A future lost and gained.
As we collectively trudge into the one year anniversary of the lockdown, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot recently on Arundhati Roy’s essay “The Pandemic is a Portal.” She wrote this just a few weeks into the pandemic, and it has remained a north star for me throughout a year that has left me anxious, exhausted, and unmoored.
Roy wrote:
“What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
Even before the pandemic hit, I had begun putting energy into the work of imagining and fighting for another world. But then coronavirus illuminated the worst of what was happening in the world, the malignancy and violence of racism, imperialism, capitalism and patriarchy, and the urgency of this work became undeniable.
Then, quite suddenly and to my great and naïve shock, I found myself walking through my own, other kind of portal. A change in leadership in the center where I teach led to an unfortunately timed reorganization and the swift elimination of my position. I had conversations in which I mistakenly believed I would be reappointed to my faculty position at the end of my current contract. In fact, I was so naïve I even thought I might have a shot at finally getting a raise after years of teaching at a pay level that was lower even than what we paid our adjuncts (to say nothing of how I compared to my fellow full-time faculty members).
Instead, just a few weeks under new management, and I was told that the center was “going in a different direction” and there was no longer a role for me. I’d finish out the last year of my contract, and be done. That was it. No further explanation. None was owed to me. It was a five-minute conversation, a bullet point on an agenda. Later, it was suggested that I “share the news” with my colleagues at a faculty meeting. I did not subject myself to the public shame of announcing my own layoff. I skipped that meeting.
I’ve been walking through this particular portal for seven months now. While this loss for me was not even close to the unimaginable loss others have experienced this year, it has been difficult. I‘ve gone through my own series of stages: Grief. Anger. Anxiety. More anger. Acceptance. A little bit of hope. Still anxiety. And finally, where I’m at now, resolve to walk through this portal with little baggage, ready to build the world I want to see. Still with a healthy (or, not so much) dose of anxiety.
Throughout this time, I’ve been reflecting on the uniquely impossible position working mothers have been put in this past year. And so has everyone else on the internet. A quick Google search, and I find the following headlines:
“In One Year, Coronavirus Pandemic has Wreaked Havoc on Working Women”
“Women’s Ambition Plummeted During the Coronavirus Pandemic, as Careers Stalled and Burnout Spiked” (By the way, CNBC, whoever wrote this headline should be fired. Fuck off with that “ambition plummeted” bullshit)
“Coronavirus Pandemic Deals Fatal Blow to Israel’s Working Women”
And my favorite (incidentally, also from CNBC) “Lost Jobs, Less Pay, No Childcare: A Year Into the Pandemic, Women are Not OK”
Duh.
I didn’t lose my job because of coronavirus. My vulnerability had more to do with the precarious nature of non-tenure track faculty positions. We’re the gig workers of academia. The Uber drivers, if you will. That’s no shade to Uber drivers; it’s shade to the system that exploits them. As a full-time faculty member, I at least had the security of benefits. But too many of my colleagues don’t. We’re all underpaid. And we’re all on contracts that make us particularly vulnerable to economic swings or simply the whims of the leadership who control our fates.
There are many ways in which I am so much more fortunate than many women who have been forced out of the workforce right now, and I want to acknowledge that. Yet, I find myself in solidarity with one particular thing that I suspect millions of women are experiencing in some way: a future once envisioned, now lost.
For me, it’s a career that I had planned to have for many years to come, snuffed out in a brief phone call (Slack call, actually). I face the improbability of moving forward on this career path when I and so many others are all searching for a needle in a haystack (it was already difficult to get full-time faculty positions at universities before the pandemic, now it’s all but impossible). With this comes the pain and, yes, humiliation, of grappling with starting all over again when you’re almost 40 and you look around and friends and colleagues are all continuing that hallowed upward trajectory of promotions and career advancements. The knowledge that my earnings will likely never recover from this. The nagging self-doubt that if I were better, smarter, more important, I could’ve somehow prevented this. Those moments when, I’ll admit, I wonder what might have gone differently if I didn’t have two kids in the first five years of my academic career.
I found myself up in the middle of the night earlier this week, as I often do, sitting with my son during yet another of his weekly bouts of insomnia. We’re coming up on two years of chronic sleep deprivation, yet my exhaustion is deeper than that. Tears streamed down my face, because goddamn I just wanted to sleep, but also because I was reflecting on my career up to this point, and all the years of fighting, which makes the loss that much more bitter.
You see, in my experience — which may be colored by being a young woman who has spent all of my career in industries dominated by older men — to be a woman in the workplace is to constantly be fighting for your own legitimacy. I’ve been treated as a personal assistant by older men countless times. I’ve been told I’m too emotional. I’ve been made to feel like I’m problematic for negotiating my salary or advocating for myself to HR. I’ve run meetings where the men at the table wouldn’t even make eye contact with me. I’ve been at events and run into male colleagues whom I’ve met and spoken to many times, had meetings with and had as guests in my classes, and yet, who still didn’t even know my name. In most cases, I don’t think the people on the other side of these interactions even realized what was happening. That, too, is part and parcel of the experience for many women. The commonness and banality of it all. And we wonder why women suffer from imposter syndrome…
Throw in a couple of pregnancies and a pumping schedule at work, and you might as well be invisible. You get offered flexibility if you’re lucky, and you get penalized for taking it. If you advocate for yourself, you’re a troublemaker.
I recently listened to a podcast with the brilliant activist and writer adrienne maree brown, in which she talked about all the time and energy she felt like she wasted early in her career trying to be “taken seriously by serious people.” It was an off-hand comment, not the focus of the episode, and yet it was so resonant I’ve thought about it nearly every day since I listened to it. As a queer woman of color, I can only imagine how exhausting that must have been for her, when what we mean by “serious people” is almost always powerful, white men.
The truth is, many working mothers were “not OK” long before the pandemic hit. The workplace is still designed for men who have wives at home taking care of the business of life. Public education serves as a meager support system for working mothers, and when it broke down this year, they paid the price, as they always do.
So, reflecting on all of this the other night while my son tossed in my arms, I cried. My heart broke for the 2.3 million women, who, like me, worked and fought and dreamed of futures that they were suddenly forced to abandon this year. I felt the weight deep in my bones of all those years of trying so hard to be taken seriously by serious people. I felt the grief of seeing five years of building an academic career, building programs and classes, building relationships, torn down right at the point when I should be excelling, right at a moment in time when the hope of recovering it amounts to fantasy. I felt the physical toll of growing and nurturing and nursing little human beings in a society that tells us this work has no value, and you damn well better keep it out of the “real” workplace if you want to have a glimmer of hope of being taken seriously.
But, something else has also been happening recently. There’s a palpable sense of emerging on the other side of the portal — both the pandemic and this unexpected career transition. With vaccines steadily being rolled out, infection rates remaining (relatively) low, and warm weather finally moving in, it feels like we may soon be able to get back to some version of those life-affirming things we used to do, like spending time with friends and family, without too much anxiety. And I’m entering into the final handful of months of my teaching career at Northwestern. This bizarre, draining, liminal year of being both in and out is finally coming to a close.
I don’t know what I’m doing next, but I have some ideas. After a year more focused than ever on imagining the world I want to see, it feels like time to build. I no longer have the patience for nor interest in “being taken seriously by serious people.” I’m no longer interested in “a seat at the table.” I’m interested in smashing that table and building something else. A community garden, perhaps. Getting my hands in the earth. It won’t be lucrative. I’m never going to realize my earnings potential. But I’m not interested in neoliberal notions of value anyway (clearly).
What I am interested in is building relationships of reciprocity and equity with my human and more than human community. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass has become another profoundly important north star for me through these lonely and difficult months.
As I walk through this portal, a future has been lost, yes. But another future is taking shape. I hold on to the hope that it’s one more beautiful, more just, and more nurturing than I could have imagined.
As Kimmerer says, “all flourishing is mutual.” I’m letting that guide me as I emerge from this portal into a new world.
