Sciences Centre

Busiest weeks last term

When we study 30 20 10

4 De c

O ct 30 N ov 6 N ov 13 N ov 20 N ov 27

O ct 16 O ct 23

O ct 9

25

O ct 2

18

Se pt

Se pt

11

0 4

of Science students reported that the week of November 5 was their busiest week

40

Se pt

of respondents said the week of November 19 was their busiest in terms of work

50

Se pt

18% 16% 19%

of respondents said the week of November 26 was their busiest in terms of work

// Data & Artwork: Lucy Fox

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THE UBYSSEY MAGAZINE

Joseph Kennel

First day of school

// Joshua Azizi

My first day at UBC back in 2013 started out with me feeling lonely as hell in my dorm room, fearing that I’d be doomed to exist in isolation all year. A few hours later, I was decked out in a toga in the middle of a dance floor, surrounded by drunken frat bros and teenagers making out. For my sheltered 17-year-old self, it was quite the escalation.

Loneliness is a common feeling for first years, but I didn’t expect that feeling so suddenly after moving into Vanier. I said “hi” to my neighbours and made some small talk with people in the halls, but in those first few hours I hadn’t established any instant friendships like you see in cliché teen movies. Rather, I just felt awkward around everyone I talked to. To kill time I decided to wander around the campus that would become my home for the next few years. I visited some of the locales that would become familiar sites to me over the years — the old SUB, the Bird Coop, Martha Piper fountain — but when I came back the old feelings were still there.

Panic set in. Why is everybody so social and not me? Am I going to be this lonely all day?

For weeks? All year?

The turning point came at 5 p.m., when I ran into someone I met briefly from Frosh who I knew also lived on my floor. She invited me into her room, and I found myself in a circle with three of my floormates. Talking began to feel a little easier and my guard started to lower. Look at me, ma! I’m making friends!

There was a floor meeting where everyone got to introduce themselves, and then a floor dinner. Like many first years in their first week, I stuck to small talk. Where did you go to high school? What faculty are you in?

Do you know what you want to major in?

So far, so good.

As the afternoon turned into the evening, the liquor started to come out. Everyone on my floor began to feel comfortable around one another, and making conversation became a lot more effortless. My confidence started to climb — I’ve made the connections I need, now it’s time to have a great night.

The big topic on campus was whether or not people were going to head over to the toga party at the Sigma Chi fraternity house. I’d never been much of a person for loud, unruly parties, but something like a toga party

COMMUNITY | FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL sounded so stereotypically university that I just had to experience it. With some help, I found myself wearing a toga made out of my bedsheets that got a pretty good reception from everyone around. It was just the validation I needed.

At around 9 p.m. we went over to the frat house, which seemed like it was at least an hour away from Vanier.

There was a big crowd around the entrance that suggested not everyone was going to be admitted, but one of my floormates knew people who were able to let us in.

It was an exhilarating sight, but also a bizarre one — hundreds of people consuming as much alcohol as possible, all crammed into a tiny house where the only way to communicate was to shout your lungs out. And then there’s the dance floor: people mashing their bodies together and sucking each other’s faces while crappy EDM music — the soundtrack to many a greasy dancefloor in 2013 — blared from the speakers.

I was, of course, hammered out of my mind as well, but the initial excitement of it all soon started to blur into uneasiness.

I was a pretty social guy in high school, but I knew where my limits were and this was way past them. And then there was the biggest problem of them all: I had no idea how to dance. I still have no idea how to dance, but back then I was worse than hopeless. So I spent the night mostly hanging around my floormates and wandering around by myself. I tried to strike up conversations, but it’s hard to do when Avicii’s voice drowns everyone’s out.

I left feeling like a loser who couldn’t fit with the cool kids.

My toga had also fallen apart, which I took as a pretty apt metaphor for my confidence. I tried to walk to Vanier, but where the hell was Vanier? And thus began my attempt at walking home, in which I accidentally explored UBC at night. Just like it did in Grade 12, my iPod soundtracked my sulking with depressing indie music like Grizzly Bear and Grouper.

17 I got tired and sat down behind a building, staring at the sky and thinking about how this was only the first day of my university experience; how I was going to see and learn so much here; how I had no idea what to expect of the next four years; how I was completely shitfaced.

At the time, I had no idea that a “fifth-year” was an inevitability.

After about an hour I found Vanier and collapsed in my bedroom. Had the night finished there, it would have been a pretty anticlimactic ending for such a monumental day. I heard knocks on my door — it was my neighbour and a few other faces I’d met that day. We chatted a bit, and even though I don’t remember much of what we said, I remember that it was enough to lift up my spirits. The night ended on a positive note.

This was over four years ago, and I’m writing about it at a point where I only need to take two more classes before graduating in April. If all that could happen in one day, you’d best believe that a lot happened in between. U

vtsl.com

FEELING STRESSED? LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE

Laugh til your face hurts with a show at Vancouver Theatresports.

With your student discount, it’s cheaper than a movie.

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THE UBYSSEY MAGAZINE

Kate Burnham

Living away from home University for me, like many, was a chance to start something over.

It was the opportunity to reimagine an identity for myself and recreate everything around me — the first step from small town weirdo to big city socialite. I spent my first year at UVic, which was about twelve hours away by car from my hometown of Castlegar, BC. The distance was relieving. I was ready to become a fullblown college man who makes adult mistakes and takes his education for granted.

// Tristan Wheeler

The distance, for the most part, made the beginning of this transition easy. Being far away was nice, I felt free and in control of my life’s happenings.

I could stay out until whenever I wanted, hang out with whoever I wanted and go wherever I wanted.

But the distance turned from freedom to a constricting prison in an instant.

Emotionally, my first year of university was like walking through a field of bear traps — just when I thought “there

can’t be room for anymore bear traps” another one attached to a place on my body I forgot I had.

My first year felt like my body was covered in these bear traps, each one with a label: long-distance girlfriend, lack of motivation, school I hated and the ever-present dread that screams “what are you going to do with your life?”

But the biggest bear trap was less of a bear trap and more of a guillotine. It was late February when I heard the news.

COMMUNITY | LIVING FAR AWAY FROM HOME My mom called me and said simply “me and your dad are likely going to get a divorce.”

I remember imagining this scenario as a young kid. In my fantasy, my parents would tell me they are going to be divorced and I, through the magic of generosity and love, would orchestrate a Christmas miracle that would make everything okay.

In reality, what actually happened was about three hours of impotent rage that included tearing down signposts, walking down to a popular bay and quickly leaving because I forgot I was scared of the dark.

Growing up, I always saw my parents as the paragon of marriage. They’d been together from their early 20s to their mid 40s, had both me and my sister, a house, a dog and loved to camp together. That’s how it seemed at least.

But what could I do? I was twelve hours away and they were still living together. Nothing was official, but nothing was alright. Everyone’s life was thrown into the air and through the magic of family dysfunction they stayed suspended — there were no pieces to pick up and nothing to catch. My family was in nuptial purgatory.

Twelve hours away from what really mattered, classes began to annoy me. Everything was soured by what I was secretly going through.

I don’t think I will ever be able to take a class in formal logic again without getting flashbacks to that spring.

My grades took a significant dip, adding to my stress as I was trying desperately to get into UBC. I was isolated.

I could only tell my girlfriend but that made things harder because she lived in Vancouver, reminding me of the fact I lived on a fucking island.

No one knew about what was going on, my roommate at the time didn’t realize what I was going through until I told him a year ago — one month after everything was official. In a phrase, I was so good at bottling my emotions, I was considering a job with Coca-Cola. I would simply go to class, come home, and sit on my computer — distracting myself by joking about farts and politics — go to sleep wake up and repeat.

Not a single person I interacted with daily knew what was going on with me.

What reason did I have to tell anyone? Why would I? I was six hundred kilometres east. Six hundred kilometres west was the middle of the ocean. What was the difference?

Come Easter, I thought I had some sort of duty to go home. I took an extra few days, citing “family emergency” with my professors and my family scrounged up the money for me to fly in.

It felt like how I imagine a newly drafted soldier would feel dropping into Vietnam: I didn’t know why I was going, what was happening or which side I was on. And like the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, it only made things worse.

It was a five-night trip into the purest form of anguish.

19 There were no good sides, no place for me to take a stand and no way for me to leave happy. It was the home I’d always known, the one I grew up in, but everything was wrong.

Gravity had been reversed and everyone noticed. But no one said anything. And to take this Vietnam analogy to its logical conclusion, when I left I was Henry Kissinger — I had not accomplished my goal of fixing my family and the dominoes were soon about to fall.

I went back to school and finished the semester as best as I could, ending with an average that still got me into UBC. Two months later, my dad went up north to work and he would never come back to the house.

I spent the ensuing months thinking about what had happened. Was it better that I had been away? If so, who was it better for? How does this change the last 20 years of my life? There’s no clear answer. A part of me is still struggling to understand those few months in 2016, but it isn’t as all encompassing as it once was.

Although, as the distance in time grows between now and then, it becomes less painful.

Distance has helped. It allows time for reflection, and that goes for physical distance as well. It allows for me to digest, understand and engage with what’s bothering me as I’m able to.

This is the second year where I’ve had two Christmases and it’s starting to feel alright.

It’s a slow process, but it’s slowly made me realize that maybe distance is okay, and maybe so am I. U

Going the distance: UBC’s commuters face challenges beyond MILES // Zak Vescera Salomon Micko Benrimoh

In her second year, recent graduate Ariela Karmel moved from her on-campus dorm room to a suite in East Vancouver.

She had a lot of reasons to move — cheaper rent, better lodging and more independence. But that also meant that Karmel was now a commuter — one of tens of thousands of UBC students who spend hours coming to and from campus every day.

In Karmel’s case, that meant an average of 90 minutes daily spent in transit.

Suddenly, her relationship with campus began to change.

She had less time to socialize, go to events on campus or participate in campus life. The place that had been home in

first year was now just school.

“I didn’t feel [the] motivation to do anything,” said Karmel.

“Because once I was done with class it would be 5 p.m., and I would have been at school since 9:30 a.m., and I just wanted to get home.”

“The way I felt about campus changed completely the moment I moved off.”

This is the commuter effect.

The longer the ride to UBC, the less time you have for studying, socializing, and participating in campus life — and it’s only getting harder.

A ‘complete community’ According to UBC’s 2009 Student Housing Demand Study, 75 per cent of UBC students

cited a “sense of engagement and connectedness with the university” as a reason for wanting to be on or close to campus.

In 2011, the Board of Governors passed a policy aiming to provide a total of around 15,000 units of housing to “support the University’s continuing transition from a commuter campus to a more complete university community.”

As reported by The Ubyssey in 2017, UBC is truly limited in what it can do — let alone what it can afford to do — to mitigate the impact of Canada’s most expensive real estate market on the UBC experience.

COMMUNITY | GOING THE DISTANCE

And as Vancouver’s housing woes only worsen, the dream of an integrated campus community only seems farther off.

“As time goes on, it’s more and more difficult for students to live off campus,” said Andrew Parr, managing director of Student Housing and Hospitality Services. “Commute times are increasing, traffic is worse and the cost of living in Vancouver is becoming unsustainable.

“We need to do things to make their experience as positive as possible.”

In the meantime, the long minutes students sink into Translink create consequences for UBC as much as they do for commuters.

Shifting gears “UBC Vancouver is transitioning from a commuter campus to a sustainable campus community.”

UBC’s 2009 Student Housing Demand Study opens on a bold note. It recognizes that the appeal of living on campus is massive: students cite advantages ranging from easier access to library services to engagement in the campus community — and UBC has taken this to heart.

“We’ve built nearly 3,500 new beds since 2011,” said Parr.

“We’ve grown our inventory by 43 per cent to ... recognize that the opportunities on campus are so much greater for students in terms of their academic and social engagement and connection to the institution and just overall experience.”

But in the next 30 pages of the comprehensive report, the challenge becomes more clear.

With a growing pool of students and a shrinking affordable housing market in Vancouver, the supply of student housing can’t match the demand.

“I haven’t checked my place in line in months because I’m just scared,” confessed third-year student Bridget Berner. Berner is one of over 6,000 students with their names far down the queue for on-campus housing.

The study identified that the biggest single determinant for a student wanting to live on campus — even more so than living closer to campus — was affordability, cited by 39 per cent of students. Despite recent rent increases, UBC dorms remain significantly cheaper than housing in neighbouring areas.

That means for commuters wanting to move close to UBC, it can be campus or bust.

“I have a lot of pride in going to UBC,” said Berner.

“I would love to just be on campus — it just doesn’t work out.”

Making it Home Wilson Hsu is a third-year mechanical engineering student.

In his first year, his day unfolded the same way: he boarded his bus from Oakridge, went to class, and then returned straight home.

Grappling with the shock of the transition from high school — and sinking up to two hours daily into his commute — Hsu didn’t participate in many extracurriculars, nor did he feel home at UBC. “It really took a toll,” said Hsu.

21

“I didn’t really know how much time commuting took — I just wanted to go home.”

In the 2017 AMS Academic Experience Survey, 21 per cent of students reported that they didn’t feel a sense of belonging on campus. With their daily schedules dictated by Translink, many commuters simply don’t have the time to spend at UBC beyond their classes. For first years in particular, this can lead to a sense of separation from the greater UBC community.

“When you’re off campus, the only people you meet are the people you go to class with,” said Karmel. “On Res, I felt like I was going out and spending time with people every night, because why wouldn’t you?

There was always someone there.”

“UBC creates a community for people living on Res, but not commuters,” argued Hsu. “People on Res get more invitations to networking invites, to parties, and they’re not obligated to check their schedule and leave early.”

For commuters, barriers to socializing or participating in campus events are often a matter of getting home. While the 99 B-Line runs late, most other major bus lines — the 41, the 25, the 4 and the 49 — end their service around midnight.

That means things like meeting friends at Koerner’s for a drink or attending a club meeting become logistical nightmares.

“When my friends are making plans, they’ll sometimes say, ‘Let’s meet at the Tank in about 15’”

22

said second-year theatre student Matthew Rhodes, referring to the Kitsilano bar.

“For me, it’s not 15 minutes to the Coppertank. It’s a full hour to and from.”

Rhodes, who commutes from West Vancouver, said that most buses returning home stop running around 1 a.m.

Spending any time on campus beyond classes means a late return home.

“Even in first year, we sort of had to sit down and have discussions like ‘I’m not going to be getting home until 10:30 or 11 p.m. most nights,’” said Rhodes. “Because that’s rehearsal — that’s being social with my friends on the weekend.”

It’s not just students facing the time crunch. Dr. Juliet O’Brien is an undergraduate French lecturer and advisor.

She said that, like students, many faculty members are pushed farther from campus by Vancouver’s pricey real estate.

“Anyone who wants kids, or wants to do gardening, or have a sizeable home — they have to move really far out,” said O’Brien. Just as students struggle to balance the commute and social life on campus, O’Brien said that faculty struggle to organize conferences, workshops and discussions that are key to academic development — stifling UBC’s academic life.

“If you want to have research seminars or any kind of intellectual life on campus, it’s really hard to get [faculty] to stay here after teaching,” said O’Brien. “They have to get

THE UBYSSEY MAGAZINE

home, pick up the kids and cook dinner.”

“And it’s worse for students, because they’ve got schoolwork on top of all that.”

Two sides of the same coin The commuter effect goes well beyond social life. The lack of a community on campus and the sheer logistical challenge of getting to school can seriously impact a student’s academic performance — something UBC is already trying to tackle.

Robbie Morrison is the associate director of firstyear experience and student engagement. He said that a healthy social life is often a prerequisite for a healthy academic one — especially for first year students.

“We know that when they [students] build community, make friends and feel a part of this place, they’re likely to be more successful in their first year and have a higher retention rate into their second year,” said Morrison.

Morrison inferred this from his work with the Jumpstart program, noting that students “are more likely to be academically successful in their first year if they attend Jumpstart than students that haven’t.” Generally, a healthy social life often translates into a healthy academic one.

“I feel like when I’m doing well socially and mentally, I do better academically,” said Karmel.

“There’s a connection between the two.”

Morrison currently helps direct the Collegia program.

Collegia’s goal is to give first-

year commuters a dedicated community space where students can study, chat and eat between classes — recognizing that doing well academically often necessitates doing well socially and mentally.

“When they arrive on campus, especially in their first year, where do you go?” said Morrison. “For resident students, there are opportunities to have places to go back to and connect with friends in those times in between classes.

“For commuter students, that’s much harder.”

Going the distance Beyond the connection between social and academic success, commuters struggle with a much more concrete problem: making it on and off of campus.

“On residence, I feel you had to go out of your way to be late or to miss a class,” said Karmel.

“Off Res, I found myself forcing myself to go to class, counting the classes I missed like ‘Oh, I have to go today, I already missed earlier this week.’”

Whether it’s a missed bus, an accident or a road closure, commuters are often at the mercy of traffic — and can miss or be late to classes as a result.

“Missing a bus means you have to add another half hour to your commute,” said Rhodes.

“There was one time when the Lionsgate Bridge shut down, and it meant that I was an hour late for one of my classes.

“Luckily I had a really understanding prof.”

The commute can even force students to decrease their

COMMUNITY | GOING THE DISTANCE

course load. Berner commutes an average of two and a half hours each way from Mission.

Those five daily hours of commuting means she can’t manage the demands of a full course load.

“I tried taking five courses, and I failed one of them, which was hard because I took five classes when I was at UBC Okanagan,” she explained.

“I realized it’s not because I can’t do it — it’s because I’m commuting stupid amounts each day to even get to school.”

It’s not just the number of courses that’s capped: limited bus schedules and long commute times mean that commuters are often boxed out of taking morning or evening classes.

“I took History 339 last semester, but it was a 9:30 a.m. class,” said Berner. “I had to wake up at 5 a.m. just to make it. My commute was around three hours every day.

“It’s a bit disheartening, because there are courses I would love to be a part of but I just can’t make to class.”

Sleepless nights There are plenty of commuter students who balance academic coursework with their commutes, of course. But for many of them, that means making a big sacrifice: sleep.

As soon as Hsu boards the 41, he shuffles to the back and promptly falls asleep.

“I need to sleep at some time or another,” said Hsu. “If it’s not the bus, it would be during class.”

For students like Hsu, who balance a full course load and extracurriculars with the

demand of the commute, sleep becomes the de facto loser.

Commuters interviewed for this article universally reported sleeping around six hours or less per night. After a long night of work, many of them said they often couldn’t even make it to the next day’s classes.

“First year was a lot of ‘oh, I have three papers due this week,’” said Rhodes. “I had to stay up ’till two, and then get up for that eight o’clock class.

“As a long-distance transit student, you always have to sacrifice sleep.”

During exam season, some commuters have even more spartan sleep patterns.

“During finals week, you get on the 258 and it’s like the night bus in Harry Potter,” commented Rhodes.

Hsu said that he and many engineers often don’t even make it home from campus, instead using their 24/7 access to sleep on couches in the engineering buildings.

“For one month at a time, I was basically living at school,” said Hsu. “I wasn’t really sure what time I was waking up, what time I was sleeping.”

UBC’s response to the exam crunch period is the commuter hostel in Walter Gage Residence, which offers 16 dorms to commuters for a nightly fee of $35. But interviewed commuters said the hostel can become quickly overbooked during exam season — and fluctuating demand means there’s no plan to expand it.

“The vast majority of the time, it runs at 60 per cent

23

capacity— it’s only the exam period when it becomes more full,” explained Parr.

“It’s difficult to take away the bed of a student that lives here on a yearly basis to give it to a student who wants it for a twoday exam period.”

In an ideal world, many students who commute long distances would love to live on campus. But as seen in the slow movement of housing strategies, that’s easier said than done.

Making it Work The crucial question at the end is how far — and how long — is too much?

“I don’t think by living off campus you can’t necessarily have a good experience socially, but I think that is dependent on how far you are,” said Karmel.

“It’s living off campus at such a great distance that makes it so negative.”

Every student interviewed for this article had a markedly different community experience.

Rhodes found a community via his involvement in theatre on campus. Hsu found his through the engineering program.

Karmel, after moving closer to campus, felt a significant improvement in her social engagement.

But most commuters agreed that the further they were from campus, the more distant they felt from UBC — both as an institution and as a community.

“I feel like an engineer — but I don’t really know what it means to be a ‘UBC student,’” said Hsu. “For people commuting to class, I don’t think there’s a real community.” U

24

THE UBYSSEY MAGAZINE

Thomas Wang, Provincial Health Services Authority, Koby Michaels, Saman Shariati

Six habits of highly productive people // Ryan Patrick Jones Some people are just good at getting things done.

You know who they are. These people balance numerous commitments — schoolwork, demanding jobs, volunteering, family time, a social life — and they do so with grace.

Meanwhile, you can barely keep track of all your assignments, let alone maintaining a healthy relationship.

These highly-productive people seem like super-humans to the rest of us plebs. But, in reality, they are just like everybody else. The difference is they have habits that form the foundations of their success.

Their days are also flexibly structured and involve patterns of behaviour that are repeated day-in and day-out.

As one of Canada’s topranked universities, UBC is home to its fair share of successful and productive

people. The Ubyssey spoke to four of them — two presidents, a professor and a PhD student — to find out how they balance it all and maintain their sanity.

President Santa Ono oversees the administration of a university with over 60,000 students and a budget comparable to the GDP of a small island nation.

Professor Jennifer Gardy is a faculty member, researcher, science communicator and children’s book author. AMS President Alan Ehrenholz is responsible for representing the approximately 55,780 of us, while also completing his degree in engineering. And Taq Bhandal is a published PhD student, research assistant and active volunteer for a non-profit women’s health organization.

Each of these people is productive and successful in their own way. By productive, we don’t just mean getting a

lot done in a short amount of time, although most of them certainly do that. They also get results and produce work that has impact. They are organized, disciplined and diligent. Most importantly, they are productive while also maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

So what are the keys to their success? What are the habits of highly productive people?

Habit #1: Wake up early Research has shown that the early bird really does get the worm. Morning people are more creative, more proactive and less likely to procrastinate.

Waking up early allows you to get an early start to the day and to get in some precious “me time” before starting work.

Everyone The Ubyssey interviewed wake up at a consistent time — early in the morning.

COMMUNITY | SIX HABITS OF HIGHLY PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE Ono is up before 5:30 a.m.

Similarly, Gardy rises around 5:45 a.m. to take her puppy out for a morning pee. Even after squeezing in another hour of sleep, she is up again by 7 a.m. and ready to take on the day.

Ehrenholz likes to wake up by 6 a.m. but sometimes pushes that until 7, depending on the time he got to bed the night before.

Bhandal is the latest-riser of the group, starting her day around 8:30 a.m. This is because she works from home and has more leeway with when she needs to get her work done.

Regardless of the exact wake up time, none have the luxury of sleeping in.

Habit #2: Have morning routines In addition to rising early, each of these people has a morning routine.

Upon waking up, Ono stretches and does breathing exercises. The morning is one of the only times during the day he has to himself, so he uses it to catch up on the latest headlines, check out what’s been going on in the Twitterverse and review his packed schedule for the coming day. He may even have an early morning conference call and is usually at the office by 8:30 a.m. for his first appointment.

Gardy uses the morning to get a head-start on the day, drinking coffee and eating toast while starting on her first batch of emails.

After having breakfast, Bhandal writes for three hours every weekday — without fail.

“I don’t like to procrastinate,” she said. “I really learned

my lesson in undergrad with procrastinating and studying for exams.”

Ehrenholz is a “coffee-andbagel person,” rushing from home to work with a regular stop at the Blue Chip Cafe. When he arrives at his corner office on the third floor of the Nest, he will do some stretching or even a bit of yoga to focus and get ready for the day.

While there is flexibility to everyone’s days, these morning routines provide structure and consistency.

Habit #3: Keep a calendar and stick to it The common organizational tool among our sample of productive people is a calendar. All four keep calendars and, more importantly, they adhere to them religiously.

“Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar kind of run my life,” said Ehrenholz. “If it gets in there, I’m generally going to it. If it doesn’t get in there for whatever reason, I am generally not going to it.”

It also helps to have outside support when it comes to managing your schedule, as the AMS and UBC presidents do.

“I am really supported quite a bit by individuals that organize my life and really make sure that I end meetings on time and start the next meeting on time, and that I leave in time to travel from point A to point B,” said Ono. “It wouldn’t be humanly possible for me to do it on my own.”

Gardy also swears by her calendar. In fact, she keeps several: one for her professional appointments, one for her personal life, a shared calendar with her husband and a travel

25

calendar she shares with her family. She is vigilant about putting things into the relevant calendar as they come up.

“The second you accept an invitation or take on something that has a deadline associated with it, put it into your calendar,” she said. And she’s not just talking about the event or deadline itself, but also all of the associated tasks or things required to prepare for the event.

Bhandal also keeps a calendar, although she opts for a physical one rather than the digital version. Hers is a whiteboard calendar, which offers a four-month view that she updates regularly.

“It’s really helpful for me to see a visual representation,” said Bhandal. “I get to put all my deadlines in and then every two weeks I’ll fill it in with daily tasks that I need to get done.”

Habit #4: Limit distractions The rise of digital technologies has increased the potential for distractions — smartphones, texting, emails, social media, or frankly the entire internet.

All of these things are at our fingertips at all times, meaning a procrastination break is just a tap or a click away. That’s why it’s important to try and limit these distractions during the times you want to get things done.

One strategy is to check social media and emails at set times, rather than continuously throughout the day.

26 Gardy does this by refusing to answer emails as they arrive in her inbox, unless they are superurgent. Instead, she does her emailing in batches — first thing in the morning upon arriving at the office and in the afternoon.

“If you’re constantly checking your email, you’re never going to get anything done,” she said.

Another option is to avoid mindless scrolling on social media.

Bhandal limits her social media usage mostly to Instagram, which she makes a concerted effort not to constantly check. She does not have a Twitter account and has severely cut down her Facebook usage, deleting the app from her smartphone entirely.

Habit #5: Take steps to replenish mental energy Our brains are a muscle just like any other. They need stimulation.

But they also need rest.

Productive people make sure to take steps to give their minds sufficient amounts of both.

This can be done by taking regular breaks. Instead of loading up on coffee when the afternoon lull hits, Ehrenholz will instead get up and do some stretches or go for a short walk around the Nest. Doing so helps him recharge so that he can get back to whatever he is working on.

It can also be done by exercising. Gardy likes to do Pilates or Lagree classes; Ehrenholz plays sports five to six times per week and Bhandal likes to do self-initiated workouts by following YouTube fitness videos.

There are plenty of ways to give your mind a break. Different

THE UBYSSEY MAGAZINE people will have different ways of relaxing, de-stressing and replenishing their mental energy.

The point is not that there is a one-size-fits-all solution, but to find the activities that do it for you and to make time for them regularly.

Habit #6: Maintaining a worklife balance When you have a lot of demands on your time, it can be easy to become a workaholic. But just because you’re putting in an insane amount of hours of work each week doesn’t mean that the work you’re doing is of a high quality or meaningful.

Indeed, research shows that working less can actually help you do better work.

Both Bhandal and Ehrenholz spoke of experiencing a sense of burnout in the past, a common occurrence among university students who push themselves too hard.

Now, they are consciously trying to restore balance to their lives. Ehrenholz does this by trying to leave work at a sensible time each day and making sure to leave his work at the office. He also plays sports most nights to help him take his mind off work.

“If I’m driving or I’m on the bus, I can still think about the AMS and I do still think about the AMS,” said Ehrenholz. “But if I’m on a sports field, I am not thinking about the AMS, I am thinking about whatever I’m doing. That really helps me stay fresh and stay revitalized.”

Bhandal has turned to meditation, mindfulness and journaling to help her down the path towards work-life balance.

“Meditating and reading more about spirituality is helping me

find a better balance between capitalist productivity and also the reproduction of the self and my own soul,” Bhandal said.

Work needs to be something that you turn off at 5 or 6 p.m. and doesn’t turn on during the weekend, according to Gardy.

She believes that taking time off pays major dividends in your work life.

“If you don’t give yourself that downtime, your brain doesn’t have the chance to do what it does best: synthesize things in the background and present you with this amazing answer,” said Gardy.

She enjoys cooking, snuggling with her pets and hiking on the North Shore.

Find passion, love your work Out of all the conversations we had, the most common theme that emerged was to try and make sure that you find your passion and do what you love.

Ono argued that the key to his success — the thing that gets him up in the morning — is that he is passionate about what he does.

“The secret really is do what you’re passionate about and then it won’t feel like work,” he said. “It will feel like having fun. I have a lot of fun in what I do.”

Gardy agrees with Ono that students should seek out their interests and follow their passions, wherever it leads them.

“When your day is fun, you will be successful and the productivity, it just flows naturally from the fact that you love what you do,” she said.

If only it were that easy. U

COMMUNITY | LOSING MY RELIGION

LOSING MY RELIGION His breath tasted like spearmint.

His back was smooth and unmarred; his dark hair styled with not one strand out of place.

I felt his lips turn upward.

“Let’s get out of here,” he breathed into me.

I slammed my lips against his and his back hit the cobblestone wall. One of my hands was in his hair, trying to unleash it so I wouldn’t be the only messed up thing on the street. The other was clenched around the cross I wore around my neck.

I’m going to Hell, I thought as I started to smile.

My earliest memory of church was when I was nine or ten. We went to Midnight Mass — my then-married parents and I — and we sat next to the aisle on

27 // Brandon Wei

the wooden pew. It creaked whenever I shifted my weight from one hip to the other.

“Don’t sit there all bundled up,” my mom had said, but I kept my jacket on anyway. I was cold that night.

We were early, so people had just begun filing in. We pretended not to notice the irritated glances aimed our way as we made them maneuver over and around us to get a seat on our pew. I was not giving up my aisle spot.

I don’t remember why we went that year after never having gone before, or for how long we stayed. I don’t remember what the pastor said, or what my parents said, or even what I said as we parroted the service.

Sammy Smart

I only remember that I was bored. And afraid – afraid I’d go to Hell for being bored in church on Christmas Eve. I didn’t want to go to Hell; I wanted to go home.

I did remember being taught a prayer, though, to say right before dinner. It was almost Christmas, after all.

God is great. God is good; Let us thank Him for this food.

By His hands, we are all fed, Give us, Lord, our daily bread.

Amen.

We stood there, against the wall, until the street light flashed on above us – until we were spotlighted like actors on a stage. I was awake. This was real.

And yet I stepped back. We stared at each other, both of us still breathing heavily. His cheeks were flushed, his pupils dilated. Half of his shirt was no longer tucked in and one cuff was unbuttoned, the fabric swaying with his now freed hair in the cool breeze. The disheveled look only made him hotter. Fuck.

He moved to follow me but I shook my head. His grin faltered when he realized that I would be leaving alone.

Except he left first.

And there I was, standing on a deserted street corner with a greasy hand and an imprint of a cross in my palm from holding it just a bit too tightly.

That was what I remembered of my second kiss. My first, I didn’t remember at all.

Amen. U

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THE UBYSSEY MAGAZINE

Kate Colenbrander

THAT PERSON I am the person who sits next to you from 11 to 11:51 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I am always early. I never show up.

I am the person who wears the yellow sweatshirt. The person who sits on the Knoll, maybe waiting. I am the person who uses an umbrella when it snows, or doesn’t, and I am the person whose feet shuffle on the floor above yours.

I am the person you never saw after first year. The person you’ve been following on Instagram ever since. We have never met. I am your best friend.

I am also the person who flickers with uncertainty.

The person who has always

// Emilie Kneifel known who she wants to be.

The person who thinks so, at least. I am the person with the overbearing parents, or the overbearing self doubt. I am the person whose everything is never enough.

I am the person who jokes about deadlines and I am the person who never sleeps. I am the person who raises her hand in every class and has extensions on every paper. I am the person who is supposed to learn. I am the person who is supposed to teach. I am the person who relishes solitude only when it is a choice.

I am the person who replies, “Good, you?” when asked about last weekend. I am the person

who slept in these clothes. Who wishes her mom’s calls lasted longer. I am the person whose words and selective silence build the very walls that break her. I am the person who never texted back. “Oh, fine.”

I am the person from that party. The person who skateboards down hills. I am the person who held the door open for you, whose ponytail is the only identifier you will ever see. I am the person whose eyelashes you will never forget.

I am the person who just started here, who just transferred, who just graduated.

And I am that person, too. U

COMMUNITY | AS HER BEDSHEETS

AS HER BEDSHEETS // Shivangi Sikri Bare back; bare mattress –

she strips me as he stripped her.

I’m shoved into the water of the washer.

He dropped a pill into her water.

Vertigo strikes, I spit out

a violent splash of

her virginal blood.

He unravelled her toga.

He unhooked her bra.

Then he undid her.

The washer lets out

gargling whirs, I release threadbare groans.

His toes d r a g g e d;

hers tapped ‘h e l p’ in morse code.

My threads catch in the cyclones in the cyclones

of the sixth cycle.

Goldilocks had wanted her just right not too conscious not too unconscious.

A ready-to-serve warm dinner for one.

Even through the washer’s white noise, I hear her tear last night’s frat tickets. U

Shivangi Sikri

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THE UBYSSEY MAGAZINE

Means to an end: The cost of free speech at UBC // Helen Zhou Samuel Du Bois

“My right to swing my fists ends where my neighbour’s nose begins.”

In other words, I am free to do as I please so long as I don’t harm another person. On university campuses across Canada, the question of where my neighbour’s nose begins — and the limits of free expression — are greatly disputed.

Figures like Jordan Peterson, Lindsay Shepherd and Masuma Khan have drawn massive media attention to the debate about free speech. Meanwhile, calls for freedom of speech are often met by concern from those who advocate for marginalized groups, whether that’s by indicators of race, gender

identity or sexual orientation. In these cases, they often favour a more “politically correct” approach to speech.

Where there seems to be disagreement — and where my neighbour’s nose begins — is on what the limit of free speech is and whether free speech is really cost-free. Living in a community as diverse in opinions and experiences as UBC’s, striking a balance is bound to lead to heated debates.

New era, old problems Freedom of speech has dominated social discourse since the 2016 US presidential election, making it feel like the

whole free speech debate is something that has only come up recently. Dr. Rima Wilkes, a professor of sociology at UBC, disagrees.

“If you think about it, we had the same debates 40 years ago about racial slurs. People said ‘Actually, I find these slurs to be super offensive,’ and other people said ‘You’re stifling my right to free speech, I don’t mean anything by it,’” said Wilkes. “It’s not any different now, and now it’s widely accepted that you just don’t use racial slurs and I don’t really know too many people who are saying that they want to go back

COMMUNITY | MEANS TO AN END

to using racial slurs.”

Now, she said, the conversation is happening with preferred pronouns and pushback from people who don’t like being told what to say.

“Maybe 40 years from now, we’ll look back on these debates and we won’t think it’s a big deal to use [preferred] pronouns.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Scott Anderson, an assistant professor of philosophy at UBC, said that on a philosophical level, language is an act — not just making a statement or conveying information.

“Though you might in fact just be saying a sentence, the sentence itself has a function that then can be used to cause somebody fear, to give somebody reason to expect that you will do something to harm them later, and so on,” he said, naming the acts of voting and making a threat as examples.

This is an impact of speech — when you say something, you are more importantly doing something that can have consequences on other people. Wilkes agrees, saying that the impact of speech is key because it’s how we learn to live and coexist with other people in our communities.

“It is about you as a person, what you have to say, and your right to express yourself, but when you’re in a classroom

or wherever, you are in a relationship with other people.

So when you say things, they can’t unhear what you said,” she said.

What freedom of speech is all about, then, is how to govern interactions in terms of human relationships.

“It is about you as a person, what you have to say, and your right to express yourself, but when you’re in a classroom or wherever, you are in a relationship with other people. So when you say things, they can’t unhear what you said,” - Dr. Rima Wilkes “One of the difficulties about these debates around freedom of expression is distinguishing statements that meant to convey mere facts, opinions, or information for the sake of teaching or informing with content that people would not have had otherwise,” said Anderson. “And separating those from actions that are designed to harm, threaten, silence or cause psychological damage to others.”

For Anderson, the challenge of drawing the line is compounded with the idea that most speech should be protected.

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“If someone is saying something that is intended to be true and informative, and doing it in such a way that is also not an act that’s criminal or otherwise disrespectful, then we should try to protect that sort of stuff as much as possible,” he said.

“That’s exactly how we both learn new things and the academy furthers the bounds of knowledge.”

Speak your mind, but mind your speech The dialogue on free speech at UBC isn’t purely academic.

Student groups have engaged themselves in the debate, and their voices are among the loudest.

For many students, the UBC Free Speech Club conjures up images of “Make Canada Great Again” hats, the male symbol on top of the Engineering Cairn and trolls on social media. Jordan Schroeder, the club’s president, attributed this reputation to multiple, consecutive “right-wing leaning” events put on by the club’s executive in the previous academic year. He also thinks that part of the reason that the Free Speech Club is associated with hate speech on campus is that there are “probably” people

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who hold hateful opinions in the club.

“There are certainly some white nationalists in the club.

There’s also some very leftleaning people in the club,” he said. “I think that the reason that the Free Speech Club gets associated with those people this kind of guilt-by-association tactic. If there’s one white nationalist in the club, people take that it be representative of the whole club, which I don’t think is logical.

“If there’s one white nationalist in the engineering department, it doesn’t mean that all of the engineers are white nationalists.” Instead, Schroeder encourages debate to challenge such viewpoints.

Under Schroeder’s leadership, the Free Speech Club has tried to take on a non-partisan, moderate stance on free speech to improve the club’s reputation.

“Although most people think that the Free Speech Club is just in favour of unbridled speech all of the time, I think there’s a more nuanced idea of free speech — an idea that free speech is not just an end in itself, but rather it’s a means to an end,” he said. “We use our freedom of expression so that we can discuss ideas and hopefully reach the best ideas and then make society better through those ideas.”

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For Schroeder, this “means to an end” approach to free speech means that political correctness, reviled by some free speech advocates, is necessary to ensure that everyone is able to partake in conversations.

“If we’re talking in a way that makes it impossible for other people to participate in the discussion or make people feel like they can’t contribute to the discussion, then what do we have free speech for?”

Along a similar vein, Curtis Seufert, a fourth-year sociology major, pointed out that there’s a certain degree of “selfcensorship” that occurs with political discussions, which is what people who are more in favour of free speech, like Jordan Peterson, often complain about.

“I find it kind of funny that people will talk about censoring themselves and how everything’s racist nowadays and how you can’t say anything without being stigmatized for it,” said Seufert. “But if you allow people on the other side to push back against that, you just get more pushing back against one another.”

Indeed, in a world that seems divided by the left and right political spectrum, allowing some a platform means consequences for others.

“We can’t just say that the right to free speech is entirely neutral. It’s consequential, and it’s consequential to different groups of people, sometimes in more harmful ways for some groups,” he said.

“Although most people think that the Free Speech Club is just in favour of unbridled speech all of the time, I think there’s a more nuanced idea of free speech — an idea that free speech is not just an end in itself, but rather it’s a means to an end.”

- Jordan Schroeder The fault and burden aren’t all on free speech proponents though. With the issue of limiting immigration, for example, Seufert thinks that sometimes people on the left, as he identifies himself, are too quick to stifle discussions because of the racial dimensions.

“In hesitance to talk about an issue like [immigration], we don’t leave ourselves room to tackle opinions that are maybe worth having, like the economic costs of immigration,” he pointed out.

“In terms of valuing free speech, by committing oneself to understanding one’s values and debating and having honest conversations, we can probably

COMMUNITY | MEANS TO AN END

end up with a less divided country. I feel like morally, we all want the best for everyone, generally speaking.”

Breaking the binary Simultaneously, it’s possible that seeing the problem as left and right, politically correct or incorrect is the wrong approach.

“I said this to the Free Speech Club, that this becomes all about winning and there’s no dialogue on either side,” said Wilkes. “Maybe we have to take away this winning and battling way of thinking about this and

start thinking about it in terms of evolution and growth.”

After all, even truth itself isn’t linear. “Claims about how to judge human practices and institutions can’t just be a question of, ‘does this accurately reflect what we do now?,’ but it will sometimes be ‘does this improve or destroy things that are important?’” said Anderson.

“Having the idea that it’s only right or wrong, true or false as a way of addressing those kinds of claims just doesn’t seem to fit the kind of thing that we’re doing when we talk about how

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we should act and structure our discourse.”

So how do we live and interact with one another when the free speech debate isn’t as clear cut as for or against?

“There are these two parts to freedom of expression,” said Schroeder. “It comes not only with the right to speak, but also the responsibility to be held accountable for the words of your voice and ideas.”

It’s about where my right to swing my fists ends, where my neighbour’s nose begins and being prepared for criticism if the two collide. U

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THE UBYSSEY MAGAZINE

Salomon Micko Benrimoh

NIGHT RIDE

// Chimedum Ohaegbu

The raindrop-freckled window chills Evie’s right arm, even through her jacket. But she’s lopsided: her left side is warm because a man is leaning against her. When the man first leaned in, it wasn’t against her so much as away from the passengers who were sweeping through the aisle as they left the train. When they were gone, he would apologize and lean away.

Except he didn’t. Evie frowned and told herself he must be asleep and that’s why he won’t move, he doesn’t know what he’s doing because he must be asleep; and a sleeping stranger can’t hurt me.

She pressed closer to the window. A moment’s disengagement from him calmed her heartbeat, but soon his shoulder bumped hers again like a friend’s teasing jostle. Awake and alert, the man brought out his phone and laughed at something on it. The screen was tilted slightly toward her, and Evie averted her gaze.

“Sorry,” she says finally. It’s best to preface these sorts of things with an apology just in

case. “Sorry, you’re leaning on me a bit there, do you mind if…?”

He pulls away, apologizing but not as vehemently as she is. In two minutes, he’s back — the set of his shoulders and jaw suggests to Evie that asking him again would incite unpleasantness beyond this.

So she bites her tongue and presses her lips together. It isn’t as though he’s hurting her. He hasn’t really — well, he hasn’t done anything, exactly, other than making her body temperature uneven and taking up her space and filling her with a thrumming fear.

But she’s riding to the very end of the line. More likely than not, he’ll leave before she does.

She just has to last until then.

This will be a funny story later — “and I was like ‘okay pal can you like… hold yourself up if that’s maybe not too much trouble?’” she’ll say, making herself out to be some sort of eye-rolling Atlas and the man a harmless dumbass. And her friends will laugh, mostly out of relief. She just has to last until later comes.

So Evie curls away from the man as much as possible and shifts her tote bag to make a barrier between their legs.

She leans her head against the window, relishing the skullscrambling vibration. Outside, the cityscape rolls past, all highrises backlit by a fog-wreathed sunset and lined at the bottom by the ocean beyond. Evie’s breath has steamed up the window. She draws back to doodle on the self-created canvas, then remembers the man and stops. Scramble scramble scramble. Finals season is not the time to do this to one’s brain, come to think of it, but really what choice does she have?

The girl sitting in front has giant headphones on. The girl in front checks her phone, sighs at the dark screen — out of battery, probably, the music cord snakes down into an iPod — and is soon engrossed in a cat’s cradle game against herself. Red thread chokes the girl’s fingertips, then slips from

COMMUNITY | NIGHT RIDE them, then dances above and between her knuckles.

Behind Evie may or may not be the hipster couple from earlier and their worried-looking third wheel, but she can’t hear the three boys’ cheerful Spanglish anymore and she doesn’t want to turn around and dispel their presence irrevocably. If they are behind her, they can see her, and maybe they’ll help her. If they’ve left…

The girl in front, though, her presence is confirmed.

Evie could touch her.

Just a little tap on the shoulder to ask her, polite as you please, for rescue from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A bubble of nervous laughter dribbles out at the boring-funny nickname.

She wants to cover her mouth but that would mean movement, and if she moves the man might think she’s jostling him back, reciprocating, inviting, asking.

And what then?

Evie resolves to do nothing to draw his attention and sneezes thrice even as she finishes the thought. He glances at her, smiling.

“Bless you.”

Is it safer to smile back or safer not to? Her nose saves her from deciding when it begins to run. Shoulders relaxing, she digs through her bag for tissue, able to breathe in the air the search forces between her and the man.

In her bag are her study supplies, wallet, a stress ball that has never done anything for her stress and a sketchbook that has, even if all the drawings in it are all perpetual halfway-theres.

Also, a candy cane — could she lick it to a knife’s point without the man noticing? — and a stolen/borrowed pomander still

35 smelling faintly of spice and citrus, probably from Lin’s party.

Band-Aids and three bottles of hand sanitizer. Her lip-balm is missing, typical. Her tissues are missing, odd.

“Here.”

She startles. The man laughs and holds up a tissue from a cute orange travel pack. She takes it and smiles this time and thanks him and presses herself into the window and waits to see if the tissue is chloroform-laced, if she’ll wake up elsewhere. Are Schrödinger’s passengers still behind her? Were they ever?

Red flashes through the fingers of the girl in front, and she bobs her head either to her hands’ rhythm or to her music, and she is blissfully unaware of everything else, even though Evie blows her nose extra-loud.

Contrary to the usual, Evie does not follow-up the nose-blowing with a douse of hand sanitizer.

Instead, she entertains a fantasy wherein she whips towards the man and tells him off and flips him off and hits him, while the girl in front applauds and plays an appropriate battle ballad on her headphones.

This is not what happens.

Instead the man gets closer in a thousand ways and the girl in front loops string in her hands and Evie imagines herself being brave, though not before imagining herself a world where this sort of bravery wouldn’t be needed.

She calls a friend and talks about the unimportant — her sudden craving for comfort foods, the pros and cons of investing in martial arts classes — to let the man know there are people who would notice her absence or injury. She’s rummaging through her bag, the waxy wrapping of the Band-Aids

soothing her fingertips, though not as much as a makeshift weapon would.

The girl in front stands.

Evie wrenches herself to her feet though it is not her stop.

The man stands, but she doubts it’s his stop, either. The man and the girl in front get off the train and Evie is right behind them until she ducks into another seat, below anyone’s line of sight.

The doors close with a pneumatic hiss and train speeds off into the night. Evie’s still crouching, heart hammering north of her ribcage. A smile lifts her lips but guilt clogs her throat: the man got out at the same station as the girl in front, and because Evie never mentioned anything being wrong, the girl in front doesn’t know about him. The girl in front is alone and unknowing and her music was so very loud and she will hear nothing if the man sneaks up on her.

Evie lets out a breath, closing her eyes. The girl in front has string and skillful fingers.

Perhaps she will be forced to use these.

Perhaps nothing will happen at all.

There’s really no way to tell.

Evie opens her eyes, shakes her head, and stands back up.

Kneading hand sanitizer into her palms, she disembarks at the next stop and rides back on a new train. This time of night, transfer buses take a while to come to the stop Evie’s fellow passengers got out at. The girl in front will still be waiting for one of these buses, and she should have somebody safe to wait with, somebody whose phone works, somebody to lean on. U

Yummy Chocolate Things (aka Dream Bars) // Samantha Searle

Samantha Searle

Ingredients: 2 ½ cups Oreo cookie crumbs ½ cup melted butter 1 cup shredded sweetened coconut ½ cup milk chocolate chips ½ cup dark chocolate chips ½ cup white chocolate chips 1 can sweetened condensed milk Directions: Preheat oven to 350°F. In a 9 by 13 inch pan, mix the Oreo cookie crumbs and melted butter.

Spread it out evenly in the pan and pat it firmly with a spoon to squish it down.

Sprinkle the coconut over the cookie crumb layer. Then add the various chocolate chips.

Pour condensed milk on top. Try to make it cover the whole thing.

Bake in the oven for 20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown around the edges.

" CUT OUT AND KEEP THIS RECIPE FOR LATER USE!

I make these with my mom every Christmas to share with family and friends. “My mom works as a baker at Costco, so when she gets home from work, she doesn’t want to do any more baking. But this is a simple dessert that doesn’t take much time, especially if we make it together. I’ve made them on my own for potlucks with friends and other occasions, but they’re always better when I make them at home with my mom. She does the Oreo base, then I do the coconut, chocolate chips and condensed milk, then I pass them back to her to go in the oven and she cuts them when they come out.

This recipe is also super easy to modify — You can add extra chocolate if you want, or even try adding mint chocolate chips, toffee pieces or nuts!

The one thing with this dessert is that you always have to make extra because you may end up eating them all before they reach their destination. U

HEALTH In this section we explore stories about mental and physical health. From on and off campus crises, students share their stories of dealing with tragedies and chronic illnesses while being a student at UBC.

DO YOU HAVE ANY PHYSICAL DISABILITIES?

NO (92%)

YES (8%)

Do you have any other conditions that could be considered disabilities?

NO (87%)

UNSURE (1%)

YES (13%)

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE STATE OF YOUR MENTAL HEALTH IN THE PAST YEAR?

// Data: Joshua Azizi & Sophie Sutcliffe, Artwork: Aziz Sonawalla

COMMUNITY | FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL

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Aiken Lao

Picking things up after a crisis When I told my UBC appointed counsellor that I no longer had time to be sad, she gently informed me that there was no way to expedite my grieving process. This was just about the worst thing you could have told a person with five classes and two jobs who was on the brink of their second total mental breakdown.

I had the first breakdown when I was told that one of my best friends had been murdered and it lasted for over two weeks.

During that time I stayed on the couch, spending days binging some Netflix series I can’t even remember and had nights where I couldn’t motivate myself to walk across the living room and into my bed. Time became a very fluid concept, and deadlines slipped away while emails went unread and unanswered. This apathetic lifestyle had been afforded to me by the holy grail of UBC: academic concession.

Being granted concession only took a few surreal, uncomfortable steps. The first was sitting in Buchanan D — a building that oozes misery — for over an hour waiting for an Arts Academic Advisor. The next was explaining to said advisor that one of my best friends had died and that I was feeling more than a little sad about it.

“I’m sorry to hear that. In order to process this, I’m going to need to see an obituary or a death certificate.”

It was clear by the look on the advisor’s face that she felt uncomfortable asking me this.

Neither of us wanted to be in this situation, but it was more difficult for me. Since my friend had died less than a week ago, no obituary had been published.

I was also not a family member or a weirdo so I didn’t have a copy of the death certificate in my pocket. But since she was requesting evidence, I pulled up an article on my phone written

// Bridget Chase by the small-town newspaper where we both went to high school.

They were using his Facebook profile picture in the report; I had taken the photo and you could tell because he was sitting in my living room. She took this as valid proof that I hadn’t sat in their waiting room for the last hour as part of a depraved long con and approved my request for concession. However, the advisor told me that there still wasn’t a guarantee that my professors would allow me to miss assignments or rearrange deadlines, but that my odds would increase if I gave them further evidence of mental anguish by attending counselling. I went home and drank whatever I had in my liquor cabinet, mulling over the idea of sitting in a room and crying with a stranger. It was definitely more uncomfortable than sitting in a room and crying

40 alone, but the thought of one of my professors deeming me “not sad enough” and forcing me to take a exam that I knew I wouldn’t be prepared for was horrifying.

“How are you handling all of this?”

I told the counsellor that I hadn’t really had a chance to try and handle anything yet as I was too busy being worried about handling my degree. She told me about Kübler-Ross’ theory of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

She said that I was still in the denial phase, to which I said that I felt pretty damn depressed and that I think I may have skipped an emotion or two. She told me not to think too much into it, to practice my calming breaths and to make a follow up appointment for the week after the funeral.

This was my first breakdown.

For the days leading up to the funeral, lying around and ignoring every responsibility

THE UBYSSEY MAGAZINE had seemed like a valid method of coping with my emotions.

My professors and employers had all been very kind, and I felt secure in my emotional insecurity. Then I got back from the funeral and the grief process got blurry. Theoretically, standing in a church with my high school classmates and getting “closure” should have propelled me from depression to acceptance. Yet, when I arrived back in Vancouver with Monday classes rapidly approaching, I couldn’t seem to budge from stage four. Time had snapped back into its usual linear focus, but the grieving process had taken over its fluidity.

So when the counsellor told me that I couldn’t lifehack my sadness and drive myself back into productivity, I elected to ignore her. I Googled things like “appropriate amount of time to grieve” and “how long to be depressed before starting work again.” I even read the wikiHow article “How to Cope With Grief (with Pictures),” and then

deleted my browser history out of embarrassment.

I had reached rock bottom.

I flung myself back into my work with enough zeal to propel me through finals and make it to summer. However, I was exhausted. I still felt emotionally drained but it was too late to deal with it. I could no longer walk into UBC Counselling and check the box that said someone close to me had just died, and the timeline in which it was socially acceptable to be sad had ended.

It took time for me to learn that there is no socially acceptable timeframe for sadness. But it can start out as simply as reaching out and asking for help. I’ve found that the stages of grief are much less linear than Google may make them seem and by allowing myself to accept this, I allowed myself to begin the process of healing. I’m happy to report that this is a process I don’t plan on expediting. U

FREDERICK WOOD THEATRE, UBC

BEST OF BACKCOUNTRY SKI SHOW FEB 13 ROCK AND ICE SHOW FEB 14 WITH LEGENDARY COAST MOUNTAIN CLIMBER DON SERL

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COMMUNITY | BARELY ALIVE AT UBC

Barely alive at UBC For most people with Crohn’s disease — a chronic, incurable inflammatory illness of the digestive tract causing severe abdominal pain, diarrhea, fatigue, weight loss and malnutrition — student life is nonexistent. Not because we prefer to live off disability pay rather than go to school, but because most of us are too weak and ill. Fortunately, I’m bizarre enough to torture myself by dragging my exhausted body to school every day, so I can provide an accurate insight into what it’s like being a second-year science student at UBC.

“Everything made me furious. Not annoyed but enraged. I was in constant pain, so excruciating that I would sometimes scream into a towel so as not to scare my neighbours.”

I honestly cannot think of a single good memory of my first year. It was an extremely lonely time, despite living in residence.

I anticipated first-year Res to be a place where everyone meets new people and makes lifelong friends, but I just wasn’t able to do that. For starters, I couldn’t introduce myself to people because I had to go to the bathroom every 30 seconds.

It’s awkward having to explain to people you just met that you have a severe inflammatory bowel disease and that you live on the closest toilet.

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// Gabi Rosu

I wanted to make friends so badly to distract myself from the pain. I imagined myself being surrounded by a group similar to my friends in the IB program in high school, but it just wasn’t possible due to the physical and mental state I was in.

Everything made me furious.

Not annoyed but enraged. I was in constant pain, so excruciating that I would sometimes scream into a towel so as not to scare my neighbours. Whenever I heard others complain about how much weight they’d gained or how little sleep they’d gotten the previous night, I hated them.

Whenever I saw them with their friends, standing in line and grabbing food together, I hated them. Whenever I saw people laughing, I hated them. I hated every single one of them with every fibre of my being. And what I hated even more than them was how much hate I was feeling inside.

I was melting away in desperation because I couldn’t eat from the pain. My diet began to gradually consist of Ensure Plus, and by the end of the school year in April, I wasn’t even able to drink that anymore.

I never counted how many times I’d go to the bathroom in a day.

I tried once — at night, when it gets even worse than during the day — but I got freaked out and stopped when I got to 24 times in less than two hours.

I haven’t slept through a single night in over three years.

I was bleeding so much from my colon that I was worried I was

going to eventually drop dead. I rode my bike to and from class only so that I wouldn’t have to endure the painstaking journey hobbling along Main Mall with a bloody diaper. I eventually stopped going anywhere except class because I just could not hold it anymore. It felt like my colon was coming out of my ass and I was rotting from the inside out. My body was just in a state of horror. None of the treatments had ever worked for me, with the “best” one available only managing to send me into anaphylactic shock the summer before I was supposed to be off having the time of my life at UBC. Instead, I was at UBC, living in my own little hell bubble, everyone around me oblivious to my dire situation.

“I was melting away in desperation because I couldn’t eat from the pain.”

I’ve written or talked about my disease more times than I can count over the past eight years. And yet no matter how much I try to convey both the physical and emotional suffering that is Crohn’s disease, I’ve never managed to portray the horrifying realities of my life.

Just remember to enjoy the small things you have. The next time you walk into a Tim Horton’s and groan because there’s a long line, think about how there are people out there who’d give anything to be able to stand in it. U

A long way home // Charlotte Beaulieu Samuel Du Bois

Last October, I left UBC with my boyfriend to go back to Montreal. He had crossed Turtle Island to come visit me at UBC and was supposed to head back alone after a month — our reunion at Christmas would then be glorious.

But it didn’t go that way at all: I ended up in his Clownmobile, heading home and leaving my studies behind right in the middle of the term.

We left for our roadtrip on October 27, but my journey began a lot earlier than that.

Why? Simply because it happens. Life, I mean. Most of the time, you just realize how much it happens whether you want it to or not. Most of the

time, you realize that the sense of control you have over your own path is merely an illusion.

Two years ago, in 2016, I was given the chance to start my bachelor degree at UBC and I really thought I was in control — and I was mad at my family and friends for telling me otherwise.

All was well, thank you very much. Anorexia? Oh, please!

Don’t be so dramatic. I just didn’t have much of an appetite.

Plus, as I said, I was in control.

Except I wasn’t. And that illusion nearly killed me.

I bet my life I have been sick for more than two years. But the truth is, I didn’t start trying to find my way

out of the woods until I couldn’t bear seeing people I love suffering from my illness — until I couldn’t bear losing anything more to anorexia. But even now, recovery remains a vague concept in my head. Probably because the tales are true: you do get lost among the looming trees when darkness takes over.

The worst part is, even now as I am writing this in Montreal, I am still not convinced I want to heal from the bite of this vicious snake. I believe that’s the thing with eating disorders, you get addicted to them — or at least I did. I couldn’t imagine being worth existing without this little voice constantly pushing me to charge through my limits…

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and I didn’t mind destroying my good-for-nothing self along the way.

I wish I could explain how it all started, but that’s another fabulous thing with eating disorders: it’s sometimes quite tricky to know what triggers them — and by the time you figure out where you come from and what you’re heading towards, you’re already being devoured by the illness. All I know is that a little more than two years ago, right before turning eighteen, I suddenly got very self-conscious. What was I doing with my life? Where was I going? I was hoping to do some good in the world, but what was I actually bringing? Was I worthy enough to step into it?

These are quite common questions for people when they reach crossroads, you may say, and I would agree. I may only be human, but for as much as I’m aware of, we are all only

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humans — no discrimination intended towards possible creatures or aliens.

Everybody has moments of pain.

The thing is, to some people, these questions might trigger some insomnia for one night or two, a sudden need to go hunting for a long-lost soft-toy in their dusty attic or a peculiar appetite for double-fudge icecream. Then they move on. Just like I thought I did.

Except I really didn’t. I had been bitten by hyperperformance and it had me throwing myself into all kinds of competitive sports, academic projects and volunteering.

And sure, I did achieve many amazing things with this new frenzy. I got stronger and faster than I ever thought I could be, running my first half marathon and participating in my first taekwondo world championships.

Charlotte Beaulieu

I got better at writing too, winning my very first shortstory competition in French and getting to represent my school at a provincial literary prize. I learned so many interesting things in school, especially about human rights issues, anthropology and so on.

Looking back, I can say that I should have been very proud of all I was doing back then.

But that’s the thing. I wasn’t. It was never enough. I was never enough.

Internal battles that turned into wars I graduated from Cégep du Vieux Montréal after my required two years, with the best grades in my program and with an incredible scholarship. I found myself having the chance to study away from home, on the other side of the country, at UBC. I was overwhelmed with thankfulness. But I wasn’t proud.

I was terribly sick and, most dangerously, blind about it. I wouldn’t admit it, but I really wasn’t doing well. No matter what I did, no matter what I achieved, a little voice in my head kept telling me I was mediocre. Not enough. Weak.

Unimportant. That I needed to do more, hurt more, if I truly wanted to make a difference — and as I ignored the danger that this internal nemesis represented, it only grew stronger and louder.

Most of the time, the venom circulated through my veins as

HEALTH | A LONG WAY HOME

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Charlotte Beaulieu

poor self-confidence and selfdestructive thoughts. Again, terribly human things, right? So I wasn’t all that concerned. Except eventually, as I started coming home from way-too-often sport practices crying, as my writings got darker and my drawings became scarier, my parents and boyfriend got very worried.

Honestly, I should have listened to them. But I was sick, remember? It isn’t a metaphor.

I am not trying to make myself a victim. It was a fact. I was mentally ill: in my head, it was dark, lonely, and there was no other way to justify it. And so when my mum made me step onto a scale to show me how much my weight had dropped, I didn’t care. When I realized I was hurting myself, I didn’t care. And I didn’t try to make any changes. In fact, I fought ferociously to stay the same or to go even deeper. If I made it through my summer and got

to UBC in fall 2016, it is largely because my parents worked hard as hell to make me eat.

You might have guessed: as soon as I was alone in residence, I went back waltzing with the demon. I let the voice in my head wash over me and it took control. I was in total denial of my own struggle with an eating disorder and I almost effortlessly led myself onto the highway to hell.

Suffering from a mental illness, such as anorexia, isn’t about having nothing to be happy about or not making enough efforts to be happy. I do see that I am a lucky person and I am slowly learning to enjoy life and to dream again. But it is a constant battle with an internal demon that uses your own strengths to bring you down, that strives to suck from you the idea that you may actually be better off without it. That you can be free. That life is worth it.

To me, it means constantly battling an internal demon that wants to kill you.

Last year, my parents had to force me to leave UBC after a few — and yet terribly long — weeks of having to watch me go under. I don’t remember very well how it all happened; my brain was undernourished to such an extent that my memories from that time tend to escape me.

But I know that during those weeks, I managed to push through, desperately — and naively — hoping to get to the final exams in December. I was a breathing minefield. Anorexia and its destructive patterns, thoughts and consequences completely took over my existence. I had a constant urge to prove to myself that I was worth walking on Earth; nothing I did was enough. I had a desperate need for people to see me, understand

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me, validate my every move.

I isolated myself a little more every week as the little voice in my head kept making me believe that everybody hated me. I felt like I needed to do and experience everything. I was dizzy and exhausted all the time — all of my energy was spent on either obsessing about or avoiding food, and exercising. I was melting away and yet all my restrictive and self-destructive behaviours were the only things I was proud of.

I wasn’t eating. I wasn’t seeing people as I got more and more afraid of them. I was over-exercising everyday. I was calling my parents way too often, crying. I was stuck in a constant panic attack.

Back at the crossroads It took me days to decide whether I was going to leave again with my boyfriend Alexandre this year or not.

Long, restless, surreal days, spent spinning my thoughts round and round in my head.

Going back and forth between “I clearly need to leave; it is the smartest thing to do,” and “Of course, I ought to stay! I love it here and nobody should tell me I can’t make it through the term!” And even as we rolled out of the parkade next to Gage on Thursday afternoon, my mind wasn’t getting any closer to accepting my decision.

I had failed, again. I was a failure. Definitely, now. And forever and ever.

Anorexia had been quiet-ish as I was striving in my studies.

Dancing between volunteering

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opportunities, choir practices and conferences, I was happy.

At any rate, much happier than I had been for what seemed like forever. When I came to the conclusion, hearing my parents and boyfriend’s worries, that I was spiraling down and that I most likely wouldn’t make it to the end of the term for a second time, it crushed me.

I bet you could say it would have crushed anybody: leaving behind passion projects, people, hopes, dreams... No one’s asking for it. But not only did it crush me, it also re-ignited a part of my eating disorder I thought I was getting close to uprooting. It was like someone had decided to turn the volume up of the demon’s voice in my head, painfully and dangerously fast.

“Suffering from a mental illness such as anorexia, isn’t about having nothing to be happy about or not making enough efforts to be happy. I do see that I am a lucky person and I am slowly learning to enjoy life and to dream again.

But it is a constant battle with an internal demon that uses your own strengths to bring you down, that strives to suck from you the idea that you may actually be better off without it. That you can be free. That life is worth it.”

Anorexia had been dormant; it rose again as its full happiness-sucking form. I still haven’t learned how to produce a Patronus, though.

I was hyperactive on

Thursday morning, stocking all my things in Alexandre’s car. I became quiet as the day went by, focused on the battle inside. I am ashamed to say that by the time we turned the Clownmobile’s engine on and went down 4th Avenue towards the highway, I had given up. The monster had won over my head.

All of the anchors had been lost to sea; nothing made sense anymore.

On the road Thankfully, our first stop was merely a few kilometres away from Vancouver. I know an incredible family in Abbotsford: they actually were my host-family in an exchange I did back when I was 14, and that’s where we spent our first road trip night. So adventurous, I know.

I say this thankfully, because I think both Alexandre and I realized just how difficult of a journey our week in the car would be. Just how steep the mountain of overcoming anorexia still was — and just how devastated I was.

Through the week, we slept together on mats in the back of the Clownmobile, we drove together in the front seats, we picnicked together in rest stops. It was fabulous crossing the country side by side, but we realized that neither of us were much into threesomes — anorexia was always present.

Sometimes, after an ever-toolong-and-anxious grocery shop, when Alexandre had to warm up

HEALTH | A LONG WAY HOME

the canned soups by himself, putting the stove inside the van at the risk of being suffocated to resist the constant wind of Alberta, he got tired, or when he had to force a breakfast, a snack or a basic meal onto my camping plate, and to fight by himself the demon I had given up on winning against, or when he had to deal with the panic attack that followed any exposition to food. Then, he got seriously mad. It resulted in a Clownmobile with a very silent Alexandre, a very anxious and shaken up Charlotte and a very content and victorious demon.

We had some memorable moments, though. On the night of Halloween, we had decided we would go trick-or-treat wherever we stopped for the night... That was before getting completely stuck in Ignace, Ontario, a small village on the road two hours away from Thunder Bay. We just couldn’t

go any further in the dark and the blowing snow. We soon dropped the idea of trick-ortreating, as the population of Ignace seemed to have decided that Halloween decorations were overrated — and as everything closed at merely 8 p.m., we ended up eating dinner in the town’s Tavern, ironically the first I was stepping foot in. Although we were afraid of being cold on that snowy night, we slept surprisingly well in the empty parking lots of Ignace’s tavern.

The next day, the traffic stopped completely on the highway because of a tragic collision between two trucks in front of us. We had nowhere to go, but we were so grateful to be welcomed by villagers along the road. They opened the doors of their curling centre, where we were offered tea, coffee, chicken noodle soup, scones and cookies. Although

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everything scared me off at the time except for the tea, I remain impressed by the spontaneous warmth of these people.

We did have amazing times. Canada is an incredibly beautiful territory. We were awakened by a guard in the Glaciers National Park, who forced us to leave early morning with a contravention for illegal camping, but also with an amazing view of the sunrise against the snow on top of the mountains. We were struck by the sudden flatness of the prairies, captivated by the incommensurability of the Great Lakes.

And Alexandre was of infinite patience most of the time, full of compassion and tenderness when I would start spinning dark thoughts. He encouraged me to draw or to play alphabet games with him, especially when Saskatchewan got too flat. He

Charlotte Beaulieu

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encouraged me to put on music on and sing, to play ukulele or to make lists of future possible projects. He encouraged me to find ancres (what are these?) along the way, along the stretched out line of the driveway that was ineluctably getting me home.

Tired of snakes and ladders Once upon a time, I was blind to it all. That’s the crazy part of the eating disorder, at least in my case: it really is a mental illness that takes over.

Anorexia isn’t a way of life. I didn’t choose to be sick. I didn’t choose to make my mom cry on the phone, to make my dad beg for me to eat one stupid grape more than the day before.

I didn’t choose to lose friends. I didn’t choose to be depressed, to have anxiety attacks at any time of the day or the night, to not be able to sleep and to have my nose in my books until four in the morning. Nor did I choose to have chest pains like bees stinging my heart when I was going up the stairs, to spend long minutes washing my hands because I could never get them to warm up, to wash what was left of my once annoyingly way too fluffy hair under near boiling water as I was always freezing. I didn’t choose to be so scared of life that I was almost welcoming my self-destruction with relief.

I couldn’t get out of my own head, of my own prison.

I didn’t choose to be sick, I just couldn’t stop myself from dying.

I had medical followups every week with

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weigh-ins, blood tests and electrocardiograms at some points. Whatever. I personally didn’t care much, but those results were being sent home.

“Once upon a time, I was blind to it all. That’s the crazy part of the eating disorder, at least in my case: it really is a mental illness that takes over.”

Eventually, my parents couldn’t bear anymore and told me that I had to come home.

Right away. I remember crying, shouting, trying to convince them that I was fine, happy, that I had so much coming up. Midterms, visits to the museums, hikes... My mom got tired of trying to argue with the demon flaming in my eyes and she left the Skype call. My dad continued to try to reach me, give me advice on what was left for me to do to close my files at the university. I didn’t want to, but that really wasn’t the point. That was the least of their priorities. I had no choice.

The plane ticket was booked for the next day. They would be expecting me at the airport. If I wasn’t on the plane, I could be sure they were going to be at my door at Place Vanier the following day to get me home.

Now, I am aware of how terrified my parents must have been, that night. Because they knew that I would hurt myself for this, for what I perceived like an ultimate failure. Like the end of my life.

I am thankful today that my parents are so incredibly strong.

That they have the courage

and the unconditional love to confront their illness-controlled daughter and to not back away before my tears and my pleads.

I realize now that what made me so angry at them in 2016 was one of the hardest decision they had to make.

Yet, when they booked that plane ticket, they saved my life.

I am also thankful that, in 2016, a part of me wanted to get me safe to Montreal. A part of me wanted to fight, to leave, to live.

On my way Props to my ever so fabulous retired host-mom, dad and sister: I surprisingly had fun that first night in Abbotsford, moving away from what I had dreamed of.

Props to my boyfriend: I did eat that night, however loud it was screaming in my mind.

And props again to him: when I started crying and panicking and letting anorexia speak through my lips when we went upstairs for my last night in BC, he told me the only thing that had a chance to reach me, Charlotte, in that moment of pure anxiety.

“Just rest for now. I’ll still be here tomorrow. We’ll still be here tomorrow.”

To this day, he hasn’t been proven wrong.

Some people just seem to find a way to remind you without saying so just how silly and precious your life is even in its simplest or most fragile instants. U

COMMUNITY | FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL

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Jack Hauen

Post-concussion, I found balance through bullet journaling and relaxation apps // Lucy Fox It was early February 2017, and the Vancouver snowfall was turning into ice on UBC’s campus. I had just finished a class and was hurrying back to my office job. In a rush to get back to work, I don’t process the black ice just outside the mechanical engineering building. Two seconds later, I crumpled backwards, toque and gloves splaying around me. I didn’t remember much after that, other than the searing headache and inability to focus.

A month and several doctor’s visits later, what I knew to be true after several similar episodes over the years was deemed true: concussion, and at the worst possible time of the

year. There was no time, at least in my view, to recover. Between a full-time co-op position, a computer science course, volunteering on-campus and my workout routine, a concussion was not something I was prepared to take on as well.

Though physiotherapy and activity therapy helped with managing and healing the physical symptoms of my concussion — including but not limited to severe balance issues and some sight problems — occupational therapy through bullet journaling and relaxation apps proved to be the most valuable asset to managing my recovery as a high-functioning individual.

Its teachings continue to be valuable today, though I no longer have bi-weekly appointments.

Bullet Journaling For me, organizational tools worked best in terms of bullet journaling.

For the first few months of my recovery, I noted everything down — even water breaks. I had both a to-do list and a daily calendar with blocks of time allotted to each event. I even had a colour code. Initially, this helped when managing my short-term memory issues; anything someone told me at work or at school was written

50 down immediately. Beyond that, bullet journaling also allowed me to visualize my week and move items around to ensure the least amount of stress and strain possible.

As explained by Trish Mahoney — early response concussion service coordinator at GF Strong Rehab Centre — organizational tools like bullet journals allow those with concussions to start forming a habit of writing down and maintaining a new daily plan, to simplify cognitive demands.

“Writing [a plan] down can help you organize [your wellness strategy] before you started with the flow of the day as well,” she said. “And having it written down can increase your accountability to forming some of those new habits.

“Often time the recommendations, even though they can sound simple enough like taking frequent brain breaks or drinking water often, to try and remind ourselves to remember to stop what we’re doing and take those breaks … is actually trying

THE UBYSSEY MAGAZINE to form a bit of a new habit away from our typical patterns.”

Now, a year later, my bullet journal serves as a scheduling essential even though I have recovered from my concussion.

With four courses per term, a full-time job, volunteer work and a busy fitness schedule, I continue to find a planner aligned with my priorities and necessities valuable for keeping me on track and on time with my weekly routine.

What’s more, I can adjust my bullet journal if my life changes, which is ideal as a student with an ever-changing schedule.

Relaxation apps Moving from functioning at a high level to a low level was a massive stressor when I initially suffered my concussion. As someone who constantly feels like they are letting someone down if they drop a project, injury was never going to be easy for me as a reason to lighten my work load.

That said, when the time came to do so I found the Calm

Jack Hauen

app and the options within it for meditation allowed me to vary my brain break options and provided a stress outlet that was easy to use at work. Similar apps include Headspace, Stop Breathe and Think, and Mindshift — though there are various others out there to chose from based on your own personal needs and what works for you.

“With concussion recovery, our brain is a lot more sensitive to stress,” Mahoney said.

“A strong recommendation through the evidence-based practice guidelines is to really establish good stress management tools. And so, apps that allow people to shift their focus to a bit of a guided relaxation exercise, guided meditation can certainly be helpful.”

Relaxation apps were also a fantastic way to incorporate brain breaks into my day to ensure my brain was recovering and not being overused while it was trying to heal. In particular, scheduling in time to stop and listen to one relaxation track every hour or two at work provided my brain an opportunity to step away from the heavy cognitive load of computer work, to shut down and to focus on something less mentally taxing.

“Rest is important throughout concussion recovery, but it’s not necessarily a long chunk of time to rest and recover once you’ve pushed past your fatigue” Mahoney said. “It’s more frequent, short brain breaks that are scheduled in throughout the day proactively to allow your brain to turn off as best as possible.” U