Kitty Taylor

I teach geography standing up. 

This matters when your pelvis feels like it is collapsing in on itself, when the classroom clock ticks louder than any painkiller will allow, when lessons are measured not in minutes, but in how long your body will let you remain vertical. I have learned which parts of my body can be ignored and which cannot, how to anchor myself to the desk just long enough to project authority, how to keep my face neutral while pain moves invisibly beneath the surface.

For ten years, I lived with endometriosis and adenomyosis before it had a name. I lived with it through my own school career, countless exams, through my undergraduate degree, through a master’s dissertation, through teacher training, and into my early career as a geography and religious studies teacher. My body learned endurance before it learned explanation. The diagnosis came late, but the pain had already mapped itself onto my life. As a geographer, I was trained to think spatially: about place, power, scale, and visibility. As a teacher, I am trained to perform competence, stability, and control. Endometriosis sits uncomfortably between these two realms; an embodied geography that refuses to remain private, but also resists being spoken aloud.

Endometriosis and adenomyosis are embodied journeys that unfolds unevenly across time and space, operating as both a material and political condition. Within the body, it is experienced as a cyclical invasion: pain that moves, settles, flares, and retreats, mapping itself onto organs in ways that resist medical legibility. Yet this intimate, lived geography is repeatedly displaced outward, translated into waiting rooms, GP surgeries, ultrasound suites and consultants’ offices, where suffering must be rendered intelligible to medical authority in order to be recognised. Each encounter becomes a site of epistemic injustice, where experiential knowledge is questioned. In this way, endometriosis is spatialised not only through lesions and surgical scars, but through referral pathways, institutional thresholds, and the biopolitical governance of women’s bodies, extending illness beyond the body and embedding it within the architectures of healthcare power.

The ten-year delay in my diagnosis is not unusual. It is, in fact, structurally produced. Women’s pain is routinely normalised, minimised, or reframed as emotional excess rather than physical reality. Especially when it comes to conditions that affect reproductive routines, such as menstruation. This is not just a medical failure; it is a spatial one. Pain becomes something you carry quietly through lecture theatres, libraries, classrooms, workplaces, something that must not interrupt the smooth functioning of institutions. If not for the risk of not being believed, then due to the stigma surrounding diseases that affect menstruation. Waiting becomes a geography in itself. Waiting for appointments, for referrals, for belief. Waiting while life continues at pace. I learned to live with cyclical pain that structured my time more rigidly than any timetable: flare-ups dictating productivity, fatigue determining mobility. Teaching would later amplify this, binding my body to bells, periods, corridors, and expectations of constant availability.

As an undergraduate, I was drawn to critical health geographies. Drawn to questions of whose bodies are believed, whose pain is legitimised, whose experiences are rendered invisible. At the time, this interest felt academic and mainly focused on colonial medicine. In hindsight, it was deeply personal. I was already inhabiting the very systems I was trying to critique, my own body an unresolved case study.

Teaching in an all-boys school intensifies the silences around endometriosis and adenomyosis. It is not that boys are unkind, most (if not all) of my students and colleagues would not know of my condition; it is that the space itself is profoundly gendered. The ideal teacher body here is imagined as reliable, uninterrupted, unencumbered…a body that does not bleed, cramp, swell, or need to leave the room. Pain must be managed discreetly. There is no language for it that does not feel like a disruption. Toilets become sites of negotiation. Staffrooms become spaces of careful performance. Authority must be maintained even when your body feels as though it is actively undermining you. When your own body becomes unpredictable, you experience this control differently. I became aware of spatial hierarchies quickly: who is allowed to sit, who must stand, who can leave, who cannot. Endometriosis sharpened my awareness of how institutions are built around assumed bodies, and how quickly those assumptions fall apart when pain enters the room.

My laparoscopy marked a rupture. For the first time, my body was removed from the classroom entirely. For two whole weeks. The hospital became my dominant geography: corridors, waiting rooms, recovery wards. Here, my body was no longer required to perform competence. Instead, it was exposed, passive, and monitored. Recovery was a strange, enforced stillness…teaching culture does not prepare you for rest. Absence feels like failure. Even while healing, I felt tethered to the classroom; thinking about cover work, lessons missed, the rhythm of the school day continuing without me. Healing, I realised, was not just physical. It was spatial. Being away from school allowed my body to soften slightly, to exist without constant vigilance. But it also revealed how deeply teaching had reorganised my relationship to pain: how endurance had become a professional skill, how ignoring my body had been quietly rewarded.

Illness has reshaped my pedagogy. It made me more attentive to how students occupy space, how discomfort manifests as distraction, how vulnerability is often misread as disengagement. It complicated my understanding of resilience. It challenged the myth of the endlessly capable teacher body. My training as a geographer gave me language for this. My training as a teacher forced me to live it. The two are now inseparable. Geography is not something I simply teach; it is something I inhabit. Through pain, through recovery, through the everyday negotiations of a body that does not always comply.

Endometriosis and adenomyosis resist closure. There is no final chapter where pain disappears and normality resumes. Teaching is similar. You can step away from the classroom, but you never fully leave it. Its rhythms, expectations, and demands linger in the body long after the bell rings. Writing this is part of my healing. It is a way of reclaiming the narrative from systems that prefer silence. It is a way of acknowledging that my body is not a problem to be solved, but a geography to be understood: layered, contested, and shaped by power.

The classroom never leaves the body. But neither does the capacity to reimagine it. And this is geography embodied.