The Privilege of Breaking Down

making it through

The Mosquito Net / John Singer Sargent /

Breaking down is a privilege.

I have learned this many times.

I am learning it again now.

Hives bloom overnight; tiny bumps littering my skin, screaming for attention. My body has opened its windows; my body does what it wants. Vertigo and nausea breeze through my ear canal and settle in my stomach.

My editor emails me in late January asking about my revision. I ask for more time. She doesn’t respond. In the past year and a half, I have turned around two revisions, each on a tight timeline. I can’t do it again. I want this one to be good. To be done. But it takes time.

I plead with the people who brought me to this Ph.D. program. Can I drop a class? Is there anything I can do to give myself more space? They lured me here: I remember the conversation clearly. All the promises about flexibility and cheap rent. They suggest medical leave, which would leave me without a paycheck and without health insurance. My neighbor, a tenured professor, assures me that I’ll be taken care of, but I won’t, and I’m not. There is no net to catch me. I cannot drop any classes. There is no flexibility. This place is a machine, and I am a cog.

I apply for accommodations and receive them. In a meeting, another professor clarifies: You can’t use these accommodations for your book revisions. This simple statement reduces me to a high-schooler evading classwork. I cry in the Zoom room. I regret mentioning the revisions at all; it was a slip. They were weighing on me, like everything else.

In between classwork and teaching and the revisions I drive from doctor to doctor, grateful for my health insurance; cursing the traffic in this sprawling town. Each visit comes with a copay. Each blood test costs $50. The allergist doesn’t answer their phone. The doctor gives me the wrong lab form. The dermatologist suspects I am allergic to my rheumatoid arthritis medication. I’m prescribed an Epi-Pen. At some point I will understand what is happening with my body.

I submit an essay at midnight, then stay up until 3 am finishing a presentation. I sprint to class the next day: the doctor’s office squeezed me in, but this has made me late for my presentation. I am flustered. The PowerPoint has typos. Somehow I remember everything I’ve read and sound halfway coherent. During our discussion the professor takes notes, assessing each graduate student on their participation and comments.

My PhD stipend, including my fellowship, is less than $30k a year. The PhD program partially subsidizes my health insurance. I contemplate leaving the program. I contemplate sleeping for two months. I fantasize about rest.

I recall my mother’s memorial, after her suicide. The one week I took off of work. Flying from Fairbanks to Seattle and back again. Nine days after her death I was working on a fire in the Alaskan Wilderness. I needed the money. I couldn’t quit.

I read books and newsletters and articles about rest. About taking care. About someone’s breakdown.

I envy these breakdowns. The trips to rehab. The refuge of a parent’s basement as a temporary home base. The unmentioned financial resources behind so many success stories.

I wonder if I could break down, but cannot let myself break down, because I don’t trust that anything would catch me.

What if I took medical leave? Lost my health insurance? My stipend?

I imagine a receding wave.

I imagine the wave that comes after, crashing into the shore, filling everything that was left empty.

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When you have slept on sidewalks and under bridges and in stranger’s cars, those sidewalks and bridges and empty cars live in your memory and your future. They wait for your return. You must make sure you never return.

You cannot take medical leave.

There is no parent’s basement or inheritance or savings account. But there is more than there has been in the past, and that is something.

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I have chosen this life.

This creative life. I could find a full-time nanny job or try other jobs and make more money and change everything.

I chose this, right?

This is where I rest, for now.

I know it’s not a conclusion. But it is the present moment. And it will change. And I have doctors. And someday, hopefully, I can take some time off and have the breakdown I have always deserved and longed for. I can let everything fall apart, and the pieces will be gathered in the netting waiting below.

For now, I hold it together, and I keep going.

Some links:

• Rest in Power, Aaron Bushnell.

• Ezra Klein on Palestine and Israel.

• Remembering Rachel Corrie.

• Remembering Alexei Navalny.