The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

by Megan Stielstra

  The hardest part: how to get the people who needed to be in the room into the room.

  In the end, we were told to run more CV workshops.

  * * *

  If you have a position fortunate enough to include your own office, be grateful for the door. With a door, you can cry and rage in peace. My cubicle was visible to fifty-some people I barely knew and of course it’s not—what’s the word—appropriate to exhibit frustration in a public workspace, especially for a woman, especially in the academy where emotional response is discouraged and emotional labor is discounted. Be professional. Be removed. “Don’t care so much,” I was told again and again, and I’d bite my lip and play Fiona Apple screaming in my head.

  I’m not sure when I started riding the elevator: up to the fourteenth floor, down to the first. I was alone. I’d sing. I wanted it out of my body. Liz Phair, Joan Jett, Pat Benatar. My mic was my fist. I wasn’t very good but who gives a shit. Who gives a shit if somebody hears. Who gives a shit about the annual report, the programs cut, resources cut, services cut, departments merged, teachers losing classes, teachers not paid, tuition rising, students dropping out, faculty blindsided, everyone asking what the hell was going on.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, again and again. “I don’t know.”

  Up to the fourteenth floor, down to the first.

  * * *

  Our health insurance switched during budgetary restructuring and all staff were required to attend a four-hour-long PowerPoint presentation, the kind where you’re given a handout, and that same handout is projected onscreen, and someone reads the projection aloud word by tedious word. The font was so small. It might have been comic sans. I wanted to climb out of my skin. Instead, I got online and asked Twitter if I could start a dance party.

  I have speakers in my backpack, I typed, counting characters to 140.

  I could play Beyoncé. I could move the tables out of the way. I could throw the PowerPoint projector//

  out the window. Maybe, if I really put my shoulder into it, I could throw it into Lake Michigan.//

  That’s why we have a lake, right?//

  Somewhere to throw PowerPoint projectors?

  Eventually, Microsoft tweeted back at me. There were lots of exciting ways to use PowerPoint! They were here to help! Would I like suggestions?

  Afterward, I had pho with my dear friend Bobby, an adjunct teacher I’d worked with for years. I spent the entire hour bitching. Four hours for fucking health insurance. Bobby listened as I went on until, midsentence, I remembered that he didn’t have health insurance.

  The shame was a hand grenade.

  I’m no better, I thought.

  I have to be better.

  I’ll be better.

  * * *

  Staff members who’d been teaching part-time classes for years, some decades, were told they were no longer qualified.

  I’m not a good enough writer yet to explain what that did to my heart.

  Lott put on his executive director hat and walked into the then provost’s office. He told her that if his staff wasn’t allowed in the classroom, he would resign effective immediately. “How can we stand in front of teachers and talk about teaching if we’re not teaching ourselves?” After that, CITE members were included on a special list, but as enrollment continued to drop and adjunct faculty continued to lose classes, I asked to be removed.

  Me standing in front of students meant a friend might not work. A friend might not eat.

  But I missed working with young writers.

  I started teaching night classes at a different college.

  * * *

  In line for coffee I chatted with another senior official and she asked if I had a minute to talk. Couch space was limited, so we sat on a bench in the lobby of a nearby hotel. I don’t remember the buildup to this particular discussion, the X and the Y before we got to the Z, but suddenly she was explaining the importance of being an “advocate” as opposed to an “activist”—to improve the system, not fight it. “Students look up to you,” she said.

  In my head I played the Sinéad O’Connor song that starts really quiet and gets more and more furious until she yells: “I’d kill a dragon for youuuuuuu.” I explained, very calmly, how every week I work with teachers there voluntarily to learn about inclusivity. How every week I try to get teachers in the room who don’t think they need to be there and until the administration makes it mandatory and—for part-time faculty—paid, it’s never going to happen. How every week I meet with a former student whose current professor regularly misgenders him. “We talk strategy,” I tell her. How to engage this professor. How to “advocate,” but still, it keeps happening, and now this student is dropping the class because truly, is this his job?

  No, it most certainly is not.

  “We have systems for that,” said the senior official. “That teacher should be disciplined.”

  At the beginning of every workshop in the CITE, we ask faculty to introduce themselves with their names, departments, and gender pronouns. I thought of all the teachers who’d thanked us for bringing the needs of trans and gender nonconforming students to their attention.

  “Shouldn’t that teacher be taught?” I asked.

  She had to go then. It was a really busy day.

  * * *

  We received an e-mail from an interim somebody or another stating that after robust dialogue in accordance with nationwide best practices, adjunct faculty would no longer be paid to conduct student conferences.

  Within the hour my inbox was full of fury.

  There is a difference between common practices and best practices.

  * * *

  When they told me the One Tribe Scholars were losing their scholarships, I rode the elevator for fifteen minutes yelling the greatest hits of 1985. I was doing “A Hazy Shade of Winter,” full-on air guitar and “hang on to your hopes my friend” when the door opened to a senior college official. I don’t remember which. There are so many of them. They have so much power.

  I put down the guitar.

  He got on.

  The doors closed, the floors counted down.

  “Simon and Garfunkel?” he said.

  We didn’t look at each other.

  “The Bangles,” I said.

  We stared at the numbers over the door.

  “Oh,” he said, and that was it.

  The doors closed, the floors counted up, and I choked on everything I should have said, but didn’t, and tried to do, but couldn’t.

  * * *

  “Here’s what you do,” I’d say in CV workshops. “Put on a movie, one you’ve seen a thousand times and don’t need to pay attention to. I use Alien 4, but you do you.” Everyone laughed. Jesus. We needed to laugh. “Then grab a notebook and start making lists: jobs you’ve held, classes you’ve taught, presentations, publications. You’ll start noticing patterns—categories—specific to your own unique experience. Some examples: exhibitions, performances, honors, service—”

  Hands were already in the air, asking about possible categories, and we talked about the things that make up our lives as educators that don’t fit on this course of one’s life.

  Other Jobs: Jobs I Had to Support Myself While Teaching

  Activities We Came Up with to Help Our Students Learn

  Brilliant Teachers I Was Lucky Enough to Work With

  Brilliant Students I Was Lucky Enough to Work With

  Student Successes under My Guidance

  Students I’ve Supported through Personal Difficulties

  Personal Difficulties I Survived While Teaching

  I looked around the room. I’d worked with many of these people for years. I’d observed their classes. We’d sat in coffee shops for one-on-one consultations. I’d been to their art shows, met their families, watched them step outside their comfort zones to help their students learn. I knew who was fighting cancer, who had lost children, lost homes, who was getting businesses off the ground, winning awards, on deadline and still sho
wing up for students, ten-, twelve-, fourteen-hour days with limited resources and little respect.

  Tick tock my ass.

  That night, I opened the document with own my CV, scanning down to the lists of faculty development workshops I’d designed over the past seven years.

  I thought about how long it had been since I woke up to a job I loved.

  I thought about the course of my life.

  In the weeks that followed, I applied to some teaching gigs at other colleges. I sent out a few pitches. I outlined a book proposal, a collection of essays about fear.

  * * *

  Lott was told by some senior vice somebody that he had to lay another one of us off, the CITE’s third team member in five years. When he protested, he was told to stop caring so much, that it was a detriment to his leadership capabilities.

  He did not do a very good job at controlling his face.

  “Put on your what the fucking fuck hat,” he said, slamming around his office. I looked at the art hung on his walls, work that students had made for him over the years. I thought about my coworkers, how brilliant they were, how undervalued. I thought about the job interviews I had set up, and the Affordable Care Act, and the ad revenue from my husband’s blog, and how much I missed being in the classroom.

  Shhhhhhhh, can you hear it?

  If I had the ability to embed video into this essay, it would be the scene from The Hunger Games where Katniss Everdeen throws herself at the stage and yells, “I volunteer as tribute!”

  Afterward, I took Lott with me to the elevator.

  Up to the fourteenth floor, down to the first.

  We sang “Desperado,” by the Eagles.

  * * *

  The last faculty development workshop I facilitated was on the book Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks. Afterward, people stayed in their chairs. Could we keep this conversation going? they asked. Could we pick it back up next semester assuming they have classes next semester, no one was telling them, and how can you live like that, not knowing if you’ll have a job next month and—

  I lost control of my face.

  “Do any of you watch The Vampire Diaries?” I asked. “Forget it, it doesn’t matter. There’s this character named Bonnie. She’s a witch, a portal to the underworld. When people die, they have to pass through her body and she can feel them as they move through her, the fear and anger and confusion from hundreds, thousands of people.” Everyone looked at me, baffled, but I kept going. “She carries all of it with her and she wants to make it better but she doesn’t have that kind of power and I just—I tried. I really tried.”

  With that, I stood up, went to the bathroom, and sobbed.

  Jesus, it felt good.

  It felt, finally—true.

  * * *

  I took the L downtown for my exit interview, lugging a hiking backpack to pack up my desk. I got off at the Red Line and climbed the stairs to the sidewalk, then a block to Wabash and another block to the corner of Michigan and Harrison. I’d walked that walk ever since I arrived as a transfer student in 1995. When you say Chicago, this is what I’d see: the grid quick frying in the July heat; the white carpet of the park in December; the underside of the Brown Line pounding overhead; the impossible beauty of the lake in the morning, blue or green or gray; taxis blowing speed limits and running red lights up and down Michigan Avenue; and commuter students smoking on the sidewalk. We had tattoos and wild hair, all ages and races and genders, we liked girls and boys and neither and both, we made our own clothes and worked six jobs and studied our asses off and wrote stories and poems and music and films. And yeah, sure, we drank too much, and sure, fine, there were drugs, and of course, of course, sex, either way too much—thighs chafed and aching up the sidewalk—or never enough. Why doesn’t he liiiike me why doesn’t she waaaant me why don’t they looooove me. And sometimes it was perfect, sometimes sad, other times dangerous in ways I couldn’t articulate for years, and sometimes—most of the time, all of the time—awkward, but we were living, trying on identities, trying on relationships. We put them on and took them off like sweaters. I lived in the Ukrainian Village, then Wicker Park, then Logan Square pre–farmer’s market, then Humboldt near the park and Uptown. I worked in Little Italy and River North carrying cocktails and cheese plates and homemade pasta, then the Bongo Room pouring mimosas, teaching in Hyde Park, Ravenswood, Cabrini-Green, the Loop—I can’t remember everywhere anymore. What I do know is this: in all the moving, all the rushing, twenty years trying to get by and make it and make things in this beautiful, complicated city, the only place that remained constant was that corner at Michigan and Harrison.

  So much of who we are is tangled in place; a country, a city, a corner.

  I didn’t want to be there anymore. That doesn’t mean it was easy to leave.

  It was the day before the holiday weekend and campus was pretty much empty, just me and a woman in Human Resources there to “separate me from the college.” That’s the vernacular: separate. I think it’s appropriate, literary even. I’d been there a month shy of twenty years.

  We sat across from each other and she went over her checklist: insurance, vacation days, 401K. She was good: kind, informative, and apologetic without being gross. I wondered how many of these separations she had to facilitate. Hundreds? Thousands? She should get a raise.

  So should your teachers.

  At the least, a living wage.

  At the very least, to know they were valued.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long to clear out my cubicle. I stuck books into my backpack and then opened the file cabinet. The top drawer was stacked with CVs I’d worked on with faculty. I thumbed through.

  God, so much talent.

  So much accomplishment, so much experience and expertise.

  You see that, right? When you look down the course of your life? What you’ve made, how you’ve helped, how you’ve loved?

  It had been a while since I opened the bottom drawer—the stories and essays and poems I used in my own writing, my own teaching. Gabriel García Márquez. Toni Morrison. Dorothy Allison. Kafka. Louise Erdrich. Joan Didion. Annie Dillard. Joy Harjo. I sat on the floor and read for a bit, trying to remember who I was before this all started.

  I liked that girl.

  You always knew what she was thinking. You could see it on her face.

  I stuffed everything from the bottom drawer into tote bags and left the top drawer as it was. Then I stood up and looked at the cubicles around me, four rows of six, an empty sea. I was the only one there. So I played some music in my head and did a little synchronized swimming, leaping through the aisles, fanning my arms like peacock feathers, sinking below the desk line and springing back up.

  The Blogger’s Wife

  I have an idea.

  It’s called “The Blogger’s Wife.”

  I’m not sure if it’s a story or an essay.

  It’s about a woman who’s married to a blogger and if someone leaves a shitty comment on one of his posts she tracks down their IP address and shows up at their house and duct-tapes them to a chair and gives an inspirational yet scathing monologue about what it means to be a decent human being.

  Naturally, there’s an orchestra playing in the background.

  It’s probably a story.

  I haven’t worked out the dialogue yet.

  I haven’t worked out the duct tape thing, either.

  What if she drugs him? Dares him? Hypnotizes him? Challenges him to an arm wrestling competition and if she wins, he tapes himself to the chair and if he wins—forget it, he can’t win. I’ll make her super strong. She’s an Ultimate Fighter. She’s Ronda Rousey. She has a 170 IQ like Judit Polgár and dazzles him with logic. She shows him a PowerPoint presentation with visual data about the long-term effects of cyberbullying and/or bullet points on how to remain civil during Internet discourse. She plays the episode from This American Life where Lindy West interviews one of her online harassers. She reads aloud from “The End of Empat
hy” by Stephanie Wittels Wachs: “We’re never going to get anywhere if we continue to treat each other like garbage.” She reads poetry, like this from Mary Jo Bang: “We pretend we forgot that we said we’d be kind.”

  Whatever she does, for sure it won’t be a gun.

  Enough with the guns.

  A year or so ago, my son told me he didn’t want to see any more kids’ movies where the parents—be they human or animated Pachycephalosaurus—died in the first ten minutes. Finding Nemo. The Lion King. How to Train Your Dragon. Tarzan. He wasn’t traumatized. He was bored. “Don’t they have other ideas?” he asked.

  That’s how I feel about guns.

  (Maybe I’m a little traumatized.)

  (Maybe we’re all traumatized.)

  I want to imagine other solutions.

  I want to imagine other possibilities.

  I believe our capacity for imagination is stronger than our capacity for fear.

  Fire, spoken language, the domestication of plants, the wheel, the alphabet, the pill, paper, electricity, anesthesia, engines, telegraphs, telephones, democracy, penicillin, the airplane, DNA, the Internet, refrigeration, period-proof underwear, rocketry, self-driving cars, man on the fucking moon.

  We can do better. We can.

  When I’m feeling optimistic, I think of the common-sense stuff: universal background checks, tighter enforcement of existing laws, smart gun technology to reduce accidental shootings by children, outright ban on assault weapons, demilitarize the police, greater investment in mental health care and education and our poverty-stricken communities.

  When I’m feeling cynical, I think we’ve proven time and again that we’re not responsible enough to handle guns and we should repeal the Second Amendment in its entirety.

  Regardless, we need more discussion about anger management.

  Domestic violence.

  Toxic masculinity and how we raise our sons.

  I think this is an essay.

  I’m afraid to write this essay.

  I’m afraid that I won’t say it right.

  I’m afraid that what I say will make weirdos threaten me on the Internet.