Care Interrupts
My talk at Oxford University on the vulnerability and power of sharing knowledge
The following is the transcript of my talk given at Sommerville College as a part of the Choral Contemplations series ‘On Being Vulnerable’. You can also listen to this talk on the voiceover, which I’ve recorded afresh for substack. I am immensely grateful to have been invited to speak by Arzhia Habibi, the Chapel Scholar and Director. She creates beautiful spaces, full of poetry, care and thought. And I am so glad to call her my friend.
You may be able to hear it in my voice, but this week I have actually been ill, it has been an interruption. I’ve taken time off work. When we get ill, it can feel like an interruption to so called ‘real life’. We apologise for missing events. We say our lives are ‘on hold’. Or, we carry on despite being unwell, often hindering our recovery or risking passing on illness. It’s understandable because it is often unpleasant and often lonely to be ill. Our policies don’t support us to be ill. Taking time off sick is financially risky for many people, the Safe Sick Pay Campaign, which my mum (who is here today - Hi Mum!) has been working on shows that a third of us in the UK only get Statutory Sick Pay. Which is so low it is nowhere near enough to pay the bills. And to get any sick pay in the first place, we need to lose three days’ pay first.
[Amazingly, the day after I gave this speech, news came out that they were changing the law around sick pay to make some improvements on this, which was a beautiful moment of synchronicity and hope]
Policy makers talk about ‘disease burden’ to describe the impact of a given illness on society and the economy. In this they frame it as ‘years lost to disability’. All of this thinks of sickness as an interruption to some ideal of health. And although we should strive to prevent unnecessary suffering, we need to be careful with how we talk about this. As a disabled person, I could say I lost years to disability, but where did they go? I lived those years, they were altered but I lived them. In this framing it’s as if Disabled people - who make up 10% of the world by the way - just poof and vanish.
It is not long, in this logic of interruption, of burden, before the sick people themselves become perceived as a burden, rather than an inevitable part of our humanity. In this logic, care work needed to support the disabled and sick people is undervalued and diminished. It is a loss.
I’ve been chronically ill for many years, so illness has been a chronic interrupter to my life. This hasn’t been easy, but it has not been as bad as you may imagine. Today I want to share some of what I have learnt about reimagining what matters. About how Interruption can be generative: a place for imagination, sharing, resisting and recreating the world.
A few weeks ago, I was invited to read a poem here, at another one of Sommerville College’s Choral Contemplations. The was poem is called ‘Of the Snail and its Loveliness’ and its by Victoria Adukwei Bulley. The poet contemplates coming across snails, along her path. There was one passage that struck me particularly. She says, about the snail:
“I have learned to step aside for you.
Have crouched, even, in the rain
To move you further along your way
In the line of your direction
& what is care but this: to hold
that which comes too soon to harm
& set it on a safer path.”
Notice in this poem, the speaker has learnt to step aside in active pursuit of the care and safety of another. She is willing be interrupted, to hold that which is vulnerable to harm, and let it alter, even for a moment, her own path.
Sometimes, we are the snail, we are out, cold and vulnerable in the rain, with powers larger than us - powers which could choose to crush us, or could choose to step aside, to hold us and to help us get back onto a safer path.
About 8 years ago or so, I experienced period pain so strong I had to be sent home from work.
[At this point when I was in the chapel I found myself suddenly very aware that I was talking about periods in essentially a church, and probably of all the places of worship I could imagine Sommerville College would be the most open to this, because it is such a beautiful cross denominational space that holds space for people’s full spirituality and humanity… but still, talking about periods in a church like space made me laugh]
The pain kept coming, and worsening, and for a long time, it went uninterrupted. Despite regularly going to the doctor, no doctor stood in its path and tried to stop it. Eventually a doctor here in Oxford referred me on to further tests, and years later, I began to get the treatment I needed. She guided me, and the harm I was under, onto a safer path.
Sometimes we are snail and the walker, we care mutually for those who share similar vulnerabilities to us. Sometimes our own vulnerability allows us to see all the specific details in the unsafe path, all the cracks and cervices, and allows us to make that path a smoother one for someone else.
I found in naming the health conditions I have, Endometriosis, PMDD etc, that without fail, every time I am vulnerable and share, other people are vulnerable too. They tell me about their experiences. People tell me they thought they were alone on their path. Together we interrupt the taboo and silence around period related conditions. The words shine light and shatter the shame that grows in the dark. Like Audre Lorde’s Litany of Survival we have just heard [Part of the Choral Contemplations is a series of poems read alongside the talk]. Lorde says ‘It is better to speak, when we are silent we are still afraid.’ We look at the path together and we speak about it: We build knowledge. We say: what would help you, me, us with this? Why is this happening? What can we do about it? Without the interruption of illness in my life, I wouldn’t have built the knowledge I have now of how to care.
It is not just those of us behind these walls at Oxford who are researchers. To research is simply to go out into the world with questions. To listen to the world and collaborate with those with lived experience and see their paths. In this way we can stand in solidarity, across our differences. We can carve a path that we can thread together.
In my work here at Oxford, connecting and engaging communities with research, I have this Adrienne Maree Brown quote as my computer background:
“We need to move from competitive ideation, trying to push our individual ideas, to collective ideation, collaborative ideation. It isn’t about having the number one best idea, but having ideas that come from, and work for, more people”
Stanford linguist Katherine Hilton, named communication style which is called collaborative interruption, or collaborative overlapping. If you’re a collaborative interrupter and your conversational partner is speaking, you will start to speak along, to validate what they have heard, add things. Collaborative interrupters build on each other, they interrupt to say ‘yes and’.
Hilton found in her studies that (and this will probably surprise no one) women are judged far more harshly for their interruptions, whereas men were just perceived as enthusiastic. What counts as rude, what counts as disruptive, completely depends on whose mouth it comes from.
Sometimes we must interrupt the status quo in order to care for those around us. And interruption is usually seen as rude. Sometimes interrupting authority, pointing out how what they are doing is needlessly crushing someone else and disrupting someone else’s path to safety is essential. I think of
’s idea of the feminist killjoy - someone who interrupts the harmful thing that is playing out and says what if this didn’t have to be the way it was. Say you do this, you interrupt a sexist, homophobic, transphobic, racist joke at a party, at a meeting, you may get called a killjoy. Now, something I love is that Ahmed argues that, she says if the so called joy is so easily killed, it wasn’t real joy in the first instance. Real joy can survive criticism. Joy built on crushing others isn’t really joy.We must see the value in interruption. We must see the value in health advocates who ask difficult questions of doctors, of people who interrupt meetings at institutions to say this isn’t as caring as we could be, we must set ourselves and others on a safer path.
Interestingly, often that type of interruption registers in our bodies as unsafe, it is not the soft care we might imagine when we first hear the word ‘care’, it can be experienced as something to panic about. It gets in the way of the predictable order. It gets in the way of delivering a nicely packaged experience or product, but in reality, often the interruption reminds us we have agency, it is a call towards real safety, real joy. It may not land us at joy or safety immediately, but it sets us on the path.
So what if care is not a negative interruption? But life itself. What if, as Erin, a previous speaker in this series, quoted recently from Disability Justice writer William Cheng, ‘what if care is the point?’ What if our accumulation of status and wealth at an unsustainable pace is the interruption to the realness of our care for one another and our planet? What if we build knowledge and kept it open? What if we opened up patents for medication? What if we shared the accessibility hacks from chronically ill leaders? What if we listened to people who try to set us onto a safer path? What if we invested our resources in safer spaces?
To be interrupted by others is a blessing. It allows us the potential for expansion. To feel the weight of others reminds us that we are solid. We are human. Our weight can be held too. To be interrupted by caring for others may feel like an interruption, but what if it is the path? What if interruptions are guides? What if they show us the way forward?
What if care was the collaborative interrupter?
Thank you
I’d highly recommend if you’re in Oxford coming to the Choral Contemplations, they run during term time on a Sunday evening. They are open to all. The choir is stunning (you can listen to one of their songs below)
My role at Oxford is soon coming to an end. No pressure, but if you feel able to give a couple of quid towards my independent scholarship please consider buying me a coffee (or let’s be honest: a bubble tea) buymeacoffee.com/rachelhrpiper
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