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Social Work Intern: “Hey! How are you doing?” 

A pause, a deeply resonant sigh,

Student: “I’m okay. There’s a lot going on but it’s fine.” 

Part of my role as a social work intern at the Women’s Center is to do check-ins with adult learners and provide support for our student community. Last semester, in conversations with both students and staff  there was an ongoing theme of unspoken grief; this touching on grief but then skirting away from it because it was too heavy to hold in a passing “how are you?”. 

[Image description: a gif of a boy in a blue shirt being asked “how are you?” with the boy responding “I’m fine”,  he laughs, smiles and then his smile turns to a frown and he begins  to cry and cover his face with his hands]

My fellow student staff was sharing with me how, during an event, the facilitator made space for checking in with how everyone was doing, and given the opportunity to share in a safe community space, each person readily named how it was still really hard living in and adjusting to this pandemic. We’ve adjusted but we also haven’t. It’s become our reality but many of us are still struggling to grapple with what that means. On top of that, there has been a huge loss of life in the midst of a tremendous whirlwind of changes, a blanket of isolation, and an anxiety about what is to come and what the world holds for us. 

Over the fall 2021 semester, I put together a proposal of a group intervention for students experiencing grief and loss, open to both death-related and non-death related grief. I asked my co-intern if she would be interested in co-facilitating the group with me and she eagerly agreed. At the beginning of January 2022, we worked together to formulate this three week grief-based discussion group, taking care to create a safe and brave space for intentional listening, for sharing each other’s stories around grief, to hold the heaviness with each other, and to provide validation and support. This group became the Pandemic Grief Processing Group. 

[Image Description: Image contains a faded white rose in the center over a solid black background with the text over it reading, “Women’s Center Presents Pandemic Grief Processing Group”. On the bottom left is the Women’s Center logo of the white tree and on the bottom right corner is a list of the session topics: “Session 1: What are you grieving? Session 2: How are you grieving, Session 3: How can we hold our grief together?”]

We wanted to go beyond “How are you?” so we approached it differently.

At the beginning of each session, we started with naming our Brave Space Guidelines, challenging others to be reflective on the ways they take up space or don’t take up enough space, and encouraging the group to be present with each other.  

For the first session, we met online and asked the question What are you grieving? Marybeth shared a few different types of grief to lend some language for what participants might be experiencing. Then we spent the majority of our time broken into small groups, giving each person time to share the grief that they have been holding. 

During the second session, we met online once again and in small groups asked the question How are you grieving? Participants shared what their grief looked like in light of the pandemic and the struggles that complicated their grief. When we came back together, I shared some mindfulness techniques outlined in this article, including mindful breathing (i.e. 4-count or box breathing), mindful walking, and compassionate self-talk. 

Our final session we met in-person at the Women’s Center on UMBC’s Main Campus and we asked the question: how can we hold our grief together? We took some time for quiet reflection and when we came back, we got to share what we had written. And for our final activity, after these three weeks of hearing each other’s journeys, we wrote affirmations for each other, and each person got to plant one of their affirmations under their own little succulent that they could take home. The affirmation would be the soil for continued growth around their grief. 

Image Description: One of the participant’s succulent surrounded by little pebbles that they planted in a terracotta pot with a blue and purple pipe cleaner wrapped around the rim of the pot.

Part of the Women’s Center’s mission is to support student success and well-being for marginalized identities, foster a sense of belonging, and build community. We know that grief doesn’t just affect our personal lives but can have a real impact on our role as students as well. And this can be further impacted by our different intersecting identities, whether race, gender identity, mental health, or chronic illness. 

Making space for people to name these heavy things they are holding and that are impacting them emotionally, physically, and consequently, academically, is crucially important. And in academic settings and higher education institutions where the pressure to keep going, to push ourselves beyond our capacity to get the grade, is heavily felt, it is even more so important to have spaces like this that help students feel seen and heard and supported. There is something incredibly validating about being able to share what you are going through, and witnessing others in their struggles that affirms it is okay to not be okay.

[Image description: A vibrant sunset background with yellow text over it that says “To wholeheartedly grapple with grief is to come fact to face with the deep meaning of whatever it is that we’ve lost. It is brave work…” – Marybeth Mareski, quoted from PGPG Session 1]

Of those participating in our Pandemic Grief Processing Group, it was about half and half of those who are grieving the loss of loved ones, and those who are dealing with non-death related grief such as the compounding effects of the pandemic on mental health, isolation, relationships, and chronic illness. While these equally valid types of grief (that you can read more about in this article from What’s Your Grief) can at times feel less visible, all losses and grief experiences are real and valid and they demand to be felt. 

Getting to co-facilitate this group and support these students was an especially meaningful experience for me. It was an honor to walk with these people and hold the heaviness with them. And while I hoped it would fulfill a need in our student community, I did not anticipate how much it would be helpful for me to be a part of. These are some of the takeaways that I am going to continue to carry with me as I deal with my own grief.

1. Name and validate your emotions

Your grief is real and valid because it is. It’s what you’re experiencing.  And it’s important to give yourself non judgemental and compassionate space to feel what you are going to feel.

We do not help ourselves by denying what we are feeling. The only way to move through grief is to get closer to it. One exercise that can be helpful is to take a pause, and think about the things that you are feeling at this moment. You can use an emotions wheel (pictured below) to help figure out what some of those feelings are and what they might be related to. By doing this, naming our feelings, we honor our feelings.

[Image description: a color wheel that names emotions and feelings starting from the center with broad emotions (Mad, Sad, Peaceful, Powerful, Joyful, and Scare) and branching out in to increasing levels of specificity {Joyful can be creative which can also be playful)] 

1. Find people you trust to hold your grief with you

Whether it’s meeting for a 1-1 with a professional counselor or having an intentional conversation with a friend, make space for yourself to share what you are feeling and express what you need: be it quiet support, vocal affirmations, or help in other areas. Know that when you choose to share your grief story, that grief is not linear. It is messy and complicated and it’s okay to not have it in a nicely outlined story. Tell your story in the way that feels good for you. And sometimes, there will be people you don’t expect to hold your grief with, let those experiences be what they will be.

[Image description: a side by side comparison of what people expect the stages of grief to look like; a clear bell-curve trajectory through the different emotions associated with grief versus “My Experience”; the same bell curve of emotions associated with grief with scribble lines all over in every direction where you can’t tell the beginning or the end of the line]

1. Take care of yourself

Did I eat today? Have I drunk water? Do I need to shower? Can I go for a short walk? Self-care is often talked about as face masks and a shopping spree, but there are so many ways that you can take care of yourself and different areas that you can focus on; mental, physical, emotional, or spiritual. We used this Self-care checklist  to help reflect on areas that we were doing well in and to identify areas that we needed  to put more care and thought into. 

Especially at times when it feels like every single person is going through it, it can be hard to admit how we are struggling and to do what we need to in order to take care of ourselves. Brene Brown talks about this in her podcast on Comparative Suffering. You can acknowledge that others have it hard AND you can acknowledge that what YOU are going through is hard too. You are worth of care and rest. So rather than falling into that comparison, we can choose to be empathetic and self-compassionate instead. Be kind to yourself. Be gentle with yourself. 

[Image description: The back of a person in the foreground of a starry night sky. Their hair is brown and braided into a crown, their head is tilted towards the sky. Their back is a moving image of trees as if walking along a tree line]

1. Honor your grief

Honoring your grief will look different person to person. And how you honor your grief as time goes on will also shift and change. Wherever you are in your grief, let yourself be there. Give yourself grace and compassion. Grief is complicated. It is not linear. You can go through the stages forwards, backwards and sideways and still have more to process. You are not behind or ahead. You are where you need to be. 

[Image description: Image of a slide used during the third session of PGPG,a background of an evening sky with soft clouds and in the foreground a listing of the reflection prompts that participants could choose from during the free-write  portion of the session. Some of the prompts include: “What do you want to honor about your loved ones and what do you want to continue to carry with you?” and “Write a gentle letter to yourself expressing kindness and forgiveness towards your past self.”]

Do you need someone to talk to? The women’s center provides 1-1 support to connect students with resources; additionally the counseling center provides both individual counseling and counseling within a group setting.

Further reading:

We drew a lot of our material for PGPG from this book: Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation by adrienne maree brown 

Here is a list of other grief-related articles mentioned in this blog post and that we referenced during PGPG:

Grief other than death:

Can I grieve if nobody died?

Grief is about loss, not just death

What’s Your Grief?

Activity: Who am I now?

Refuge In Grief

What if there’s no such thing as closure?

Mindfulness in grief

Join members of the UMBC community in a virtual event about the leaked SCOTUS opinion on abortion. A panel of faculty experts will speak about the context and implications of the leaked opinion from different perspectives. After Q&A, participants will be invited into breakout sessions for facilitated conversations for critical reflection and mutual understanding. 

Faculty Panelists:

• Laura Antkowiak, Associate Professor, Political Science

• William Blake, Associate Professor & Associate Department Chair, Political Science

• Loren Henderson, Associate Professor, Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health

• Carole McCann, Professor and Chair, Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies

Organized by the Center for Democracy and Civic Life and the Center for Social Science Scholarship.

Original Event Post Here

Content Warning: medical mistreatment

Positionally Statement: This post is written by Ojuswani Phogat, a second-year student at UMBC and a student-staff member at the Women’s Center. In writing this blog, I hope to shed light on one of the many ways in which individuals who experience menstruation are disenfranchised by the medical community, who so often fail to effectively diagnose menstrual irregularities in favor of prescribing the “birth control band aid” because they fail to believe and understand their patients’ issues. The following blog speculates as to how and why birth control is seen as the holy grail of menstruation issues when it, in fact, does not treat the problems at hand. I do not claim to be an expert on the uses or effects of birth control, nor am I situated in any position within the medical field myself, meaning my qualifications for discussing such issues are only through the lens of a patient. I aim not to blame providers but rather to expose the inefficiencies present in obtaining medical care for gynecological issues. This piece in no way aims to negate the necessity of birth control and its role as a contraceptive, as it should be accessible to all I with stand all those who are fighting for access to healthcare and autonomy over their bodies. Note: this piece uses the terms: The Pill, birth control, hormonal birth control, and contraception interchangeably to refer to the hormonal birth control pill. 

ID: Someone looking at a calendar filled in with three weeks of blue squares and one week of yellow squares. The calendar rests against a blue background.

I was 12 years old the first time I experienced irregularities in my menstrual cycle. I had gone through a six-week period of continuous heavy bleeding with no indication of nearing an end. I knew as much about menstruation as a child who had experienced their first period could, and as such I was more embarrassed than concerned by my condition. It wasn’t until the bags under my eyes looked like craters, and the brown of my skin gave way to a ghostly gray that I took steps to get help.

The medical care that ensued consisted of blood work, ultrasounds, and multiple gynecological visits before I was given some “remedy” to my apparently undiagnosable problem. A remedy that promised not only to “regularize” my cycle but also one that allowed the doctors to put the diagnosing efforts on the back burner as they congratulated themselves for a job well done. When these same symptoms resurfaced in my junior year of high school (approximately five years later), I was again given this same magical quick fix: a surface-level solution that hid rather than resolved my issue. That solution being none other than hormonal birth control. 

ID: The image displays the chemistry behind oral contraceptives, particularly the different hormones present in the body and how they are impacted by the use of contraceptives. The top left discusses the natural hormones 

If you aren’t yet aware of the absolute agony that hormonal birth control can be for some, allow me to open your eyes. Here are just some side effects of The Pill: nausea, vomiting, stomach cramps, bloating, fluctuations in appetite and weight, depression, blood clots, and strokes. I call on these primarily to situate your understanding of the immense impact that these tiny 15mm pills can have on the body and the mind.       

I know my story is not dissimilar to others in my life—both friends and colleagues—who resonated with an experience where insufficient health solutions facilitated the loss of well-being and health. The unfortunate reality is that a lack of effective medical care is pervasive, particularly when discussing menstrual issues. The long road to diagnosis and helpful treatment is one that I recognize many people are forced to take, the consequences of which have altered their ability to live a life they deem to be acceptable. 

It is important to note that this phenomenon is not new. Persons with menstrual ailments, whether or not they are related to chronic illness, have always been met with resistance when attempting to access proper health care in which their symptoms are clearly addressed. Such poor treatment by medical providers is an everyday struggle in the world of disability and chronic illness, in which people and their pain are ignored. 

The world of menstruation is complex. It is a bodily phenomenon that is all-consuming and one that leaves no area of the body or mind untouched. When one experiences this phenomenon abnormally, as  many do, their needs are habitually diminished and care foregone in place of a single band-aid solution: hormonal birth control. Whether it be polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, menorrhagia, etc. (all very different conditions), or even when lacking a clear diagnosis, the answer always seems to be The Pill. 

The Pill as a Cycle Regulator

I often ask myself: why it is that the medical community could even fathom such an intricate and enigmatic cycle (that differs from person to person) to be regulated by what is essentially a single remedy, especially when the remedy in question can have so many negative side effects?

In researching this further, I find the blame to lie in part with the medical community but more so on marketing and political agencies that have come to control the narratives of The Pill as medication and its uses. I speculate that this standard of care for menstrual issues has to do primarily with cultural stigmas surrounding menstruation and contraception and the way they have been handled in the legal-political sphere. 

The historical rhetoric surrounding both contraceptives and menstruation seems to be resoundingly negative and rooted in pervasive cultural stigmas that deem those seeking sexual health care to be shameful and promiscuous. The irrational fear is that increased access to contraceptives allows individuals to be sexually irresponsible which promotes vice. Even Gregory Pincus (the scientist responsible for the research and development of birth control) concerned himself with it as a scientific quest and not one rooted in sexual freedom for women (which he too strongly opposed). 

The origin of birth control was always marked by the stigmatization of any attempts to control conception, so much so that the form of The Pill on the market at the time was marked as an “obscene and illicit” material by law and therefore prohibited to be used for the purpose of preventing pregnancy. In the United States, the Comstock law of 1873 expressly forbade the distribution, discussion, research, or advertisement of contraceptives which encompassed a stronger version of today’s birth control pills. 

You might be asking, “Well, with all this red tape, how on earth did they come to create and distribute The Pill?” In answer,  birth control was marketed primarily as a mechanism for menstrual cycle control, as opposed to as a contraceptive, and could only be prescribed as such, mainly to married women. A similar phenomenon occurred in Canada with the 1892 Criminal Code which criminalized the sale or distribution of birth control since it was considered “illicit” material. As laws were adapted, birth control became available for use solely as a cycle regulator in 1960 and that practice accelerated its popularity as a prescription drug in the medical world.  

The standard of care that remains in the modern-day continues to “regulate” menstrual cycles by administering birth control.

Since its arrival on the market, The Pill has been used for the process of cycle regulation, when it was developed and intended to be a temporary mechanism for controlling whether one conceived or not. Even today, it remains unlike other modern medicine as it is “prescribed routinely and by default”. 

I can only speak as an individual on the patient end of the health care process who is dissatisfied with the medical care I have received thus far. It is disheartening to experience the sheer lack of options held by persons with menstrual issues when it comes to claiming agency over their health and to be poked and prodded for years only to remain in a state of unknowingness.  

The incorrect notion perpetuated by ineffective gynecological health care remains: menstruating individuals’ health matters less and will be treated as such. Because of this sentiment, the burden of care falls on individuals. It is critical to take note of the patterns and behaviors of your body. In doing so you may know how to better recognize and approach signs that may indicate menstrual disorders.

https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/view/menses-vital-sign-teenaged-girls

ID: The image is an infographic titled “Key Issues to keep in mind when assessing menses”. The bullets are as follows: remember to use menstrual cycle as a vital sign; even in the first year of menarche most girls have a period every 90 days; irregular periods even those resulting in anemia may be a sign of polycystic ovary syndrome; remember to screen for chlamydia in patients with heavy or irregular menstrual bleeding, teenagers with heavy bleeding should be screened for a bleeding disorder with at least a complete blood count (CBC), ferritin and thyroid-stimulating hormone level; the most common bleeding disorders associated with heavy menstrual bleeding include platelet function disorders and Willebrand disease; only draw von Willebrand testing during the first 3 days of a menstrual cycle when estrogen levels are at the nadir) 

If you are facing menstruation-related issues, I urge you to stand your ground in the exam room. While it is likely that your journey to diagnosis and productive help may not be easy, it is critical to actively protect your physical and mental self. You deserve appropriate care that works to treat rather than hide your ailments. Knowing the ways in which you may advocate for yourself in medical practices is key. 

In looking for further resources and information on this matter be sure to check out the links below: 

Menstruation and Menstrual Problems | NICHD – Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development 

Medline Plus Estrogen and Progestin (Oral Contraceptives) 

PBS The Side Effects of the Pill 

NIH Half a century of the oral contraceptive pill 

NIH How the Pill Became a Lifestyle Drug: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Birth Control in the United States Since 1960 

Figuring the Population Explosion: Demography in the Mid-Twentieth Century 

Calling all graduate student leaders!

The Graduate Student Association is looking for new Senators to represent all graduate students in the GSA Senate. 

If you are interested in becoming a senator, please apply here! ASAP

Elections will be done by poll in upcoming weeks.