Welcome.

There are few living platforms at Colgate that bring people together to find voice and speak life from the margins. This limits our individual and collective abilities, as members of the Colgate community, to understand how each other’s struggles, passions, and the expression of these struggles and passions, are inherently linked to others, and instrumental in shaping our entire lives. Collective Breathing (learn more here) is a space where unheard contemporary voices from the Colgate community  engage in a collaborative process of breathing life into our stories for ourselves and the wider Colgate community.


As a member of Collective Breathing I, Sharon Nicol, designed a companion independent study entitled Collective Breathing: The Making and Memory of a Feminist Art/Performance Collective. This blog is the home of my work in the course and an archive of my experiences within the collective.


The Collective Breathing course is centered around three major themes—Shaping(Making), Telling(Living), Remembering(Archiving). These themes exist as a framework for the present collective and future generations. Shaping the Collective Breathing project involves developing the vision for the current collective, understanding who is part of the vision, and determining how the vision will be realized. Telling the project means executing the vision, whether it be a communal creative space and/or an end-of-semester performance. Telling is not only about the end-product, but all that exists between. Remembering the project focuses on how a project’s herstory is preserved for those involved and future generations. Remembering is in conversation with content and medium, asking what do participants want to be remembered and how? These processes can occur simultaneously, at varying lengths, out of order, and sometimes not at all, yet having engaged with other models that uptake such a structure and in recording the collective’s experiences with these themes as they happen, we will be better able to return to order/the vision if there are any missteps during the process, and better contextualize our outcomes post-vision. Through this blog, I will document my reflections as I move through the Collective Breathing syllabus (which can be viewed here, along with the independent study proposal) 


This is my attempt at remaining accountable and transparent with my own thoughts and further humanizing the process myself and fellow collective breathers are engaged in, for generations to come. I am imperfect, and I recognize the value of sharing the imperfections of the building process in order to sustain this work.

I welcome feedback and hope that you will stay engaged throughout our journey. Please visit the larger Collective Breathing Blog/Archive that will feature voices of the whole group.



Thursday 6 April 2017

Ourselves | Black : Empowering the Black Community by Promoting Mental Health

If I could write a note to the authors, what would it say?

Dear Dr. Sarah Y. Vinson (creator of Ourselves | Black) and contributors,

Thank you for developing this resource to support members of the Black community who have been harmed by silences surrounding mental health in our communities. I wish I'd earlier had the language to address the emotional and mental issues that impacted my childhood experiences. I appreciate the varying perspectives that the articles and resources come from, as no experience is the same and various pathways to conversation, support, and healing are possible. I noticed your resources for parents to help support children that are dealing with a wide range of mental and emotional health issues, yet I wish there were resources to help children/young adults address issues of mental health with their parents.

I have been learning how to see elders in my life as equally human and capable of suffering from the similar human issues as myself, and in this process I have come to see how adults in my life (particularly my stepfather) were not given support in their mental health journeys. Recently I read a piece from Colonize This on... and I wondered whether the author had ever spoken to her mother about her mental health experiences? I know that part of the difficulty in initiating any difficult conversation from the point of the child to the parent is in recognizing (and respecting) the lines that have been drawn between elders and children to secure childhood innocence and foster respect for elder, yet in coming to see elders as equally human, it is necessary to come to see them as equally in need of support that a child may be able to give in some ways.

I appreciate the letters from mothers to daughters and daughters to mothers in the asian american woman in case of emergency pack because it breaks down the social barriers of parent and child to allow both to see the humanity (and possible brokenness) in the other so that they can be involved in the healing process. I can't be an ally/aide in someone's healing process if they cannot honestly share with me what they suffer from.

,but even if I still had a relationship with him, I still don't think I would be able to address his experiences with mental health and the silences that surrounded his diagnosis, treatment (or lack thereof), and life with him.

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