The last time I'd been in the building, in May, I was saying the same thing to my brain as I quickly exited the building sobbing uncontrollably.
On Friday, May 13, 2016, I defended my Master's thesis in front of a panel of three professors. One was an advisor who had worked with me during the semester to oversee my thesis schedule, which I'm not sure went very well. There was some miscommunication on both of our ends-- being a professor at an underfunded research university, my advisor was very busy and seemed overextended. Being someone naming and treating anxiety for the first time after reaching the deepest, darkest low I've ever reached in my life, I was incredibly anxious to ask for extra help (or any help really) because I worried I would be a burden for doing so. I regret this choice now, but it happened and it's something I can't change. Regardless, I felt extremely rushed to finish my thesis, and only had about a week to work with the brutal and challenging comments I received from my readers. Basically, I needed to overhaul the entire project in the span of a week and a half.
I'm a fast and apt writer, and rewriting 20 pages was no problem for me. Writing 20 strong pages, with a solid argument and nuanced exploration into loose threads, was more difficult, particularly when dealing with burnout and feeling so stretched thin across my teaching load. Had I not been teaching, I could have pulled it off. Yet the busiest time of my school year overlapped with the busiest time of my students, as well.
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For the past two years, I have been an instructor of college composition classes. I mostly taught incoming students, either freshmen or transfers, and began doing so as soon as I stepped foot on campus. This meant that I was a 22 year old newly graduated instructor, teaching freshmen when six months prior I'd been sitting next to them in my own undergraduate classes. This alone was daunting in many ways. On top of that, I was required to teach two courses of up to 24 students each, every semester, entirely by myself (not as a traditional teaching assistant who sits in the corner and observes classes to teach a discussion section once a week or grade midterm essays). I was doing the thing, running that shit-- only I was also so incredibly anxious.
Standing in front of my classes on every first day of each semester left me red in the face, hot in the chest, and shaky in my limbs and my voice. I often didn't feel like I was in charge. I felt like a peer. These feelings were caused in part by raging imposter syndrome, my often debilitating anxiety, and the looks I got when I announced myself as and tried to occupy the role of the head instructor. I'm (now) a 24 year old woman who looks about 19. I have a high pitched, soft-spoken voice. I have a petite frame. People don't take me seriously. Many of my 18 year old students didn't, and neither did many of the non-traditional students who were often older than me (UWM has a large body of non-traditional and veteran students, so it wasn't uncommon to teach students in their late 20s and early 30s. My oldest student was around 65).
I know that I was taken less than seriously because students often talked to me as a friend, not an instructor, with inappropriate language and in inappropriate tones. One female student signed off an email asking for help with homework with "You're such a doll." Another student once gave me an awkward and unsolicited hug after one of our meetings about class participation. An older male student once stayed behind in class to talk about his paper and ended the exchange with "You're doing a really good job" in the most patronizing tone you could imagine, as if he was patting me on the head and coaching his kid sister at soccer practice. Another male student, alone with me in my office, critiqued the tone of my voice as too quiet, and casually (because he was sort of laughing at me) but cuttingly (because he was making very unwavering and unwanted eye contact in what I can only assume was an attempt to ruffle me) mentioned that he and "all the other guys in class had talked about this." My uncomfortable interactions with this student, who was about my age, were drawn out for weeks-- a mentor advised me to move my office hours to a more public space, fearing the student would become more inappropriate in future one-on-one meetings. Notifying the student's advisor caused more grief, as my comments unfortunately got back to the student and exacerbated the tension. Each class became a stressful series of power plays in which the student continued to stare me down and make critical comments to other students while I tried to teach undisrupted. Just two weeks later, he was publicly yelling at me in the library that my class was "bullshit" and that he "couldn't learn from me" because of my feminist politics.
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I could go on about the many microaggressions and a few straight up aggressions I experienced as a teacher, but then that would be an entirely other piece of writing. The gist of these explanations above is to introduce a few ways that both agism and sexism are real, and that both of them together are impossible to deal with in ways that feel good or successful. My brilliant friend Rebecca offered an analysis that stuck with me and shaped how I began to regard my interactions in the program, as the youngest graduate student and composition instructor throughout the duration of my two years there: "No one talks about oppression at the intersection of gender and age, and how women are impacted in practically paralyzing ways." Her statement clicked an important realization into place for me, in that it was step one to my understanding that these things that were happening weren't my fault. Of course, I knew that already, but I didn't really know that, you know what I'm saying? What I mean is, even when criticisms and microaggressions are unfair and you recognize that, it might still feel like you could be doing something different. I was blessed in this program to be surrounded by strong mentors, but also, the advice given to me on how to best deal with all of this shit kind of reinforced this anxious idea I had in the back of my head that I must be doing something wrong. Like, if I was just more this way or that way in the classroom and prepared and on guard to handle this situation and that issue that things would be much simpler for me. But the world sucks and oppression is real and I was often feeling immobile and unable to deal.
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I guess I feel the need to explain so much of what I was going through in the space of the department and the university because my time spent there feels violent and exploitative, yet it was normalized. I felt unable to talk about it as I'm doing here. The two-year experience legitimately made me feel crazy. In my second and final year, in the beginning of the spring semester in the cold and dreary months of a Milwaukee January, I wasn't leaving my bed. I would just lay there and cry, my partner sitting next to me and navigating between hugging me and hovering over me as I attempted to explain what was wrong (everything, everything, everything). "Everything just feels like bullshit," I said one day. "I have six months more of this program and I feel like it's all bullshit. I just have so many more hoops to jump through and it feels like nothing matters and I don't know how I am going to make it to May and teach two classes and write a thesis and it's all bullshit."
"You need to get help, Olivia. You're depressed... you are really depressed." Thank fuck for my partner, who can deliver the honesty and compassion I need.
This was where my headspace was at after a year and a half of battling these microaggressions and feeling the need to overcompensate with students and colleagues alike for my age (intersected with my gender). I just needed to push through six more months, but had no idea how much more the department would attempt to break me.
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Fast forward a month when a white male colleague, twice my age, attacked me and a female WOC colleague a year older than me in a sexist and ageist (and for her, racist) manner in disturbing, passive aggressive online comments. Here was I, already feeling crazy, already unraveling in my mind and crying all the time, now the subject of some pissy 50 year old manchild's hurt-feelings Facebook status.
The way the argument started was hilariously embarrassing. A handful of female colleagues were excited on Facebook about Beyoncé's then-new song, "Formation." This older male colleague made some joking disparaging comments that in my opinion were more than a little uninformed and annoying. I made a simple "The song is not for you" comment and pasted a link that pretty thoroughly explained why white people should hold off on criticizing the song, since it was so obviously a song written to uplift blackness, and specifically, black women. And then the following transpired, L M A O:
Fast forward to the next day, when the white male director of the department, far older than twice my age, sent both me and my female colleague a strangely worded email that sounded to us like we were being shamed for defending ourselves. Fast forward to later that week when we met with the director and another male administrator/professor, who began the meeting laughing at the comments I'd printed out and making light-hearted jokes while we uncomfortably explained what had happened. Fast forward to this male administrator/professor barely glancing at the comments, shrugging his shoulders and looking at us with bright eyes and a smile, saying "At least he didn't threaten you!" Fast forward two seconds to my face growing hot, my voice rising and shaking, telling him that all sexism is violent, that I felt threatened, that I felt attacked, that I felt unsafe. Fast forward to the administrator/professor's smile fading, the brightness leaving his eyes, a scowl forming, beginning to debate me on what sexism was, calling our comments he hadn't even bothered to read a "flame war," telling us that Facebook comments were nothing they could have any part of because they happened "outside of the space of the physical department" even though two days prior these men had addressed us over university email about how Facebook exchanges like these needed to be handled appropriately because these things can "negatively affect the space of the department."
"Now we are just getting into semantics," I say, flustered and overwhelmed and wanting to stop debating the definition of sexism with middle aged white men who'd never before experienced it.
"That is what we do here!" he replies with a laugh, obviously loving the debate we had entered into, which, for him, was a theoretical game.
Fast forward to the end of the meeting when we asked if they would address the older student and tell him his words had been inappropriate and this administrator/professor firmly and coldly telling us "no." Fast forward to us being gaslighted. Fast forward to us leaving his office and me inexplicably hearing the words "Thank you" roll off my tongue. (The same words I'd uttered to the senior who dropped me off at my freshman dorm the morning after he'd sexual assaulted me.) Fast forward to two months later when a graduate student representative liaison between students and faculty notified me that none of this should have been handled internally, and that there exists an outside department to handle inter-departmental conflicts that I should have been informed of. Fast forward to me sitting in a bar with colleagues, and leaving the bar with my partner, and finding out later that two 30-something year old white male colleagues were debating my actions on Facebook with a friend of mine, who grew upset as the discussion grew heated. Fast forward to one of those dudes apologizing to this friend for his use of their emotional labor, but never apologizing to me for questioning my credibility. Fast forward to multiple people telling me to get over this situation when a lot of people I don't ever even talk to and who were not even ever involved really can't seem to get over it themselves.
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As Sara Ahmed has written, maybe we should rethink "oversensitivity" as "sensitive to that which is not over." I have been adoring the work of Reina Gattuso over at Feministing, who recently responded to Ahmed's piece "Against Students" in her article, "We're All Progressives Here!" She analyzes Ahmed's argument thusly:
"This is what Ahmed gets at in her definition of oversensitivity and in much of her other work: The fact that, when marginalized people name and agitate against violence, they are blamed for creating the problem, because they don’t allow those with power to ignore the problem. This explains, for example, phenomena like victim blaming: If someone names sexual violence or harassment, they are at fault for forcing the community to confront gender inequality; because if they hadn’t brought it up, we could pretend it didn’t exist, and the comfortable could remain comfortable."
This take pretty much sums up how I felt in the aftermath of this particularly intrusive event. I felt that by speaking up at all, by pushing back and articulating how this older colleague's language had been unfair, jarring, sexist, and agist, that I had created a problem. That by critiquing the violence I experienced within the institution, those in the institution felt like I was critiquing them. I contribute some of these uncomfortable feelings to my anxiety, which pretty much makes me feel like a burden and a problem wherever I go. But I'm also just an outspoken person who can't deal with injustice-- I need to speak out and sometimes it gets intense. In undergrad, my radbabe friends had each others' backs. Rebecca, the brilliant friend I referenced earlier, once wrote and published a piece in our undergrad newspaper titled something along the lines of "For all the problem gurls." It was basically a love letter to all the gurls who felt like they were "too much," as gurls are often told that we are. It's how the same person can critique me for being too quiet and too outspoken and not see any dots on the spectrum in between. In undergrad, I was surrounded by women who understood what it's like to be disbelieved. To be slandered. To experience trauma and violence. To know how to unspeakingly say "I love you" to each other over bottles of wine and carefully crafted momos and projections of Beyoncé videos blown up on the wall. To do everything and anything to move in support and solidarity with each other, for each other.
In grad school, there were people being helpful, but it wasn't in that intense all-encompassing way I'd been used to. Maybe it's unfair to say I felt unsupported. Grad school is honestly just a really isolating place, after all. Maybe it's again something to be explained by my anxiety (though I'm also wary of how my anxiety leads me to be more easily gaslighted, to more willingly believe people when they say I am being irrational and ungrateful and dramatic). But it was honestly hard to deal with those who were telling me they had my back, yet still remained friendly and cordial with this disgusting 50 year old dude (I have 12 mutual friends with him on Facebook, still). I didn't get that. That was never how my group of radbabe women operated. We cut that shit out. (Maybe I was just really lucky in undergrad to find myself in such a beautifully empowering social space.)
It was hard when comments from colleagues made in solidarity turned into comments that felt like tone-policing. It was hard when it felt like people didn't accept this as a valid experience to feel so angry about. It was hard hearing through the grapevine that this person or that person had called me dramatic. It was hard feeling like people wanted me to just get the fuck over it and move the fuck on when injustice still felt like a hard and heavy stone jutting out of my stomach.
To return to the words of Reina Gattuso, in another piece called "Naming Names," she writes about an uncomfortable and disgusting experience she had interviewing "an Important Man" for her school's paper.
She explains how, "At the end of the interview, after I turned off the recorder on my hot pink laptop, he asked me about myself." Telling him about a freshman formal coming up, he responded:
“'Any girl whose bra matches her laptop deserves to have a date to freshman formal,' the Important Man said, looking at the hot pink bra pressing through my white sweater. My breasts.
Then: 'Don’t print that. My daughter goes to school here.'"
Gattuso explains how she "didn't revive [the encounter] until three years later, when my rage had condensed into something solid, unrelenting... I understood the comment clearly: An abuse. One small anecdote that summed up the entire big, frightening way the system worked."
Gattuso's words here, while angering, are so helpful and affirming to me. My rage is also solid and unrelenting. There it stays, in my gut, bringing blotchy redness to my face when I talk about the experiences of ageism, sexism, and exploitation on campus. When someone utters that dude's name. When I speak about my disappointment in the department and someone looks like they want me to shut the fuck up. How I had to deal with this shit in my last semester, when I was almost across the finish line, hopping along with bloody knees and a broken heart in an effort to make it out in one piece. How my last semester was shadowed by the most intense experiences of agism and sexism I'd dealt with piled atop the countless microaggressions I was already carrying on my shoulders. How I felt like a problem and a burden and a fault to my community. How I felt ostracized and now actively distance myself from many people in the department, regardless of how people really feel about me because my anxiety just really makes it too intense to deal with everybody sometimes. How, on top of all this, I lived in poverty for the last two years supporting myself and my partner. How I was exploited and was valued at $11,500 dollars a year to stretch my mind to its limits to give 48 students personalized attention each semester. How I came to hate my own research, and hate my own thesis, and leave my thesis defense crying because my professors told me that I was a better student than what I presented them with. How I went home and made a self-deprecating, humor-filled status on Facebook making fun of how I'd had a panic attack in my thesis defense but was actually sobbing uncontrollably in bed for three hours unable to breathe. How I hate talking about grad school to friends who are genuinely interested because it was a let down in so so so many ways.
I'm sure people will read this and again feel like I am being oversensitive and dramatic. I am sure that people still might not understand my anger after I've worked as hard as I can to lay out the picture of the institutional violence I faced working within a graduate department toward my Master's degree. But this piece of writing is honestly for nobody but me. I am burnt up and I am burnt out. I need to articulate these feelings if I want to stop feeling like garbage. I need to tell my anxiety-filled self that it wasn't my fault. I need to cut myself a break. I need to recognize the work I have done these past few years and be proud of myself for making it here in light of all the bullshit I had to sift through along the way. Writing this is powerful. It's healing. It's my own statement telling myself that it's ok to feel like I have these past two years, like my graduate degree was just a huge bummer. It's ok to hate my department while those around me love it. It's ok for me to be mad. I'm happy for them, really, I am. I don't wish these feelings on anybody. But to deny that they exist would be to deny my own struggles and experiences and perseverance, and that's something I can't do if I am going to move on. It's scary to write this and to admit this, because I am naming myself as a victim. For six years I have ignored that I am a victim, but I'm now naming myself a victim of sexual assault and institutional violence and it's uncomfortable. It's scary because for the past four years I have only wanted to be in academia. Now, I want to move very far away from it. I just want to rest. I want to write fun pop culture analyses on TV shows and music videos. I want my mind to be quiet. I want to have a life where I'm not critiqued at every step.
I'm working on it.