The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

by Megan Stielstra

  29

  November 5, 2004. Marketa sends us a text message:

  Oh no! It’s very bad! I would like to cry! I don’t understand people who want to have so bad president! Don’t be scared please I still like you and I’m sorry about your bad president! I wish you better time my darlings.

  29

  Back to Chicago, back to Humboldt Park: a new third-floor walk-up at North and Kimball. It had three bedrooms and an open floor plan. Before we signed the lease, the landlord asked what would happen when we broke up. Which one of us would move out? How would the other pay the rent?

  “We’re not going to break up,” Christopher said.

  She gave him a look.

  “We’re not!” I said.

  She called me my dear and said, “Good luck.”

  Luck: we had each other. Luck: we had our friends. Luck: we still had jobs. I split my time in front of students and behind a bar, and it was then that I started to figure out the craft of oral storytelling, how the literary techniques I was teaching from Kafka and Morrison and Didion were so similar to those my customers used after a mimosa or two or five: structure, tension, exaggeration, scene. This is a necessary plot point to the story of me and the personal essay; I didn’t start off writing them for the page. I wrote them to tell out loud, mostly in bars, to a hundred or so deliciously tipsy people looking for connection in this beautiful mess of a world. I signed on with a storytelling collective called 2nd Story; we are educators and directors and producers who support people of all ages, backgrounds, and skill levels in first writing their own stories, and then performing them out loud.

  People spend a lifetime looking for a creative community.

  This is mine.

  29

  Fuck the shows and movies where the woman won’t get out of bed on the morning of her thirtieth birthday. Fuck the expectations and the social conditioning. You do not need to be married with careers and houses and good skin and a size four and gold cards and Blahniks and poodles and babies—babies! I didn’t have a dentist.

  “I want a baby,” a friend told me. “I’m thirty-four.”

  “Madonna—” I started.

  “don’t tell me madonna had a baby at forty everybody says that i could give a flying fuck fuck madonna my clock is ticking.”

  I’d read an article in Newsweek about women freezing their eggs to fertilize later, if and when they decided to have a family, however they chose to do so. Apparently, they were “lining up with their credit cards and their dreams.”

  I liked this idea.

  “Wait till you’re thirty,” my friend said. “Just wait.”

  29

  We got a puppy.

  30

  We walked into the house. I didn’t know how I would feel. I hadn’t been there in over a decade, not since my parents split, and my mom moved out, and my dad got a renter and left for Alaska. There were the wood walls and floors and ceiling, the front windows overlooking our little lake. The dock was still there where that boy threw turtles for my dog to fetch. The rowboat was still there, same green oars that carried me away. Upstairs were my bookshelves, the poems on the walls painted over. The garage felt wrong in its emptiness, but the rest of the house was new: new paint, new carpet, no furniture—ours.

  When Dad called from Alaska and asked me to drive to Chelsea and check on the house, I was worried it would be haunted, that I’d only remember the last few years of high school when everything got hard. Instead, I saw a refuge, a hideout, like Terabithia or the Batcave. A new renter would move in that summer, which gave Christopher and me nearly a year of weekends to escape from the city. We slept on an air mattress in front of the fireplace. We spent Saturdays reading books. We figured out what would happen next.

  30

  We got married on a beach in Macatawa, Michigan. Our friends Amy and Scott were kind enough to share their home, and we brought ten friends for the week. It was lovely. It was easy. We swam in the lake and shopped at the farmer’s market. We watched The Shining four times in a row. Dia and Jessica and I went skinny-dipping. Randy read us poetry. There was Maker’s Mark in bulk because apparently, while everyone was getting dolled up before the ceremony, Jeff walked into the kitchen where the caterers were setting up and yelled, “my god there’s only a half bottle of bourbon!” One of them took pity on him and went to the store. Later that evening he walked me across the beach to my almost husband and as the people we love looked on, Lott—by the power invested in him by www.spiritualhumanism.org—married us as the sun went down.

  It was perfect.

  It still is.

  I’m not saying that every day is barefoot in the sand. That’s okay. I can sit here in my sweatpants watching him cook mac ’n’ cheese and think: I am wild about this person. I think it when he talks about art or worries about money or worries about me. When he rides bikes with our son or builds robots with our son or talks to our son about what it means to be a good person. When he reads books every night before bed because he’s online all day and has rules about when he can and can’t be on the Internet. When he’s walking toward me from a distance and, in the split second before I recognize that he’s mine, I think: Oh my god, look at that guy! And when he sits at the computer, working, working, working for this life we lead and these dreams we have—him and me and our family and our plans.

  Course of One’s Life

  The new provost asks all faculty and staff to submit their updated CVs to his office for review. Ask—his word—but it’s clear that this is a requirement. “If you’re unsure of the conventions of a CV,” his e-mail informs us, “you can find support at the Center for Innovation in Teaching Excellence.”

  Within the hour my inbox is full of fear.

  * * *

  In higher education, abbreviations are an art unto themselves. Ours was C-I-T-E and pronounced “the site.” After years as a freelance writer and part-time educator, this was my first full-time job: first nine to five, first trip to HR, first weekly staff meeting and white elephant holiday party and e-mails about leftover donuts in the break room and please don’t clip your toenails at your desk. I had a desk! My own desk! It came with a dedicated file cabinet, an ergonomic chair and was next to a window, which those of us in cubicles know is the holy goddamn grail. It reminded me of Scotty Got an Office Job, this incredible web series by Scotty Iseri about the absurdity of office culture. He writes lines from Pee-wee Herman on his palms and secretly films himself gesturing at meetings. He steals a coworker’s teabags, the ones marked do not steal my teabags, and stuffs them down his pants. He performs an epic synchronized swimming routine across a sea of cubicles, and every time I crossed my own sea—four rows of six, specifically—I wished I could do the same.

  Truth is I was rarely there. My team and I ran from building to building across the college’s South Loop campus, facilitating workshops for departments in instructional development and educational technology. We designed curriculum, online classes, and faculty retreats. We sat on committees for pedagogy, learning outcomes, and strategic planning. We did classroom observations and one-on-one consultations. We attended student forums and took their perspectives back to the faculty, centering their needs across our programming.

  Specifically, my job involved helping teachers create inclusive classroom spaces, which meant bringing together the many people engaged in the work in their separate silos, a sort of lab or think tank. “I imagine it like this,” I’d say. “My creative nonfiction class is a place where students can focus on their writing. Once a week, for four hours, the rest of the world falls away. So often, we don’t have that luxury as teachers: a place to talk about our work, to think about our work, a place to try new things.”

  I loved it.

  When you have love, you can handle any amount of bullshit.

  Right up until you can’t.

  * * *

  “CV is short for curriculum vitae. Latin—” I’d say, “for ‘course of one’s life.’”

 
; Laptops are out, everyone furiously taking notes and panicked about paperwork. The room is packed. A year earlier, the college’s new president and CEO told an auditorium full of faculty and staff that we were on a “value clock”: at some point, our value to the college would run out and we’d be let go. The air went out of the room. Tension unrolled, an unspoken fear carried around campus and into classrooms. Shhhh, can you hear it? Tick tock. Since that day, attendance at the CITE’s professional development workshops spiked—CVs, academic cover letters, teaching philosophies and portfolios, job searches. The provost’s call for updated documents shouldn’t have been cause for alarm—it’s standard practice at the university level and rightly so, in my opinion—but when the whole of your job becomes defending that job, it’s hard to see through the fear.

  My office drowned.

  Hi, Megan. I’ve attached my CV. Can you look it over and tell me what to do? It’s no secret that higher ed is in trouble; full-time positions are few and far between, tuition is climbing, enrollment dropping, tenure under fire, and more than half of the country’s college teachers are adjunct, trying to piece together a living wage. I pored over their documents, looking for places I could help. If we move this award higher, will that get your foot in the door? If you list teaching credentials on page three instead of page six, will your job be protected? If you change your second reference, will you be able to feed your kids?

  * * *

  Early into my new position, I facilitated a retreat for the film department. The morning of, I was told they’d changed their name and so, in my opening remarks to the fifty-some faculty and staff in the room, laying out the day’s agenda and so forth, I welcomed the new Department of Cinema Arts and Sciences.

  A hand was raised. An administrator stood. And he explained, to me and to everyone, that the department was not “Cinema Arts and Sciences” plural, but “Cinema Art and Science” singular, a decision that had been made collaboratively with full transparency following robust dialogue unpacking the profound complication of Cinema Arts and Sciences being confused with the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences who already held ownership over said plural form and additionally henceforth the “and” in Art and Science would be demonstrated textually not as a-n-d or an ampersand (&) but rather a plus sign (+) in all branding and documentation—however when spoken aloud we will of course use a-n-d and for a more common understanding.

  I laughed out loud.

  Mine is not a delicate tee-hee little golf clap of a laugh. Jaw goes down, eyebrows hit hairline and I snort. Charming as hell. You want me at your parties.

  The look on this man’s face said that was not an appropriate response.

  Afterward, I went into Lott’s office and shut the door. He was my executive director, a man I’d known for years in multiple capacities. After a former provost hired me to work in the CITE, Lott and I developed systems to contextualize the different facets of our relationship. “Put on your teacher hat,” I’d say. Or “your administrator hat,” “your budget hat,” “your I am your boss hat.” Other hats he wore included: writer, editor, activist, faculty adviser to the student LGBTQIA organization, faculty adviser to the Office of Multicultural Affairs, community engagement liaison, instructional designer, the administrator who fought to enact college-wide name change policies for trans and gender nonconforming students, the administrator who fought for adjunct faculty to be paid for professional development, the administrator who fought to center student voices in strategic planning, and the person who reads more poetry than anyone else I know. Also, on a more personal note: he’s family, my son’s uncle, my village. I hope everyone is so lucky.

  “Put on your I’ve been in higher ed administration my whole career and I know how to dance the dance hat,” I told him.

  “Cinema Arts and Sciences?” he said.

  “it’s singular,” I yelled.

  He sat behind his desk, looking very calm as I paced around his office and went off about wasted time and resources.

  “How do you keep it together?” I demanded. “I want to stand on a chair and scream.”

  “I hear you,” he said.

  “I agree with you,” he said.

  “Will any of that help students?” he said.

  I sat.

  For the next hour, he taught me to control my face. We talked about meditation. About counting: down from a hundred, or the number of letter e’s in the document in front of you. “Find what works for you,” he said, and after some trial and error, I landed on music, playing songs in my head whenever things got hard. When our instructional technologist, a man with a doctorate in online education, was told he had to teach faculty how to turn on their computers, I played “We Built This City” by Jefferson Starship. When our director, a brilliant woman from the writing center at Princeton, had her office taken away for the audacity of going on maternity leave, I played “Barracuda” by Heart. When we were told to make videos for the provost the day after being forced to fire our digital media specialist, I played “I Want Candy” by Bow Wow Wow.

  Here’s the truth: I needed the job. My husband had just left his to blog full-time. We were trying to build back our credit after near foreclosure. It was pre–Affordable Care Act and my son and I had preexisting conditions.

  This is true, too: I loved the school, the same one that had changed my life years earlier as a student and where I’d taught on and off for a decade.

  When do you fight and when do you cope?

  For me, music helped.

  Right up until it didn’t.

  * * *

  “Think of it like this,” I’d say in CV workshops. “If you’re an actor, you show up at auditions with a one-sheet resume stapled to the back of a head shot. That’s industry standard. A CV is standard in higher ed; it’s how we show what we’ve done and what we’re doing. No single template will work for everyone, however, there are conventions.” I’d write examples of expected categories on the whiteboard—name, contact information, education, professional history—and immediately, hands would go up. At first I was surprised at some of the questions. Now I look at them through the lens of my own privilege. I held a seemingly secure position and was paid a living wage. I had health insurance that covered my family. I knew my work was valued and was beginning to understand how rare that was.

  Category: Name

  I read that search committees are biased against women, against people of color. Should I use my first initial instead of my full name, like S instead of Sarah? Should I use a whiter version of my name? Joe instead of Jose, Rose instead of Rosanna?

  Category: Address/Contact Information

  Can this part be left out? What if people on the hiring committee are biased against my neighborhood? What if they don’t want to hire within the city? What if they’re only hiring locally? How will my paperwork get past HR if people stop reading at the second line?

  Category: Education

  I don’t have a PhD. I have a PhD but it’s in the wrong field. I have a PhD in a different field, but thirty years of professional experience in what they’re looking for. Should I go back to school? I don’t have a masters. Can I move the education category to the back of the document? I don’t have a BA but I have twelve Grammys and a Whiting and a Nobel Peace Prize and 7 million followers on Twitter. Does any of that matter?

  Expected Category: Professional History

  Can’t I just say “faculty”? Students don’t know the difference. What do these titles even mean?

  * * *

  Over the course of my career, I’ve had many titles: adjunct faculty, visiting faculty, visiting lecturer, visiting writer, contributing writer, writer, artist, teaching artist, teacher, instructor, administrator, assistant director, founding director, director. My title at the CITE was associate director of Faculty Development, which I adored because of the mail I’d receive addressed to Megan Stielstra, Ass Director. I’d circle the ass in red marker and hang the envelopes over my desk. Lott thought this was hi
larious. We’d drink coffee and look at the Ass Wall and laugh. Jesus, we needed to laugh. His boss, I wager, would not find it humorous. She was the associate senior vice president/assistant provost of Academic Student Engagement Instruction and Learning and Global and Recruitment Initiative Affairs, which is a position held by several people at this particular college and maybe other colleges, too. I’m not sure. I’m not sure what she did. I am sure that she didn’t know what I did. She’d never seen my work, though it was her job to defend that work. Honestly? I don’t think she knew who I was. She called me Maggie a lot. There was a Maggie in my office, as well as a Megan. We had completely different jobs, completely different personalities, and looked nothing alike; still, it was fascinating how often we were confused for one another and subsequently blamed for that confusion, as though us both having m names was a personal affront.

  Real talk: Maggie is totally rad. Being mistaken for her was an occasional annoyance, at worst. I would take that annoyance and multiply it times ten, times a hundred, a thousand and try to imagine what faculty, staff, and students from nonprivileged identity groups—people of color, queer and nonbinary folks—experience in college on the daily. How often they’re expected to control their faces both in and out of the classroom. I am in awe of their patience. I am furious they have to exhibit such patience. The CITE tried to run workshops on unconscious bias, on gender and racial justice. We talked with faculty about the changes they wanted to see and how we could support those changes. We talked with students, particularly a group called the One Tribe Scholars who received scholarships through Multicultural Affairs to work on issues of social justice on campus.