BRIDGING: How Do We Begin With Collective Care?

By: Audrey Maxner

This is not an essay about bridging in relation to my work; but rather an approach to connection in relation to my identity.

This writing is part of my processing of the past several years and a reflection of my own identity, grounded by an intersubjective lens into other people’s perceptions of me. I do not tell many people this story, because I have come to expect that my words will be misunderstood and that I will only be blamed for mistakes I made. Writing it on my terms has required my active participation in the cycle of learning, unlearning, and relearning where I have been and reframing what I mistook for mistakes in the past as choices I made with the tools I had available to me. This is my way of sharing what bridging is from my perspective as a Chinese-Jewish Queer Disabled woman living, and not truly fitting in, in the Western world.

Classical Music Dynamics Gone Wrong

In the pre-COVID days of 2019, my partner, Fin, and I decided to apply together as a musical duo for a summer music festival in Wisconsin. Generally, these festivals are designed to offer additional training for young Classical musicians through intensives, coachings, performances, workshops, masterclasses, and any other learning opportunity the programs can think of — more of an incubator for concentrated learning and less of the dance-party-raves most people first assume. Both Fin and I, having each played our instruments for many years, were familiar with attending these Classical summer festivals and what they entailed. We expected debilitating heat, uncomfortable dorm-living, intense coachings, endless socializing, and hours upon hours of playing our instruments, all of which would result in newfound friendships, musical perspectives, and cherished experiences. However, this festival took us in an unexpected direction. 

I should also say, because it is relevant to this story, that Fin and I were two weeks into dating after being friends for three years, both in the beginning stages of understanding our respective disabilities, and sick. Not just a little bit sick, but ugly-sick. Fin had the worst of it with bronchitis, hives, and a massive dosage of antibiotics and steroids that prevented them from sleeping for a month. I had the tail-end of a sinus infection and had just finished my own round of antibiotics prior to flying to Kenosha. In all fairness, we were not pretty and we were not trying to be pretty. Simply put, we were tired.

When we arrived at the festival, it was a day later than everyone else. We had some travel difficulties getting to the campus which resulted in us missing all the meet-and-greet orientation activities and instead getting there in the middle of the night in the pouring rain, long after campfire s’mores happened. We also arrived to discover a surprising lack of accommodations after disclosing disability on our shared application. First, our room was located on the second floor in a building that had no elevator. Second, the air conditioning did not work. Third, our “bed” was supposed to be two flimsy mattresses on top of wooden dorm bunk beds. We quickly scrapped this, pulling the mattresses onto the floor and making a “floor bed.” Fourth, our linens were the tiniest, lowest-ply products you can imagine. I am a 5’2” Asian-American woman and I could not get the towel to wrap fully around myself. Fifth, the walls were paper-thin, meaning our suitemates down the hall could hear every Broadway sing-along-at-the-top-of-our-lungs that we had.

Mostly, all of this made us laugh a lot. We were excited to be doing this together, to spend time with one another, to make music, and to meet new people. It’s always thrilling to figure out how to be a team with somebody else, and for Fin and me, navigating messy, chaotic situations was nothing new. 

But things changed once the festival began. Right from the start, it became clear that we were severely overbooked and expected to be workhorses for the span of two weeks. Our daily schedule was filled from 8am to 9pm, with thirty-minute meal breaks and only two or three hours allotted as rest time, if we were lucky. Fin and I would end our duo rehearsals early to catch fifteen-minute naps on the nearest couch, desk, floor, or flattish surface. Our workshops taught us our “network is currency” and that playing respectability politics is key, sending the message loud and clear that we were not meant to be regarding each other as people but rather as human capital competing with one another to be the highest achieving cog in the machine. Heavily fatigued, we sought any and every way to conserve our energy. This included skipping morning workshops, taking naps anywhere we could, and grabbing meals to-go from the campus mart instead of speed-eating in the cafeteria. 

The festival faculty assumed the worst of us. In later conversations with them, they admitted that they considered us to be egomaniacal, pretentious, elitist, arrogant, and aloof simply because we were too tired, too sick, and too disabled to perform within their constrictive container. Their actions reflected their misconstrued perceptions of us. In coachings, we were privy to targeted individualized attacks on our personalities, our relationship dynamic, and our playing. They utilized their position of power, claiming authority as musicians, and weaponized our age against us, insinuating youth equates to naiveté. Armed and loaded, a second faculty member we had never spoken to showed up unannounced to our coaching session within the first week of the festival. Together, she and her colleague posed a united front in calling us “lazy” and “ignorant,” making fun of the way we spoke and performed, and directly stating that my partner’s personality overshadows my own. In another explicit demonstration of power, they forced me into a private lesson where the faculty member spent another hour tearing into my musical approaches and techniques in an attempt to belittle my musicianship. Faced with combative bullies who created and controlled a space preventing conversation, autonomy, or shared learning, our only possible avenue of response was to bear it and feel it later. 

This treatment and severe misunderstanding of my personhood was deeply harmful and triggering for me. There are not many times in my life when my tears have been my greatest defenders. But this was one of them. For two days straight, I went silent and continued to cry. Like many other previous situations in my life, the responsibility fell on myself and Fin to make a choice: to repair the damaged situation to the best of our abilities, or to walk away. 

We chose to stay. Like our ancestors, the marginalized people working to sow seedlings of change while facing oppressive institutions, we took it upon ourselves to explain our perspectives, to clarify our actions, and to justify our positions. We took on the burden of the emotional labor and the emotional toll in the hopes that our choice to stay could instigate growth and possibly prevent the same future harm from being imposed onto somebody else. For the first time in my life, we gave my tears strength and used them to show: we are human, we are feeling, and we are harmed. 

Holding the Arts Accountable

There are many words to describe the harm Fin and I experienced: racism, sexism, anti semitism, ableism, ageism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, tokenization, bigotry, jealousy, bullying. This is by no means a comprehensive list. At the core of all these issues lay conscious and unconscious biases which led to stereotyping and prejudice, and there is no true way to discern all the biases that were at play that summer. As the LGBTQ Diversity Council explains here, the main difference between unconscious bias and stereotyping is the awareness of the bias and the action stemmed from it. But regardless of the intention behind the action, the impact on my own wellbeing remains the same. 

So long as bias exists unaccounted for and unchecked, so will the parameters that allow harm to be perpetuated. We are living in a trust economy. This means trust is the driver of conversation, collaboration, and safety. Yet how are we supposed to trust one another when people’s biases are on full display? 

Throughout our history, bias has been weaponized against anyone who did not fall into the heteronormative, cisgender, white, non-disabled dominant narrative of the Western world. This has created a culture of assimilation, where marginalized people do a disproportionate amount of work fitting in and fighting against the barriers placed around them compared to their non-marginalized counterparts. The situation that I faced at the summer music festival was not unique, uncommon, or unusual. Rather, it is what I have come to expect. 

Transforming the Approach

Therefore, this is not a question of how we bridge. Bridging implies an equal meeting of two sides to reach compromise. But we are not living within an equal world and I am not seeking to be compromised with. I did not write this to tell my side of the story. We are not all on our own islands trying to build bridges to reach one another. As Fin says, “We can all build boats together, and some of us like to swim.” As much as our individualistic competition-driven society might suggest otherwise, we must no longer seek independence but rather interdependence. 

My inimitable advisor at American University teaches to assume the most generous interpretation of people’s words and actions. By acting generously, we co-create a foundation of trust and care for one another. We break through the defenses constructed over a lifetime of seeing, feeling, and experiencing systemic inequalities. We bond, not just with those similar to us, but with those unabashedly different. We celebrate these differences and grow from the shared knowledge that we collect. We learn to love and how to show love for what each of us brings into the world. 

This is a question of how we as a global community heal, how we build trust, how we care, and how we love. This is about decentering the white, ableist, heterosexual, cisgender, individualist, competitive perspective that dominates in Western society and reframing our collective mindsets so we marginalized people are no longer responsible for baring our wounds, bearing everyone’s emotional burdens, and holding the trauma that continues to perpetuate generation after generation. 

I wish that at the summer music festival, the faculty could have led with generosity, and that I could have done the same in kind. I wish they could have asked, listened, and cared for my disabled needs. I wish they could have acknowledged I am not in competition with them, or anyone else around me, but simply finding my way as best I can. I wish they wouldn’t have used me as currency. I wish they could have seen past my Asian skin, my Queer hair, my disabled body, my femme frame, and realized that I have a personality, a perspective, and a voice. 

These are all things I will no longer compromise. If I am to be loved, I am to be understood. If we are to find understanding, we are to start loving. If we are to reach love, we require trust and care — interdependence. How do we get there? 

I’m with my advisor – let’s start meeting others with generosity.