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‘I loved many aspects of my job as a teacher, but I began experiencing memory fog and the strange sensation of being outside of my own body.’ Photograph: Hill Street Studios/Getty Images It sounds like you are dissociating, which is a trauma response. Find a therapist to work through this issue so you can break the cycle Philippa Perry Philippa Perry Sun 18 Aug 2024 06.00 BST Share 188 The question I am in my 20s, surrounded by a supportive partner, family, and friends. I am also lucky enough to have had a good education and to have done well academically. Earlier this year, I quit my job as a secondary school teacher in an inner-city comprehensive. I loved many aspects of the job and was good at it, but I began experiencing memory fog and the strange sensation of being outside my own body, even when teaching. Shortly before I made the decision to quit, a male student made a sexually violent threat towards me which wasn’t handled brilliantly by the school. After several years, I decided enough was enough and handed in my notice. Since then, I have been trying to pursue other jobs in all sectors. I have been largely successful in getting interviews and securing roles, which is nice. There’s only one problem: every time I get a job, I start to feel a horrible sense of claustrophobia and distress. Twice now, on my way to a new job, I have taken a train straight back home. I make up an excuse about why the job wasn’t right for me and start the search afresh. I fear feeling trapped again – which is how I did throughout a lot of my teaching career – so stave off this feeling by never properly committing to anything. But I’m starting to feel worried. Apart from the fact that I am burning through my savings at an alarming rate, what if I always feel this awful sense of entrapment and can’t hold down a job? I had another job before teaching and the same thing happened. Am I simply lazy and just don’t like working? Philippa’s answer Memory fog and experiencing yourself outside your own body sounds like it could be that you are dissociating when at work. Dissociation is a response to trauma. For example, people who have had bad car crashes often remember the seconds leading up to the crash and then the moments after it, but have no memory of the crash itself, even if they didn’t pass out. Once the body has a learned pathway to this dissociative response, you can slip into it when experiencing other types of stress. Now you are associating this feeling with work. Perhaps your body is fighting you and winning and not letting you go to work. It won’t have helped that you received a threat of sexual violence in your last job: this will be another negative association your brain will be making with work. Cast your mind back to when you first felt trapped and tackle it There is also something going on about being trapped, as you mention that you had this feeling at an earlier job. If you free-associate around entrapment, what comes up for you? If I do this exercise, I can see my childhood as being trapped – when we’re growing up, we must live by our family’s rules and don’t have much of a say about where and how to live. Work contracts can also be a bit like traps. Cast your mind back to when you first felt trapped: what was that situation? What I think you should do is see a psychotherapist experienced in trauma and do detective work together to find your original trauma. If we go back to the source of our troubles and tackle that, it can stop us getting stuck in a cycle of repeating that past dynamic that continues to haunt us. But to pay for this you will probably need to go back to work! Choose temporary work that won’t trap you. But it might also be that you haven’t found your true vocation yet. There is a book by Richard N Bolles, What Colour Is Your Parachute? containing exercises designed to help individuals understand their own career preferences and goals. Try, for example, the flower exercise. Draw a flower with seven petals. Each petal represents a different aspect of your ideal job and work environment. To fill in each petal you answer the following questions: what do you value most in life and work, including your core beliefs and principles? What areas of expertise and knowledge do you possess and are passionate about? Which types of people do you prefer to work with? What are the physical and environmental conditions in which you work best? How much responsibility are you comfortable with and what are your salary expectations? What transferable skills do you have? What are your preferred locations for living and working? By filling out each petal with specific details, you create a personalised picture of your ideal career, helping you to identify job opportunities and career paths that align with your strengths, values and preferences. You are not lazy, but you have some kind of mental block. You need to identify this so that you can get around it. Meditate upon this block, see what images arise for you and work with them. When we get stuck, we can also get unstuck – especially when we are proactive about it. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/aug/18/jobs-make-me-feel-trapped-so-i-never-stay-am-i-just-lazy

Luís Costa published his first volume of poetry, Two Dying Lovers Holding a Cat, in November. “It is not about cats,” he said. “It’s about two lovers who cease to be lovers. There’s just a lot of symbolism about cats.” The next month, his cat, Pierogi (“dumpling” in Polish), fell ill. “He had his own Advent calendar. That’s when I noticed he’d lost his appetite,” says Costa. Pierogi had cancer, which had spread to his bowels and his liver. He died just before Christmas. “A couple of weeks ago, while I was hoovering the house, I pushed the table aside and there was a whisker. He was a tuxedo cat, so he had white whiskers. The contrast with the floor was quite striking. That was very hard.” Everyone who has lost a pet will have a friend or acquaintance who said the wrong thing. When my puppy died of canine parvovirus, my friend kept referring to her as “it”. I’m not saying I have never forgiven her, but that was in 2003 and I don’t seem to have forgotten it. Other greatest hits include: “You still on about that?” and: “When are you getting another one?” “As if you’re just replacing one furry body with another,” says Susan, who volunteers for Paws to Listen, the grief support service of the charity Cats Protection. She lost Tabitha recently. “A very judgmental cat, certainly, but she was our difficult little madam,” she says. “And now she’s gone and it’s horrible. Her presence filled the house, so when she died … well, it’s just a house now. It isn’t a home.” ‘Some people are aghast to hear that it might be harder for someone to lose an animal than a person.’ Photograph: Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images Hearing such recollections, and recalling my own loss, it’s clear that pet grief is objectively, indisputably real. Many of us don’t need to be told what it feels like, but wonder why this great open secret – that losing an animal is enormously hard – is so often minimised. Diane James is the head of pet loss support at the charity Blue Cross. Its bereavement service, for all animals, has been running for 30 years. It takes 20,000 calls a year and advises similar organisations in the US and Canada. “Some people are aghast to hear that it might be harder for someone to lose an animal than a person,” James says. But it depends on the person or the pet. “When we compared it with the human grief cycle, we noticed some differences,” says James. “We talk about responsibility grief.” The custodian relationship has a particular anguish. Catherine Joyce, a team leader at Paws to Listen, says the bulk of calls are from people who have had to get their cats euthanised: “It’s an incredible burden.” The academic and writer Finn Mackay, who lost their soulmate, a cat called Solomon, just before Christmas, remembers when the vet said: “‘There’s nothing you can do; he’s dying.’ I signed this form and within five minutes they gave him a lethal injection through his paw. For a minute, I thought: this is really stark, this is alpha and omega, I shouldn’t have this power. It was awful.” ‘When a pet dies shortly after a person, or even a long time after a spouse or parent, it can be especially hard.’ Photograph: Westend61/Getty Images There can be an anticipatory grief, too, which seems to be worse with animals than humans. Your power to euthanise freights every moment with the painful question: are you prolonging their suffering for selfish reasons? But after making the painful decision to end their misery, says James, “people say they feel as if they’ve signed a death warrant or they’ve murdered their pet”. For some, the guilt will be so unbearable that the vet ends up on the receiving end. Lola, 52, lost her eight-year-old rescue staffie cross when she thought she was going in for a routine operation. “It didn’t seem mega-serious until we got a phone call saying: ‘We need your permission not to resuscitate her,’” she says. “I remember it so clearly, being in the kitchen, me pleading with the vet, trying to get him on side, while my husband went mad, shouting at him: ‘You wanker, you’ve killed my dog.’” It’s common for couples to have very different but equally intense grief responses. My sister and brother-in-law, who have two cats, were caring for a small stray, Slow Cat, who wasn’t allowed in the house. When he took ill suddenly and had to be put down, the vet gave them a moment to say goodbye. My brother-in-law said: “I love you, Slow Cat,” and my sister started laughing, even though she also loved Slow Cat. Sometimes, when you are mourning, the last thing you want to be is married. When a pet dies shortly after a person, or even a long time after a spouse or parent, it can be especially hard. This may be echo grief, the fresh loss bouncing off the original loss, the feelings similar in a way that may feel shameful, because you are supposed to think humans are more important than animals. So then you have shame on top of sorrow and no certainty over when, if ever, it will end. Maybe you really are grieving harder for your pet. That is fine, too. Mackay lost another cat, Pixie, before Solomon. “My father had died not long before,” they say. “As bizarre and hard to process as that was, I didn’t use to speak to my dad that often. I was close to him and I loved him very much, but we only spoke every so often on the phone. Pixie was always there.” Anyway, not all familial relationships are perfect. Costa, who is queer, says: “When I came out, I had a really terrible experience with it. The notion of unconditional love vanished for me at the age of 19. With this cat, I thought: hang on a second, it is possible. It was the first time I’d experienced that.” Pet mourners can also feel compound grief, when the pet was the mascot of a relationship or a time that has been lost. “People feel like all the memories have died,” says James. If you are talking about an animal with a long lifespan, such as a tortoise, that will bring up memories and losses all the way back to childhood. It can read to the outside world as if you cared more about your dog, say, than your dad, but it may be that you are mourning for both. ‘If you are talking about an animal with a long lifespan, that will bring up memories and losses all the way back to childhood.’ Photograph: Manu Vega/Getty Images Animals often provide solace for their humans through all kinds of difficultly. People struggled with losing pets after Covid, Susan says, “if they were on their own during lockdown with the cat and their relationship became closer by default. People will say: ‘This little cat saw me through my divorce, or my redundancy.’ The cat, knowingly or not, was supporting them.” The reason people take it hard, when someone asks them if they will replace a pet they are grieving, is the implication that the animal wasn’t unique. So, try not to say that. But James adds the caveat that she doesn’t like rules: “Sometimes, people find talking about loss difficult. We’d rather they say whatever they can, as compassionately as they can, than worry about making a mistake.” The decision to get a new pet will be personal. “Some people need to do it really quickly,” Susan says. “Some people will never get another cat. Some people need a cat in their lives, but they need time to grieve the cat they’ve lost. It’s hard to form a bond if you take in a new cat too soon.” When it comes to disaster stories of grieving pet owners getting new animals, dogs come into their own, being capable of wreaking so much more havoc than cats. The next dog Lola chose was a maniac, as is mine. I got a dog, Romeo, 11 months after the death of Spot, a prince. Romeo is the same breed, but he is not the same. I wouldn’t say we haven’t bonded, but a typical conversation with Romeo will go: “Come sit by me, you little tosser,” and he’ll bowl over, head-butt me in the face, eat my jaffa cake, then sit by me, like a tosser. A typical conversation with Spot would go: “You are a prince,” and he wouldn’t need to do anything, because he would already be sitting by me, like a prince. Mackay brings up the notion of the “grievability” of things, a subject the philosopher and gender-studies academic Judith Butler has written about. “Any living thing that is not replaceable is grievable,” says Mackay. “I lecture on that with my students; we do the sociology of pets. And they’re rolling their eyes, but as soon as we start to talk about animals they’ve known, they come out with all these unique traits. This dog doesn’t like walking in this weather. This dog growls at postboxes.” It’s interesting, because Butler was talking about war when she was developing the concept of how we divide lives into grievable and ungrievable by exactly that mechanism: amplifying the uniqueness of some, shading out the uniqueness of others. If you accept that every animal is unique, you accept that, some day, someone is going to be grieving them, hard. “Dogs don’t live long enough, in my opinion,” says James. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/aug/15/the-surprising-shame-of-pet-loss-you-are-supposed-to-think-humans-are-more-important-than-animals

Thirty delegates from across the US will represent voters who cast ballots in protest of Democrats’ pro-Israel policies. Delegates from the 'uncommitted' movement will be at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, next week [Alex Brandon/The Associated Press] It started as a last-minute effort in February: Organisers in Michigan hoped to use the state’s Democratic primary to send a message to President Joe Biden to end his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Six months later, Biden is no longer the Democratic presidential candidate. But the US’s “ironclad” support for the war continues. And so has the “uncommitted” movement, the protest effort born in Michigan. Initially, the aim was to encourage primary voters across the country to cast their “uncommitted” ballots in protest of the war. But now that the primary season is over, the “uncommitted movement” has set its sights on a new platform: the Democratic National Convention. Next week, 30 delegates from eight states, representing some 700,000 voters who cast “uncommitted” ballots, will be heading to the convention in Chicago. Though they have been denied an official platform to speak at the proceedings, they hope their presence will still send a strong message. “We’re the first delegation ever to be representing Palestinian human rights. And I think that that’s really important. We’re a small but mighty group,” said Asma Mohammed, who organised for the “uncommitted” movement in advance of Minnesota’s primary. Mohammed acknowledged the “uncommitted” delegates will be a minority at the convention. Still, she emphasised the voter base they represent could be decisive in November’s general election. “There’s 30 of us, and there’s over 4,000 delegates nationally. So we’re less than 1 percent of the delegates,” she told Al Jazeera. “But inside the convention hall, we will be representing the Palestinians that were massacred, representing the almost million voters nationwide who said that they want a ceasefire right now and that they want an arms embargo.” Activist Natalia Latif tapes a ‘Vote Uncommitted’ sign on the speaker’s podium during an election night gathering in Dearborn, Michigan [File: Rebecca Cook/Reuters] The group had requested for Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician who has worked in Gaza, to speak at the convention. Their appeal was denied, Mohammed said. Still, the delegates, under the banner of the Uncommitted National Movement, will hold a programme of events on the sidelines of the convention. There, they will meet with various caucuses and seek to rally other delegates pledged to Kamala Harris, the new Democratic nominee for president. ‘Fighting for human rights’ The Uncommitted National Movement has already used its position to protest against the continuing bloodshed in Gaza, where more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed. Earlier this month, Harris was formally designated the Democratic nominee through a virtual roll call — an online vote in which all delegates could take part. Instead of voting for Harris, the “uncommitted” delegates nominated victims from Gaza. Mohammed was among the delegates who participated in the protest. “I submitted my vote for Reem Badwan, a three-year-old who was murdered in an Israeli air strike in Gaza,” Mohammed said. “And I made clear my vote [in the general election] was contingent on a ceasefire and an arms embargo.” Ahmad Awad, an “uncommitted” delegate from New Jersey, said the effort was a “symbolic way to highlight the many victims of the war”. The 29-year-old lawyer nominated Abdul Rahman Manhal, a 14-year-old killed in Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp in November. “The districts that I’m representing as an ‘uncommitted’ delegate encompasses Paterson and Clifton, New Jersey, which are home to a large Palestinian American community. It’s basically little Ramallah,” Awad said, drawing an analogy to the West Bank city. Awad explained that his participation in the “uncommitted” movement stems from a family history of fighting and surviving human rights abuses. “Fighting for human rights is something that’s really ingrained in my DNA,” he told Al Jazeera. “On my father’s side, both of my grandparents were born in Palestine prior to 1948. My mother’s side is Polish. My grandfather is a survivor of Nazi slave labour camps.” ‘Resolute is the best word’ In Harris’s abrupt entrance into the presidential race, activists have seen a potential opening for a course change in US policy towards Israel. Harris became the Democratic nominee after Biden withdrew from the race on July 21, amid concerns about his age and capacity to lead. Whereas Biden has advanced a policy of “bear-hug diplomacy” towards Israel, some observers believe Harris has signalled her intention to take a tougher stance. Shortly after entering the presidential race, Harris pledged to denounce the suffering of Palestinian civilians. “I will not be silent,” she said, shortly after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In a brief exchange with two “uncommitted” leaders — Layla Elabed and Abbas Alawieh — at a campaign stop in Detroit this month, she also said she would speak with the group. But her campaign has not set a date for the meeting, and a Harris campaign adviser doused hopes that she would support a full arms embargo on Israel. Michael Berg, a 49-year-old uncommitted delegate from Missouri, said there had been some positive signs from Harris, although he had tempered his expectations. “It’s hard to know where things are going,” said Berg, who named two-year-old Gaza victim Jihad Khaled Abu Amer as his vote during the virtual roll call. “I’m hoping that Vice President Harris is not as dug in on positions as President Biden seems to be.” Still, Berg explained he and the other “uncommitted” delegates are steadfast in their mission to advocate for a ceasefire at the Democratic National Convention. “So we are, I guess, resolute is the best word. We are going to the convention because we have a very clear mandate and mission from the people, and we’re going to do what we can.” ‘Standing with my fellow Kentuckians’ Violet Olds, for instance, applied to represent the “uncommitted” segment of voters in Kentucky but was not initially involved in the movement. Olds, a digital project manager, said that after she was selected by the party to represent uncommitted voters, she was approached by her local Democratic Socialists of America chapter, which connected her to the national protest movement. “I actually reached out and found ways to communicate with other Kentucky voters to find out why they voted uncommitted and how I can represent their voices at the convention,” the 41-year-old told Al Jazeera. “And it all comes down to basically Gaza and Palestine. So I’m standing with my fellow Kentuckians and with Palestinians.” During the roll call, Olds named Mohammad Bhar, a 24-year-old Palestinian man with Down syndrome who died after being mauled by an Israeli military dog in his home in Shujayea in Gaza. “I am autistic, and so that means that I represent a whole different class of people than I think the Democratic Party is usually used to representing, and my son is autistic, as well,” Olds said. “So when I heard Mohammad’s story, it really, really, really hit home.” Asma Mohammed, an activist with Uncommitted Minnesota, addresses media in Minneapolis, Minnesota [Stephen Maturen/AFP] Others, like Inga Gibson, a delegate from Hawaii, have long been part of the Palestinian solidarity movement. Nearly 30 percent of voters in Hawaii’s Democratic primary cast their ballot for “uncommitted”, the largest proportion of any state. Seven of the island state’s 22 delegates are “uncommitted”. Gibson attributed the turnout to Hawaii’s “own history of settler colonialism”. “A lot of native Hawaiians within the Palestinian freedom movement have drawn on that parallel,” she explained. Gibson, a 52-year-old environmental policy consultant, said that the relatively small size of the “uncommitted” delegation does not reflect wider sentiment against US support for Israel. Polls have repeatedly shown widespread disapproval of Israel’s actions among Democrats. Experts say the support for Israel could disadvantage Democrats in several key battleground states, including Michigan and Pennsylvania. “I do not feel that our movement, by any means, is in the minority, even if our delegates are, per se, in the minority compared to 4,000 others,” said Gibson. She named Gaza victim Ruba Yasser Nawas, a 22-year-old software engineer, during the roll call vote. “Everything that we are asking for is completely mainstream.” ‘Cannot just make this week a celebration’ June Rose, the sole “uncommitted” delegate from Rhode Island, also said it was incorrect to assume the delegation members come from the fringes of the Democratic Party. “We are Democratic professionals. I’m the chief of staff of the Providence City Council. I’ve made my career helping to elect Democrats and defeat Republicans who pose incredible risk to the future of our country,” the 29-year-old told Al Jazeera. “But my relationship with the party will never supersede my relationship with my values, and in this case, my values and my party are in direct conflict.” Rose named Eileen Abu Odeh, a toddler killed with her family in an Israeli air raid in Gaza, during the roll call. They explained the delegation’s presence at the Democratic National Convention can serve as a gut check for the party, as it prepares to chart a course forward on foreign policy. “Our party cannot just make this week a celebration, and I think that that’s the tone that many in our party want to take,” Rose said. “But that celebration would be on the graves of innocent children who’ve been slaughtered.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/17/uncommitted-delegates-bring-gaza-war-message-to-democratic-convention

As Israel’s deadly attacks continue, UNRWA warns the so-called Gaza ‘humanitarian zone’ has shrunk to just 11% of the Strip. Mourners gather near the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes in Deir el-Balah, Gaza [Ramadan Abed/Reuters] A family, including six children, have been killed in the central Gaza Strip, in the latest waves of Israel’s deadly attacks across the besieged Palestinian territory. At least 25 Palestinians were killed in the past 24 hours, the Gaza Health Ministry said on Sunday. The parents and their six children were killed in Deir el-Balah in the central part of the Strip, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital said. The grandfather of the children said their mother worked for the United Nations. “My daughter, together with her husband and six children, was sleeping peacefully at home in Dier al-Balah. They were taken by surprise, an Israeli missile landed over their heads. The entire house was flattened. They were all killed,” Mohammed Awad Khattab told Al Jazeera. “My daughter has been struggling to have children for years. She had those children through IVF … What wrong did those innocent children do? Were they posing any danger to Israel? Were they carrying arms?” he asked. Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Deir el-Balah, said: “Four of her children were twins and they have been lined up together in order to be buried in cemeteries here in this town. “We have seen really heartbreaking scenes this morning with dozens of bodies lined up in the morgue outside Al-Aqsa Hospital. There has been a remarkable surge in Israeli strikes in Deir el-Balah where Palestinians were told to seek refuge,” Abu Azzoum added Israel’s 10-month-long offensive has so far killed more than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Elsewhere in the strip on Sunday, an Israeli aircraft bombed two apartment buildings in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing at least four Palestinians, the Wafa news agency reported. Late on Saturday, an attack near the southern city of Khan Younis killed four people from the same family, including two women, according to Nasser Hospital. And in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the centre of the Strip, seven people were killed, including three children, according to Al Jazeera Arabic. ‘Chaos and fear’ According to UNWRA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, areas designated as so-called “humanitarian zones” in Gaza by the Israeli military have shrunk to just 11 percent of the Strip, “causing chaos and fear among the displaced”. Mohammed Moghayyar, the director of operations at Gaza Civil Defence, told Al Jazeera that Israel reducing the size of the humanitarian zone has cut off crucial facilities such as hospitals and increased the risk of diseases spreading. “The more the Israeli occupation forces reduce the safe humanitarian zones, the more it continues to violate international law and the Geneva Convention, the more it causes death and killing among our people,” he said from Deir el-Balah. Meanwhile, Hussam Abu Safia, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, has told Al Jazeera the medical facility will have to stop working within the next 24 hours due to a shortage of fuel and medical supplies. On Sunday, the Israeli army said it is deepening its operations in Khan Younis and on the outskirts of Deir el-Balah. Fighter jets attacked targets in Khan Younis from which rockets were launched towards the Nirim community in southern Israel yesterday, the army said. Air attacks destroyed loaded launchers ready for attacks in the area, it added, saying that soldiers killed fighters and located weapons, including grenades, assault rifles and explosives. Troops also kept operating in the Rafah area above and below ground, the army statement said. As the war rages on, United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken headed to the region on Sunday for another attempt at procuring a ceasefire deal. In the Qatari capital, Doha, where Qatari, Egyptian and US negotiation mediators tried to hammer out a deal on Gaza, ceasefire talks were paused on Friday, but are expected to resume next week with the hope of concluding an agreement in Cairo.

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