Isolation: A Bubble of My Own Making

TE AO MĀORI | ISSUE TEN | ISOLATION

Written by Taigaga (Jamal) Rerecich (he/him) | @417mal | Contributing Writer

I've always thought of myself as a social person. I like people, I like being around people, I like the noise and mess of whanaungatanga. So it surprised me, writing this piece, to realise that isolation is something I live inside every single day. Not the isolation of being alone, but the isolation of being somewhere nobody else I know can quite follow me into.

Law school is a bubble. I don't mean that as a criticism, just as a personal description of what it is. Inside this bubble, everything matters more than it has any right to. A grade, a moot performance, a missed deadline, a triumph in a competition, these things sit on your chest for days. They shape how you see yourself. They become, temporarily, the whole world. And then you step outside the bubble, and none of it means anything at all.

Most of my mates are tradies. They're out on building sites, engineering boats, running crews, earning good money and going home at the end of the day with dirt on their hands and nothing left to prove to anyone. When I try to tell them about a case I've been wrestling with, or the pressure of an assessment, they nod politely, and then we talk about something else. It's not that they don't care. It's that the bubble I live in simply doesn't reach them. It has no gravity outside its own walls. I'll go from a three-hour negotiation prep session, adrenaline still running, straight to a barbecue where the biggest conversation is about ute trays and how the Warriors are playing. Two completely different worlds, and I'm the only one carrying both.

That's a strange kind of isolation. Not loneliness exactly, because I have people all around me. It's more like being fluent in a language nobody else in my life speaks. And for someone who whakapapa Māori, that isolation has another layer stitched into it.

Te ao Māori teaches us that we are never truly alone, that our whakapapa places us inside a whakapapa of relationships stretching backwards to tūpuna and forwards to those not yet born. Whanaungatanga is not just some nice concept; it's the structure holding everything up. And yet, walking into a lecture theatre in first year, I remember feeling the opposite of that. Looking around a room of 200+ faces and counting the number of tauira that looked Māori. Realising that succeeding in this bubble often meant learning to operate in spaces that were never built with tāngata whenua in mind, spaces where the frameworks, the language, even the humour belonged to someone else's world.

That is its own isolation. Not just being one of the few Māori in the room, but carrying the quiet, constant translation work of moving between te ao Māori and the Pākehā-shaped world of legal academia. You learn to code-switch without even noticing you're doing it. You learn which version of yourself gets you through a tutorial, and which version comes home to your whānau.

What's helped me most has been finding others carrying the same weight. Te Aro Ture (AUT Māori Law Students Society) and the wider community have become something like a second whakapapa inside the bubble, a place where the translation work isn't necessary because everyone already speaks both languages. Where a negotiation competition can be about strategy and also about tikanga, where governance conversations can hold both Incorporated Societies Act provisions and a karakia. In those spaces, isolation drops away, because the bubble briefly widens to fit who I actually am, rather than asking me to shrink to fit it.

But that only happens some of the time. Most days, the bubble stays a bubble, and I stay someone standing slightly outside two worlds at once, too immersed in law school to fully live in the world my mates live in, too grounded in whakapapa to fully disappear into law school's version of what matters.

Maybe that's the real lesson te ao Māori offers here. Isolation isn't cured by choosing one world over the other. It's softened by remembering that whakapapa doesn't ask you to be in only one place. It asks you to carry all your places with you, the lecture theatre and the barbecue, the moot court and the marae, and to trust that none of them cancels each other out. The bubble will always feel like it matters more than it should. But whakapapa is the reminder that something else, older and steadier, matters more than the bubble ever could.