Let Me Know When You Get Home Safe

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Let Me Know When You Get Home Safe
• Olivia Hopewell and Emily Aguilar

oh. emily and i are writing this in the summer of 2023 as recent alumnae of Bryn Mawr College's graduate program in Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies. When Catherine approached us to contribute to this "Rupture and Return" issue, we jumped at the opportunity to reflect on our experiences of the past few years in a thoughtful and rather personal manner—and among such an impressive group of contributors. Under the issue's theme, we were asked to describe our experiences as students during the pandemic, start to "finish." We are exploring the rupture and return of this rather unique coincidence of campus closure and social redefinition, of being white Classicists during a time of disciplinary and nationwide reckoning with anti-Blackness and white supremacy. We have both spent significant time since 2020 formulating and reformulating our thoughts on these topics, particularly through our co-foundation of a student-activism group called Students Promoting Equity in Archaeology and Classics (SPEAC), but also simply through our individual ways of coping with this period. These two aspects of our pandemic lives—working with this anti-racist collective and growing as selves—in many ways feel like the throughlines of the last three years, so we have decided to structure our thoughts accordingly: How have we experienced rupture and return as students working with SPEAC? How have we as selves?

A few months have passed since that initial conversation with Catherine. I have submitted my doctoral dissertation, Emily her master's thesis, and we are navigating living together for the first time in a new town. Since graduation, we have been in a surreal, atemporal haze of uncertainty and bliss and summer. What I am trying to say here is that it is been a while since we first developed our approach to this prompt, and I have had entirely too much time to think and overthink, landing myself in that familiar existential loop [End Page 355] that makes writing near impossible for two huge reasons: first, my relationship to SPEAC is different now; and second, my thoughts on the nature of the self are developing always.

To that first point, the more I try to summarize the role of SPEAC in my experience of the pandemic, the more daunting the task feels because, frankly, my feelings surrounding the group are complex, and while I want to be honest about those feelings, I fear that what I write will fail to explain my intentions. I am conflict averse, so describing any disappointment in our work with SPEAC feels dangerously close to self-aggrandizement and conceit. I am also fully aware that discussing an anti-racism group as a privileged white girl too easily reads like a white savior martyr narrative. The reality is that in order to reflect on my personal and professional experience of the pandemic, I have to talk about SPEAC. This group's formation is entirely bound up in my and our shared journey through this time. So, I wanted to name my situation at the outset before I say anything further about this work. We do not see ourselves as revolutionaries or think that we have done something unique with SPEAC (and this is a good thing—more on this later!). We are fully aware that our work with SPEAC as well as the emotional and intellectual fuel for its formation are functions of our white privilege. It feels important to foreground this acknowledgment of our role in the field and our self-understanding.

To that second point, the other symptom of having thought about this piece for so long: I am increasingly unsure about the vocabulary of this prompt. I am not sure that I understand the self or personal experience as things actually subject to rupture, things compatible with the language of return. As is true for so many of us for so many reasons, I have experienced a lot of precarity in my personal life. I am a first-generation low-income (FGLI) student with a complicated early life, and my relationship to that precarity is why "rupture" is so hard for...