Boundaries

Last Thursday Marissa brought up the concept of “responsibility” in class. She was referring to the fact that each of us assumes a certain amount of responsibility for the subject matter simply by participating in discussion. She pointed out that at some point, each of us will decide that, on some level, an aspect of the class will refer to us specifically.

I found this intriguing because it engenders uncertainty about boundaries, specifically between us as students and the texts which we study. It reminded me of the classic pitfall of many new students in medical school. They spend all day researching and absorbing information and factoids pertaining to a whole host of horrible diseases, and eventually some begin to self diagnose and decide that they themselves are showing symptoms of some disease they were studying. There is a critical moment at which the boundary between student and text is crossed; the disease becomes very real and frighteningly corporeal to the student as something which heretofore has only existed in text crosses the boundary.

I have had to combat multiple moments like this throughout the course of our discussions; I realized early on that things quickly became awkward and uncomfortable if I took them personally. In order to assess certain topics that might be applicable to me in an objective manner, I had to stop reading from the perspective of me.

Forcing myself to be objective has helped me to maintain the boundary between myself and the text, but I am beginning to wonder how much can actually be learned while keeping every discussion at arms distance.