A Jumble of Thoughts from the Abyss

On privilege, academia, and calling oneself a writer.

Mar 26, 2023

The end of spring break was two weeks ago, but I worry on most days how I will make it to the end of the school year. Once I am finished worrying about that, I worry about how I will make enough money to pay my rent during the two month gap between the end of this semester and when I will receive my first paycheck for teaching a summer writing composition class, which will be direct deposited into my account sometime during the second week of July.

How will I make it, I ask myself. I ask myself this because I don’t know how I will make it. Because one week off after working sixteen hours a day teaching, reading and writing for classes, and revising my book, was not nearly enough time to recover.

Because how can I think about finding freelance work or designing a course or two or doing anything when there is so much I have to do that I wake up each morning already overwhelmed by it all?

Sometimes I ask myself: how am I doing everything? I have asked myself this question a lot over the course of my lifetime. When I was a firefighter. When I was a nanny. When I was working 30 hours a week during undergrad.

I especially asked myself this question after my mom died by suicide. I asked myself: how am I not falling apart? The secret was that I was falling apart, but I couldn’t afford to actually fall apart. I had to pay my rent.

There is a kind of resentment that builds in me when people who have a lot of resources complain about their lives. By resources I mean parents, family money, savings accounts, backup plans, good health insurance, mediocre and/or okay childhoods. The resentment builds, and then I feel guilty for feeling any resentment at all. These people have as much of a right to complain as I do. Everything is subjective. My pain isn’t necessarily worse than theirs, nor is my sense of instability. If it is, I have no real way of knowing this, because I can only experience my own life. Not theirs.

But I resent it. I resent not having money. I resent not having family support.

And then I feel guilty for resenting it.

Resenting someone else doesn’t change anything.

(listen to Matthew Desmond’s conversation on Fresh Air, about his new book Poverty, By America)

I know that I have my own privileges. Many of them. But money is not one of them. When I think of bridging that gap between May 8th and July 14th, I know I will do it. I will do anything. I will work at McDonald’s if I have to (I’ve done it before). But I don’t have to (although I am not totally sure of that). That I (probably) don’t have to work at McDonalds is part of my privilege.

Other privileges I have? My whiteness. Without my whiteness, I would surely be in prison for crimes I committed when I was a teenager, or unraveling my time in prison. Being poor and white is one thing. Being poor and Black, or Native American, or Latinx, is a whole other thing.

When I got myself to Syracuse at 32 years-old and began my undergraduate degree, I did not imagine that I would be struggling as much as I am ten years later. And yet, in a way, it’s my choice to struggle. Because I chose my PhD, which pays very little and demands very much. I could be making good money as a nanny (except I cannot nanny anymore because my body is broken from my last nanny job). I could find an office job somewhere (theoretically).

Instead, I have chosen to have less money, less security (very little security), because I want to be able to write and read.

And yet, others choose this, and for them the choice is different. Others get to choose this without wondering if they will perhaps be homeless (again) when their stipend stops in May.

(part of my privilege is knowing that I will not be homeless again. but I don’t always know that I will not be homeless again)

This isn’t what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about not knowing what to do, because I have so many things to do. Here are the things I have to do this week:

Install and figure out Zotero.
Complete my class readings (which I like doing, but which takes a lot of time).
Continue researching for my book and (other) newsletter.
Teach my two writing composition classes.
Go to my PhD classes.
Look at a cheaper apartment (fingers crossed).
Write out plans for my newsletters.
Sleep.
Eat.
Exercise.
Try not to fall into the social media abyss.

Hm. Writing it down helps.

The truth is, I haven’t been writing this newsletter because I have nothing positive to say right now.

And that’s not a good reason not to write this newsletter.

Because what am I waiting for? That moment when things all come together?

Then, I could come back and write a perfect newsletter that is inspiring and hopeful and celebratory. In that newsletter, I’d tell you that things were very dark, but now they are no longer dark, and isn’t that great?

I am tired of this way of storytelling. I have no interpretation for my current experience. I only know that it feels difficult, and it is difficult, and that my body hurts and that my average nightly sleep for the past six months is six hours and twenty-seven minutes, and that I have an autoimmune disorder, which means I am supposed to get good sleep and not be so stressed out.

Sometimes instead of sleeping I watch TikTok, and my hungry dopamine receptors feel a sense of connection that’s not really there, so I watch more of it.

Then I delete TikTok and get two good nights of sleep. Then I download Tiktok again.

(or Instagram, or Reddit, or (tv show name))

This is not how I want to live my life.

I’m making things sound really horrible. They’re not. There are many good things happening in my life.

I have a book coming out (eventually, someday, hopefully), I go to parks and take long walks alone (and sometimes with others), I pet my cat. I have made a couple friends I truly adore (and am grateful for).

my cat is a source of joy, most of the time

But I also wonder when my goals will include more than simply being financially secure.

Lately I’ve been asking myself (again): what do I want? For so long (over a decade) that answer was “to be a writer.”

Now I am a writer. And here I am. Turns out I was always a writer. Turns out nothing changes when you reach a goal. I am the same person I was when I first started believing I could (maybe) be a (real) writer. This was fifteen years ago now.

My problem? That I thought I wasn’t a real writer to begin with.

That I saw writing as a hierarchical practice, and some writers as superior. I based my conception of their superiority on the awards they’d won or where their work was published or if they had books out in the world or (hate to admit this but) how many followers they had on social media.

And truthfully, I am grateful for that hierarchical view because it got me through school. And I am grateful for many of the people I met and worked with, both in my undergraduate and MFA program. And I’m even grateful to be here in this PhD program, because I get to learn things and write things.

But now that I am here I can see what a farce it is, this idea that there are real writers at all. There are no fake writers except for people who call themselves writers and do not write at all.

Now that I am here, in the academy, I see the way people are categorized based on their accolades, awards, and publications. And I also long for all three of those things, because I’m a human being (but mostly because they come with money).

But the truth is I am no different now than when I was not a writer in the eyes of others. Except that I no longer see other writers, no matter how popular or talented or hard-working or famous, as better than me.

There is no one better than I am.

I am no better than anyone else.

This is what’s different about me now, as opposed to then.

I understand now that yes, maybe writing does involve a certain level of “talent.” I’m not sure how much. I think the “talent” is a kind of ability to observe the self and others in a specific way. That specific way is unique to each writer.

Sometimes I think the “talent” is actually just really hard work. Revising and revising and revising. A way of seeing that happens to align with the currently praised way of seeing.

Because for some very “talented” writers, their writing will go unnoticed because not enough people understand it. Because it doesn’t fit into the current definition of “good.” History tells us this.

Thinking about the discourse of privilege

In my MFA several people told me that my writing was accessible. Which was, to me, a compliment. But others would say the same thing, replacing the word accessible with “simple.”

In my PhD it’s clear to me that some students “get” theory in a way that I don’t “get” theory. They understand the language of theory. I have, for my entire academic career, had a strong aversion to these different languages. While I think it’s productive to know and understand many different kinds of theory, I resist marrying myself to any singular theory, but I am also a fan of reading about the different ways people have seen and interpreted literature and art, so I read theory and enjoy theory.

I also understand that the place I come from (a single mother without a high-school diploma, an absent father who didn’t graduate middle-school, too many schools to count, always reading in the corner) is often the place I want to write towards.

I never want to write things that I wouldn’t have been able to understand when I was 20 years-old.

But I also understand that, at 20, I spoke in a different language than I speak now. There were many words I mispronounced and didn’t know. Yet I had a dictionary, and used it often. I read books and got what I could from them.

At 20, I read Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and I understood it. I read Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and I understood it. Some of my first favorite books were by Richard Wright and Amy Tan. I gravitated towards books written by people of color because many of the books written by white people did not seem to articulate this feeling I had, of existing on the margins of the world in school and at home, and everywhere.

It wasn’t until I was in my undergrad that I understood my own white privilege. But I resisted the concept, because I had not felt privileged for most of my life. I had experienced homelessness and a lot of economic instability. And when my mom married someone with money, I experienced abuse at his hands. At their hands. So my financial stability seemed to come at a cost.

It took me a long time to absorb this word privilege, and to understand its intersections (thanks to Kimberlé Crenshaw).

In the academy, I see people categorizing themselves by their marginalized identities, and I do this, too.

And: sometimes a point of marginalization can become a shield to hide behind. It can be weaponized to make someone else feel smaller. Sometimes by people with power, to harm those with less power.

Our points of privilege and marginalization matter, especially when it comes to education, our prison systems, and our particular histories of slavery and land-stealing and redlining and suffrage (to name only a few).

Right now, Trans people are fighting for their (our) legal existence in the United States. People with disabilities are still fighting for basic accommodations and access. Black people are still dying at the hands of racist police.

And: many people highlight the ways in which they are marginalized without highlighting their privileges.

This, to me, feels evasive and manipulative.

I have reread Beloved and Ceremony and many of the books I read when I was younger, and my understanding of them is deeper and more complex than it was when I was younger. Then, it was impossible for me to fully recognize the ways in which my own lineage and race granted me access to the inner circle, if I wanted it. Now that access is more clear to me. I am a white queer nonbinary person who is disabled, and yet on sight I appear to be a white woman. I can pass as straight if I need to. Many of the ways in which I am and have been marginalized are out of sight, and that in itself offers me a lot of privilege.

It took me a long time to understand this.

Click here to watch Kimberlé Crenshaw’s TED Talk on Intersectionality.

You might be wondering where I am going.

Let me circle back to the beginning, where I admitted that I sometimes feel resentment towards people who have more resources than I do.

There’s this phenomenon I’ve noticed, where people hide their privileges. And another phenomenon, where people are open about their privileges, and lead with them.

I think the latter is important. I think more people should do it.

I also think that we cannot distill our experiences as humans down to our points of privileges and marginalization.

I don’t think we can assume anything about someone’s race, (dis)ability, gender, sexual orientation, economic status or past statuses, neurodivergences, or (name many many other ways of existing in the world) by looking at them or regarding them superficially (i.e. on social media or from a simple exchange).

And here is where I ask myself: who am I resenting?

I myself could certainly be resented, for my own privileges.

What does my resenting do, but work as a kind of wedge between me and someone else?

Also: what drives my resentment?

I don’t have an answer for that last one yet, but I am absolutely positive that it is very complicated.

Thank you for reading this very honest little newsletter.

I’m interested in what you have to say, in how you feel, in what you think. So please, if you have feelings and/or thoughts, leave a comment.