How can I ever tell you what is really like?
How do I explain the will necessary to get up each day, to go and work somewhere that I know doesn’t value me?
How do I explain the impact that those bemused looks have when I encounter yet another obligatory bureaucratic process that doesn’t account for my existence?
How do I explain the pit in my stomach as I go to a meeting with someone who just last week sent me a very polite email explaining why I didn’t count and why I didn’t deserve to be supported? How I, nonetheless, go and fight and demand my right to exist, and how much that takes from me?
How do I explain that when a colleague is actually kind to me, I go back to my office to cry, because I’m so unused to it at this point? Because having someone validate the painful feelings I try to suppress brings them bubbling back up to the surface.
How do I explain how distressing it is to myself to students each semester, so that they know that their evaluations of my teaching will affect my ability to pay rent next semester?
How do I explain the depression I sink into at the end of every semester as my working world, what sometimes feels like my whole world, collapses?
How do I explain how painful it is when well-meaning friends and colleagues tell me I’m doing all the right things and they’re sure will come through soon? If I’m doing all the right things, how is it still not enough? And they can’t possibly know things will turn out well for me. But I should thank them for meaningless platitudes, because I know they’re trying to help?
How do I explain the frustration when every member of my college and university expresses sympathy, but nothing more? As though they can’t effect change. As though I’m an inconvenient symptom of a problem they would rather ignore.
How do I explain that another six months’ worth of work might sound like a good thing, but that it traps me in a perpetual cycle? But then how do I explain that I’m too scared to make another choice and abandon my academic dreams?
I don’t know how to deal with this. I am not someone who fights the system. I have great colleagues and dear friends who shake things up in necessary and important ways, who seek to undermine and fundamentally restructure the system. That’s not my model. I work within systems to try and effect change. But this system doesn’t even want to acknowledge my existence. I’m not sure my model will work.
But in some ways I’m one of the lucky ones. I have an office to use (and sometimes cry in). I’ve had enough work to pay my bills and no one else I financially support. I have (some) colleagues who help to amplify my work and my voice when I don’t feel able to, who have slowly grown to understand how small this system makes me feel.
But being treated like a peer, like a colleague, being treated as a whole human being, should not be that notable. I don’t know if the system will ever improve, but I hope that as people we can do better by one another.
Anonymous contributor.
