My Honest Talk About Weight

When I was little, younger, a good chunk of my elementary school years were spent in Connecticut living with my grandparents on almost fifteen acres of land. I spent afternoons, weekends, breaks, wandering and rambling all over that land. Our neighbord had two hundred in an "L" around us, and I had permission to play there too. So I did. The woods were a godsend playground for someone of my imagination. I hiked up mini mountains and on huge boulders with elves. I hid under domes of leaves like Yoda's house on Dagobah. I climbed trees. I tracked through swampy wetlands. It was great. 

I'm also half convinced my grandmother was trying to kill me because who tells a 6-10 year old to go out and play in this?

That realization came later, but for a good chunk of these younger years, those woods were my refuge in many, many ways.

When I was growing up before we moved in with my grandparents, I though yogurt and granola were sweets. Even after we moved in with them I wouldn't have said we ate a lot of junk but even as I type that I know that's not true. We weren't allowed regular soda, but we had Entenmann's Coffee Cake every week. Pizza every Thursday for The Cosby Show then Star Trek: The Next Generation. We had cookies in the afternoon after school.

My grandmother had expensive tastes so I was exposed to caviar, roast goose for Christmas, duck, Caesar's Salad, escargot, bagels and lox. My family also had very strict rules about clearing your plate at dinner. I was not allowed to leave the table until my plate was empty. I have a keen memory of sitting at that table, long after everyone else was finished and done, staring at food on plate that made me sick. Liver and onions particularly caused me to gag. As did beets. And brussel sprouts. All foods my grandmother made fairly frequently. I was told I was being dramatic. Mom worked a lot, so these decisions came down to my grandmother whose child rearing was informed by her alcoholism, her inability to get out of an abusive relationship, and being raised during the Depression.

Once we moved out of their house, our lives became precarious in a lot of ways. We spent time staying in the guest rooms of friends, on couches. A lot of this time is hazy but I remember very clearly the frequency of getting McDonald's Happy Meals, and I have a large box of Legos that prove it. It was easy to grab when Mom was working and trying to juggle two small kids. 

In high school we lived with someone with a milk allergy and I was introduced to apple juice over cereal. Mom soon worked a day job and several nights in a restaurant. Once we moved out on our own our life was still precarious. Rentals were into houses that were empty during the off season and required moving in spring, then again in the fall. We didn't we own furniture, and most of what we all owned fit in  the car. I was a latch key kid so my breakfast and lunch were free and reduced at school and I honestly don't have memories of what dinner looked like.

I never saw Mom exercise. I saw her drink. I saw her smoke. I saw her high.

Yet I would have said I was a healthy kid. I liked playing outside. I never really had a bike, it was an expense and we never really lived somewhere where you could ride a bike. But I would have said I was active. 

I was always a weird kid. I always had my nose in a book. I had a weirdo imagination. It was when we moved to NC first for a short time during middle school then high school I remember feeling totally on the outside and a lot of it had to do with gym class and sports. Up until that point I had always seen gym as playtime but in NC it was about sports. It was about knowing the rules to sports and being good about it. It seemed like all the kids had been playing since they were four or five in pee-wee (whatever the hell that was) then little league (again, what was that?). I was made fun of and judged as less than from the first second. I was confused because I had enthusiasm, and liked playing but those thigns suddenly didn't matter because if I didn't know how to already do all these things, wasn't already good, then it didn't count.

So I mostly gave up.

It was the end of college before I got into karate, took ballet again, and discovered I liked going to the gym. It was a relevation to me that I could like these things that I had been taught were not for me. However these things were also up against the fact that I worked full time in the theatre department, ate crappy food on my meal plan (French fries in soft serve, 32 oz caffeinated soda to get me through 20 hour days at the theatre and candy by the pound). Before I left for college I remember Dad telling me to eat Chinese food if I had to eat "junk" because at least there were vegetables. There was a lot of pizza, and no Chinese food close to campus, and the grocery store was several buses off campus, and I was in a city I did not know with no car, and it all seemed totally inaccessible.

I saw nothing wrong with any of this, although looking at pictures from my college years I'd clearly put on weight.

When I graduated from college I immediately went to work in theatre, first as a freelance master electrician in Atlanta, then moving to New York City. The work was regular but not dependable. I never knew where the next job or paycheck was coming from. I went into credit card debt, my work schedule got worse not better, since I had to take all the jobs I was offered. Twenty hour days and weeks and months with no day off was the norm not the exception. The work was physical, I lugged cable, twenty pound lights, loaded and unloaded materials, but injuries were common, there was no workman's comp, no health insurance, no days off.

I would have said I liked the work but the truth is these conditions were toxic. In college we'd been trained that on time was late, you were expected to work all the time, there was no time off, no vacations. I injured myself on a work call, jumped off the apron, onto an extension cord, rolled my ankle and did not call 911 until the call was over. Then when the ER told me to stay off it, use crutches for weeks I was back at work the next day. This toxic work at all cost environment only got worse in NYC. Professional theatre had no space for people's mental or physical health. I was the rare woman in a technical position, I was overworked, blamed for every little mistake, rarely praised, never mentored. Older men were hostile at best, abusive and took advantage of me at worst.

Even with more permanent positions things were still precarious, I had a title, and in theory full time work but at any time I could be fired. There were no benefits and the pay while not awful was lean. I lived with a couple other techs and still operated on caffeine, nicotine, and shitty food. I lost a lot of the college weight only because I didn't eat much and worked a lot.

Once I left theatre and became a teacher my eating habits did not change much honestly. Now in my mid-twenties, maintaining the weight lose was easy only because I didn't have much money to spend on anything, including food. Also living in Brooklyn I walked a lot. I walked to the bus, the subway, I walked blocks to work, I walked to the grocery store, and lugged my grocery cart uphill to get home (well, what counts as a hill for Brooklyn).

In 2004, at age 28 I moved home to help Mom. I was still smoking, not working out, although I took a brief part time job at the YMCA. For the first couple of years I regularly attended pilates class 2-3 times a week. The studio moved, then we moved, and once the convenience was gone, so was my motivation to do anything. I also started doing more at work and just did not make the time for anything else. I was tired a lot. Stressed. Anxious. Had no outlet for any of it. 

Dad did all the cooking so maybe I ate better? But I had no control over the food and it was a lot of red meat, fat, salt. There were vegetables but not really. I ate what was put in front of me. At almost 30 I had little to no idea about portion sizes, health, good habits, or nutrition.

I got put on cholesterol medicine for high cholesterol, but told myself it was genetic, there was nothing I could do. I told doctors half-truths about what I was eating in that I told them what I ate but left off the portion size, the lack of exercise.

I was a size 8, 135 lbs when I moved home, that did not last long.

Mom became diabetic and from 2004 to 2011 when she died battles over her diabetes ruled the house. She wanted to drink soda, eat chocolate, sweets, and use her insulin. When we would meet with the nutritionist I remember thinking what she said did not make sense because she'd hold up the pudding or juice pop and say "as long as you're tracking the fiber and sugars you're fine." It seemed to me that eating all that processed food, junk, as long as the math made sense did not make sense to me. It bothered me but was not enough to get through to me. It was a start though.

Mom never got ahold of her diabetes, Dad continued to buy what she wanted. Mom would buy it herself when people took her out.

In 2009 I got Nehi, and regular walks became a thing for me. Nehi was a really active doggo so regular walks of 1-2 miles twice a day became a habit, longer walks and hikes on trails on the weekends. My eating habits didn't change though, I ate the food put in front of me. It was still normal to go to the movies, eat a large popcorn, the large Twizzlers, drink a large soda. I remember around this time starting to think maybe a medium or small soda and popcorn were okay, and started to resist upselling at the counter. But these were not real changes.

In 2013, I was 37 and 165 lbs. Nehi and I moved out to Albuquerque for my PhD. We walked a lot, twice a day, a nice benefit of a more flexible work schedule. I was also faced with having to grocery shop and cook for myself for the first time in nine years. I felt like that scene in La Femme Nikita where she shoves all those cans in her grocery cart, following and copying other people in the store. I felt like I didn't know how to cook, shop, anything.

The altitude and hills and walking were all good, as was walking across campus, but was still drinking a lot of soda, smoking, not eating great.

I ignored the fact that I had to buy bigger clothes. I ignored the fact that I was tired, stressed, anxious all the time. I remembered a James Spader interview where the guy asked him how he felt about his weight gain, and Spader answered that he just bought a bigger belt. I liked that answer. I told myself that there was nothing wrong with being bigger, that I would not buy into fat shaming, and would just keep on keeping on.

In 2016 when my PhD progress was derailed I remember feeling lost about a lot of things. I remember feeling like I needed something I could control. I went to Student Health and started talking about my weight, asking for help. They referred me to a nutrionist who told me to drink hot tea before meals because this would help my metabolism. There were other things but honestly, this crap, ridiculous sounding advice made me disengage. Still, I was starting to feel bad about my weight. I attended a friend's thesis presentation, then graduation and I remember looking at the pictures and knowing I was fat.

A couple of years later, having finished my PhD, back teaching high school full time, having mostly Nehi and I were walking more, but at this point my weight was in the 170s. I had stopped smoking by this point and that was when I changed a bunch of things. I started trying to run. I tried to eat healthier, seeing quitting smoking as a chance to change the habits I'd had for twenty years along with smoking.

I felt better, I didn't get sick as much, but the weight stayed the same.

Because I had a new job I had a new doctor and this was the first time I was told that at 5'4" and weight in the 170s I had a BMI that put me from overweight to obese. Now, I know there are real issues with using BMI and I agree with most of them. The fact is though even being told I was considered obese didn't really sink in because to me I walked every day, I didn't really eat junk, my habits did not match what I saw as "fat people" habits and so I kept keeping on and the weight kept creeping up.

My doctor suggested I try Bright Line Eating. It's a pretty simple system that operates on the idea that if you're allowed to have a cheat day or cheat foods that it's easy to go beyond portions or common sense so they draw bright lines that you don't cross. Ever. The main ones are no flour, no sugar, and the book talks a lot about the addictive properties of both.

For my mind, this made sense, it seemed easy, so I started making moves away from any processed foods, no flour, no sugar. I ate Cheerios, milk, fruit for breakfast. Sometimes yogurt and fruit and oats. Lunch was carrots or celery with guac (an approved "fat") and apple or grapes. Dinner was a salad with a portion controlled protein. No more sugar in coffee. No soda. Started drinking lots of water, tea. It was an effective program, and I started to lose weight.

I ran into a problem though that was in hindsight totally predictable. 

See, I'd never asked about why I had a problem with food. I never asked why I accepted the idea of "comfort food." While I had some vague sense of the food pyramid and the plate picture, these seemed like abstract ideas, not practical things that I applied. I never had good models for how to eat, or working out or healthy actions as habits. Never in all these conversations did I ever talk about the fact that I'd always been told my biological father was an alcoholic, that I knew my mother had addiction issues with food, smoking, alcohol, drugs. Never had I ever heard anyone talk about how suffering abuse as a child often led to trying to solve things with food. How precarity as a child could affect people for years. About the trauma that food and housing insecurity does to folks. On top of all this, while my compulsive behaviors were know to everyone who knew me, and often the butt of jokes, it was never something I talked to doctors about.

All of these things came to a head with the BLE because I started to worry about not having enough food. I rebelled against being told I could never have a dessert (despite never really caring about sweets up to this point) or bread. These things were contradicted by an obsession with checking my weight daily, counting calories, recording food, counting portions, grams of sugar. The BLE system triggered the worst of my obsessive compulsive behaviors. Food became all I thought about, and I rebelled against it.

So I started easing off. I added whole wheat items. Then bread. Then tortillas. I added an occassional bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

I never went back to eating a lot of processed foods, or sugar in my coffee, and still ate mostly salads for dinner so I told myself I was doing well.

But weight stopped coming off, and while my lowest weight was 158 at the height of PhD stress, the next lowest was 167 in 2017 with these changes. But they didn't last.

I stopped paying attention, or rather, I stopped caring. I decided there was nothing wrong with me, that in a lot of ways I was the healthiest I'd ever been and I would not be shamed.

I moved crossed country, started a new job, adjusted to lost of new.

 I wouldn't say that my habits changed, but they did. I would buy a whole pie, or gallon of ice cream and eat it over a weekend. I was eating bread at every salad dinner. I'd eat a dozen cookies from Friday grocery shopping to Sunday. This binge eating made me sick. Sometimes I'd get halfway through something, recognize it was awful and throw it out. But a week or two later, I was back buying it.

The cycle was to eat mostly healthy- Cheerios, 2% milk, bananas or bluberries. Small lunch, no sandwich, no bread, snacks were nuts or apples, salad for dinner with protein. Vinegratte dressing. Milk, tea, no soda. But then I'd eat a whole pie. Or 12 cupcakes. I lost the ability to stop. If it was in the house I ate it. All of it. Throwing it out if I could manage was the only thing it seemed I could do. I knew it was bad. I could not seem to stop.

Then the pandemic hit, and it seemed like my stress and anxiety got worse, and I still had no coping strategies. Nehi died. I was terrified all the time. I hurt my hip in a fall and my morning walk of 3-4 miles went away.

I hit 191 lbs. A 41" waist.

My mind ping-ponged. I needed to work out more. The walking I did was fine. I ate well. I didn't eat well. It was about calories in-calories out. It was about stress and cortisol. It was about genes. Other people ate way worse, why couldn't I have a bowl of ice cream? I cut out all these things, I did without, that wasn't fair. I was in the best shape of my life. I was obese. I was stressed and anxious. I needed to destress.

I surfed the internet looking up thyroid issues, cortisol, heart failure. My hands and legs started to swell in the morning, I went to doctors, no one said anything. They ran blood work, nothing wrong with me.

I am 45 years old, the scale this morning said 187 and this is where I am.

• My natural brain wiring of obsessive compulsive behavior now obsesses about food as well as color coding, patterns, and rug corners being rolled up as well as counting windows. It does not matter that this was not always the case, what matters is that this is true now.
• I have started to be aware that I am susceptible to the idea of comfort food, of "rewarding" myself with ice cream, sweets, and I am actively working against this. I am working to not use food as an answer to good or bad things.
• Diet sodas are not a solution, a compromise, because I have them and feel like crap for days.
• I do need to destress and find a way to lower my anxiety. So every night before bed I'm working through beginning yoga forms, sitting the meditate, and using the lavender infuser a friend gave me. It's not a quick solution, but my shoulders have less tension and I'm generally sleeping better.
• I'm back to mostly not eating sugar or flour, watching portions. 
• I'm back walking most mornings barring bad weather. But I'm also learning on days I hurt, or overslept that it is okay for me to take a day off.
• I'm trying to let go of "I should be able to..." and "I never used to..." and instead acknowledge that this is my reality now. I cannot have sugar in the house. For me, even if I think I'm eating healthy, I have to be more aware of portions, that extra cheese, meat in my salad adds up. 
• That I need to be more aware of what I'm eating, why, when, in response to what?

Look, I'd love not to think about food all the time. I'd love to feel healthy. I'm starting to realize that while I may get there I am NOT there. There's a lot going on, in the world and for me, and I need to make life changes I can live with, long term habits.

So this is where I am.

I feel a little ridiculous that at 45 I'm just now figuring these things out. I certainly wish in hindsight that more in K-12 was about finding healthy workout habits that you can take with you through life. I wish I'd had models of good eating and a healthy life. I wish I'd had better models for how to get through rough things without depending on bad things. How to deal with stress, not be so anxious. Not go off the deep end when confronted with some things.

But wishes and horses.

I wrote this in part because I do think we need to have more honest conversations about health and weight. Women in particular. I think we need to normalize how society teaches us that food is a way to cope because we don't have access to health care and mental health care and because those things are stigmatized while "chocolate therapy" is a funny joke. For me, reading Roxane Gay's Hunger  helped a lot, reading how experiencing trauma can cause women to eat to deal but also eat to make us unattractive to potential abusers.

I wish we talked more about how our work environments, the seemingly global expectation that we work, overwork, no matter what. That there is no space or pausing for grief. For loss.

For me, it's been easy to lie to myself, to convince myself I was fine in large part because a lot of what I was and wasn't doing didn't match the image the media shows us of what people who have food issues look like. Because as a society I don't think we have these conversations, teach these things.

I think I've had the very bad habit of lying to myself through half truths. Yes I walk most days but not fast. I don't push myself. I've done yoga and pilates but I don't do it regularly. I eat salads every night but probably put too much protein on it and don't watch my portion sizes. I eat "healthy" snacks like nuts and fruit but again excuse the amount because it's healthy. 

I am 45 years old and 5'4". Depending on who you listen to my "ideal weight" (and I've got issues with that term) should be 108-132 lbs. I can't tell you I'll ever hit that. I can tell you I'm trying. I can tell you I'd like to lose the inches at my waistline because not seeing my feet, being uncomfortable when I bend over to lace my shoes, being at a higher risk for heart issues, these are bad things that get realer and realer the older I get. So I'm calling myself on my bullshit. I'm working on telling myself the truth. I'm trying to, at 45, establish the habits that I should have always had.

I'm trying to focus on how small moves add up. Smaller portions. Days I don't buy sweets. Days I drink more water. Days I walk. Nights I get through three cycles of the yoga form. The nights I don't fall down in any of the yoga form. 

I'm trying to be more aware, and make better decisions for me, all the way around. I think I'm in a better place than I have been. I do tend to self-sabotage, so I'm focusing on not doing that. 

But for now all I've got is work in progress.

The Last Year//The Nothing

I was in the grocery store shopping Friday and I saw people not wearing masks. I saw people wearing masks that didn't cover their nose. I saw people walking the wrong way down aisles, showing no awareness of how they close they were, not social distancing at all. I went into a CVS for the first time since I got my flu shot at the beginning of August and the check out lady got mad I waited for the two couples in front of me, standing right next to each other to get six feet away before I moved up.

A year in and how are people so bad at this? 500,000 dead, a number many say is a big underestimate, and still going, so how do people not care about this? 

A lot of people are starting to share things that are "a year ago..." remembrances. Some are from last "normal" thing they did like dinners and drinks out, or trips. Others touch on how they felt at the beginning of all this. I saw one comment that said these were ways of mourning.

Almost a year in I feel the weight of it all. 

The kids who didn't get food because they depended on school lunches.

Families evicted.

Families that didn't get to say goodbye, lost people, 50% of the population that suffers we don't know long term effects from Covid, because some people decided them going out to dinner, on vacation, for a beer, was more important than someone else's life.

Hotels with rooms empty and homeless people on the street.

Families who lost people because they couldn't afford NOT to go to work.

Families who lost people because some people decided having sporting events was important.

Law enforcement and government employees who decided masks weren't important, neither was enforcing people using them.

Law enforcement who aggressively attacked people for not wearing masks.

The government for not doing a damn thing with the weeks staying home not really in lockdown, just kinda, because we're American and special and science doesn't mean US, was supposed to buy us.

The people now calling healthcare workers and teachers selfish because they're bringing up totally reasonable questions about the safety of their work environments.

Corporations who saw the past year as a chance to make more money, obscene money, while people lost jobs, went hungry, died.

Schools that went ahead with standardized teaching. Grades. Sports. GPAs.

Teachers that still have due dates. Late work and attendance policies. Who have dress codes for Zoom. Who require cameras on. Who insist on using proctoring software.

People who died at home because medical technology is racist and said their oxygen levels were fine. Or because EMS triaged them as not bad enough. Or because they were alone and there was no one there.

People are still dying because they can't afford insulin.

I honestly do not know what to do with the fact that with everything that happened this year it still was not enough to get anything to change.

There are still families and kids being deported. There are still people including kids in cages at the border, suffering God knows what after the winter storms in Texas. 

School boards are still fighting to not teach the historical truth of our country.

My state recently voted to remove the phrase "systematic racism" from learning standards.

In a year where we we were forced to design from scratch the majority of what we do- school, work, conferences, government, there was a chance, an opportunity, to redesign things and design things by first asking what was wrong with the way we had been doing things, then design things by asking how do we WANT this to work? What needs do we want to serve? Who do we need to center? How do we do this?

But we didn't.

We just didn't.

We chose not to.

We actively doubled down on the policies and approaches we know are harmful.

We did not change how we taught or ran schools or supported our communities.

Teachers and healthcare workers went from heroes to selfish, self-serving monsters, in under a year.

Corporations and people happily cheered Black Lives Mattered when it would make them money or get them shamed for not, but didn't bother following up with local and regional governments to make sure concerns became concrete in who they elected, what budgets got passed.

Corporations, employers, governments decided just a couple of months in to act like we were done, that the worst was over. To just pretend like we weren't all living the plotlines of multiple YA dystopian novels,  and everyone needed to keep on keeping on.

It's ridiculous. But it's also uncaring. Barbaric. Cruel.

There has been no acknowledgement of the suffering, the grief, the loss, let alone dealin with all of it.

I don't know how to move in a world that does this. That doesn't care. That just keeps on.

This is what I don't know how to accept. What I refuse to accept.

Honestly how do I deal with, interact with,  people I encounter who still think hospitals report more Covid deaths than happened for money? That masks are tyranny? That the virus isn't real, that 500,000 aren't dead?

How do I view people who have traveled in the last year, gone to big family gatherings? Who looked at the last year, at all of it and went "meh."

How do I not think these people are selfish, awful, monsters?

If the last year was not enough to get people and institutions and corporations to change I don't know that anything will.

And that reality, the weight of all the loss and damage and grief, most of which was avoidable, preventable, is what I just don't know what to do with.

The other week a student asked me "do you ever think X will change?" and I said no. I explained I still believe in small moves, that teachers can change minds, in the one one one impact.

But I just don't think I believe in large scale institutional change anymore.

In the same way I cannot believe that it's almost a year in and we're still in this because folks decided they did not want to make small, brief sacrifices for the collective good.

I'm not even surprised at the cruelty, the evil, the selfishness.

But I am tired. After a year of loss, of grief, of this weight, of no help and support, I am tired. And others have dealt with more, lost more, felt more, had less help, less help. And the world just kept going. Kept showing them with every day that it did not care.

It's the Nothing.

And it turns out I've got Nothing.

Things They Don't Teach You in Grad School: Credentialing

I am in my second year of my university job and one thing that has struck me over that time is how much of a university job graduate school does NOT prepare you for. Things like advising students, building schedules, recruitment, increasing enrollment, participating on committees, balancing workloads, there is a lot.

The other day I wrote a Twitter thread about how credentialing is one of these things you don't learn about in grad school. And while I think all of the things I mentioned above are important, and maybe I'll write about them later, I thought I'd spend some time talking about credentialing, because while the above things aren't taught in grad school I at least had some passing understanding they existed, or heard them mentioned. I never, not once, heard about credentialing.

So, what is credentialing? 

Schools have to be accredited for their degrees to matter. The accreditation is done by regions, and involves a process usually every five years where schools prove how they're meeting certain standards. One part of this involves credentialing professors, ensuring that the professors are qualified to teach the classes they are teaching.

I always had the idea through grad school that if you were a medievalist or an early modernist or did 19th century American lit, those were the areas you taught in. I had some idea that was true of R1 universities, but that SLACs and community colleges and smaller schools that you did more, and there was more of an emphasis on teaching, but I didn't really understand how it worked.

The easiest way to get credentialed is to take 18 credits in an area. There are other ways, you can prove it through publishing or special certificates, but those can be tricky. Taking classes in the area is the easiest way, both for you to ensure it "counts" and for your department chair, credentialing committee to ensure there are no issues. At my school every semester you have to fill out and submit a Faculty Transcript Form that lists the classes you're teaching and then shows the "supporting graduate course" which must be 18 hours.

So for example, I have a PhD in English literature and most of my classes were in medieval and early modern English literature. This means, generally, I am credentialed to teach literature classes regardless of the specific topic, although obviously I teach the Brit Lit I survey, and the Shakespeare classes and not the American Novel because that's not my area. I generally use the following classes on my credentialing form:

• ENGL 551 Uppity Medieval Women
• LING 590 Old Norse Language and Literature
• ENGL 650 Anglo-Saxon
• ENGL 698 Independent Study: Old English
• ENGL 552 Renaissance
• ENGL 550 Middle English
• ENGL 551 Uppity Medieval Women
• ENGL 553 17th Century Literature
• ENGL 552 Renaissance Literature
• ENGL 660 19th Century American Gothic
• ENGL 551 Viking Women
• ENGL 550 Middle English heroes, saints, and lovers

It's clear from this listing what my qualifications are. I took lots of classes in poetry, and Southwest Film and Lit, and other topics, but they're not proof for the classes I teach, so I don't list them. Also, for my lit classes, I tend to only list my PhD coursework even though my MA is in English literature and my MS Ed was in Secondary Education, English, and I had English classes I could list. This is not a rule I'm following, it just seemed to make more sense.

But half of my schedule every semester, sometimes more, is GE classes. Which means I could be teaching Composition I and II, World Literature I but not generally II because that's out of my area of expertise. For World Literature, again, I can use my credits in literature classes to qualify me. But the Composition courses are a bit different. Under my form I list these classes:

• ENGL 537 Teaching Composition
• ENGL 7005 Writing Fiction
• EDD 602 Urban Education
• EDS 692 Advanced English
• EDE 650 Advanced Study in Reading
• ENGL 686 Teaching of Writing
• EDS 654 Reading in Content Areas

The blue class is from my PhD program. The Purple is from my MA. But the rest of them are actually from my MS Ed. So I've proven my qualifications through three different schools and programs. When I teach English Education oriented programs, like our Intro to English Studies, Capstone, Young Adult Literature, or English Education, I often use the above classes and these:

• ENGL 500 Introduction to professional study of English
• ENGL 511 Job seekers workshop

The titles of the courses matter because they signal the area of expertise. This is very important for schools and programs to consider. If the course title isn't clear, we go to the course descriptions, so them being detailed enough also matters. Some programs' course descriptions are not long or detailed enough to help with this, so that can be an issue. Likewise, the prefix matters. More interdisciplinary programs can be problematic. If you're hired for an English job, but your program maybe was labelled humanties (HUM) or interdisciplinary (IDS) or part of a philosophy department (PHIL) it's hard to use the courses to prove credentialing. I've noticed too with international applicates and degrees this may be more of an issue so you may need to do more work or explaining.

This is where your CV and cover letter can help. When you apply for a job the first thing the committee may look at is your transcripts to see if they can credential you for the job. It's an awful situation to be lucky enough to get a hire, hire them, then realize once they are there that there are credentialing issues. Then the professor either can't teach what they were hired for or has to take more classes in order to be credentialed, it's not a good situation, and in smaller schools, where everyone does more and there's less overlap, I imagine it's a much bigger issue than maybe it is at larger R1 schools. So let's say you're applying for an English job, a generalist position at a teaching focused school. First, for the love of all that is holy, please show some awareness of where you are applying and do NOT spend two huge paragraphs talking about your dissertation, and do NOT make that your first paragraph. Going on and on about your research shows a lack of awareness of your audience, and the place you supposedly researched to apply to. Instead, if you're applying to a teaching focused institution put your teaching paragraph first, focus on what students get out of your class. If you're hired for a generalist position then I would use your letter to emphasize the GE classes you taught or TAed. Likewise on your CV, same thing. Put your teaching first, list ALL the classes you've taught, especially if they fill a gap in your coursework for the job you're applying for.

For example, if you're a modernist for American literature and that's what your coursework is in you can be credentialed to teach American Lit. But if your CV lists that you TAed Composition for three years that helps the hiring committee see you can teach those classes, and at an institution where GE is half of what you'll be doing, that matters. A lot. If in addition to that you talk about in your cover letter how you engage students, work in GE classes, cool projects, that shows an awareness of where you're applying and means a lot.

If on the other hand you're a modernist for American literature and your cover letter is two huge paragraphs about your dissertation, a small paragraph about teaching graduate students (which the place you're applying to doesn't have) and no emphasis on teaching GE classes or surveys, and then your CV lists no teaching experience, then you're probably not a great fit for a generalist English position at a teaching focused school.

I know the job market in higher education has been a crap shoot for a long time. It is luck and a Magic 8 Ball as much as anything else. The global pandemic and economic recession has only made all of this worse for a lot/most fields. I would qualify all of the above as advice on how to improve the elusive "fit" but it's all still a crap shoot. Having been on a couple, few search committees at this point, I will say that it's true that the committee is looking for people to work with the next twenty, thirty years. So fit to job and department is important, but so is fit in that sense. You don't always get to make a decision based on that, but if you get a hire, it can be a real chance to build the department, support students, change a culture, do cool things.

Because so many PhD students are mentored by people who were last on the market years or even decades ago, even with all the advice out there, these tips for refining and tailoring your materials may not be something students get. Too many predatory folks complain about higher ed, then monetize people's pain and trauma selling academic snake oil. That's unethical, but honestly, just systematic of larger issues in higher ed. I'm not trying to solve all that, although in the past I've offered advice based on my experience with three years on the market, and eventually getting a great tenure track job at a small liberal arts HBCU.

I do think that if people are still in their programs, taking coursework, or maybe out but looking for ways to beef up resume for one more round on the job market, that keeping credentialing in mind can help. If you're a literature person making sure you have 18 credit hours in composition makes you more marketable. If you're a rhetoric and composition person having 18 credits hours in literature makes you a better "fit" than a rhet comp only person. Now, I'm speaking for smaller schools where the faculty does half GE, and tends to cover more things. I can't speak to other schools. But for a school like me, the more you can cover, the easier it is to credential you, the better it is.

I wanted to be a nun

I wanted to be a nun.

I wasn't Catholic at the time, but I viewed this as a small obstacle.

I can tell your exactly what inspired this piety, and unlike the generation before me it was not Maria from The Sound of Music.

My inspiration was a line from Pat Conroy's The Great Santini where Ben is the odd boy out when he crosses himself on the basketball court before taking a shot.

It was Colleen McMurphy from China Beach. 

It was Winona Ryder in Mermaids.

I had a pre-Vatican II image of Catholicism. Mass in Latin, weekly confession. Cover your hair. Old school Catholic. And I loved every part of it. The idea that you were connected to this larger idea, that your life had a a routine, a schedule, a foundation, a touchstone that you could always return to. That your days, weeks, years were dictated by routines and that you always knew what to do. It seemed stable, and comforting, to always have this thing there. To be able to go anywhere in the world and attend Mass and know exactly what you were supposed to do.

To someone whose whole life was defined by precarity and instability, never feeling safe or on even, unmoving ground, it seemed lovely to have this consistent life line.

I carried a rosary and memorized the Hail Mary prayer years before I converted to Catholicism in college.

Once I was older, and after my conversion, which always seemed to surprise people (one Benedictine monk told me I strangest pious Catholic he'd ever met. Um, thanks? I didn't know what to do with that and still don't) I became interested more and more in religious communities, and how to deepen my contribution. There was a lot that appealed to me about monastic and religious life. As someone whose obsessive compulsions craved order and rules for everything, it seemed as good a fit as the military life I once thought would be perfect. As someone who never fit in the world for a variety of reasons, the idea of not living in the world also seemed perfect.

As I got older and read a lot of Jean Plaidy and especially Sharon Kay Penman (more my gateway to medievalism than Tolkien or D & D that others often name), the stories of older women who retired from the world to convents seemed like ideal stories.

One parish I was part of introduced me to oblates at the same time that I spent time at a Benedictine Abbey, and that seemed like a way for me to revisit, reclaim, some of what I wanted, now that I was past the age of being able to be a nun. There's a 35 year old cut off. There are also cut offs for student loan debt. When I turned 35 I was so sad. It was like letting go of something, a hope, a wish, that I did not know I was still holding onto. But when I spent time at the Abbey? Seeing that life of devotion and service? The Divine Office organizing your day. Starting it, ending it, framing every day. It was so lovely. 

When I was applying to college jobs I applied to quite a few that were Catholic, or near abbeys. While I have issues with many of the politics of hate of the Church, I knew that for me personally, constructing a life within these frameworks would provide me the support and connection I needed and wanted.

Despite my active role in Church, I have never been part of the community, the collective. I thought I had it once. I decorated the Church all year. I trained altar servers, I served myself for all the holidays or when kids didn't show up. I was a Lector. I made soup during Lent and joined Church groups. The parish was older so I was always the "kid" but I felt I was part of something. But then Mom died. And no one showed up for me the way I'd been showing up for them. Because it was an older parish we held a lot of funerals, we supported people in their time of grief. Yet when the one thing I needed was the thing my parish, my community was supposed to be good at, no one showed up. It crushed me. It left me feeling empty.

In many ways my life as a teacher reflects many of these ideals. I have always wanted to be part of a collective, a community, to serve, to be of use to others, to contribute. My mother used to (always in a negative way) accuse me of "playing the martyr" and perhaps she wasn't wrong. But I never understood why it was a negative. What was wrong with sacrificing for the greater good?

It's still how I do things, twenty years into my teaching career. I never offer a solution or bring up a problem if I'm not willing to do the work. I'm the first to volunteer, to offer to help. I just want to be part of something larger than myself, to be of service. Every day I read my daily readings. I put my rosary in my pants pocket, I cross myself and pray for strength. At night as I say my prayers I pray for strength. 

In higher education our lives as professors are divided into teaching, research, and service. Our service is supposed to be to our department, our school, our larger communities. I guess I always thought of it through the lens of being part of a religious community not knowing any better. I thought that the service would be a group of like minded people working together to achieve a common goal. Working for the betterment of all. A collective that recognized each other's gifts, paired them with jobs and contributions that would bring out the best in them, and contribute the best to the collective. 

This is not how it works. 

I think in part that it doesn't work this way because the capitalistic goals of higher education are at odds with what true service is. The goals do not match up. But oh man, what amazing things we could do for our students, our communities, if they did.

Every morning I walk. Since my hip, I don't walk as long or as far as I did a few months ago, but I'm getting there. I don't walk fast. I rarely run. I walk across the hospital parking lot, past the EMT station, over to the community college campus where I walk in circles around and around the outer road of the campus. Round and round. My Bear McCreary Pandora Station in my headphones blocking the background noise but surprisingly not blocking the birdsong. I watch squirrels run across the road like they're just done a heist and are evading the cops. I watch chubby birbs that look like a child drew two circles, one fat one for the body, one tiny one for the head, and then just stuck wings on them. I keep a wary eye on mean geese. I see ravens? crows? I can't tell them apart sit on power lines. I see nutras. The quiet, the circling, is comforting. The campus is on the edge of wetlands so often all that accompanies me is the mist and the trees.

In my walk over to the campus I tend to find my mind cluttered. Full of noise. All the weight of the world pressing down, often in hard to move ways. 

I find that as I walk the noise starts to quiet a bit, single words and phrases come to the forefront, repeating again and again like a mantra. This song plays in my head a lot. "Deals the cards as a meditation" feels like the phrase that fits this time the most.

As I walk in circles, I am reminded of the role walking, through paths, across deserts, on grounds, through spirals, have had throughout a variety of religious people, and religions through time. It appears in our media, our tv shows. The need, the understanding, that if we can clear our minds, embrace the quiet, dedicate the time to listening, that we can maybe find some of the answers we seek.

When I walk I am alone. Like, literally. I rarely see people on my walk, and even when I do, they are in the distant, disconnected from me, there, on campus, going about their own lives, in no way connected to me. I am an outside observer, in the background. Often this feeling of disconnectedness feels like a weight, pushing me down, as though it might push me all the way into the ground, disappearing, leaving no trace.

As I walk, as the noise seems to fade, as I seem to let go of weight, concerns, things, with each step I often think of two images. I think of the old story of two monks. One monk carries a well to do woman over a puddle, and miles down the road his monk companion is still upset the woman did not thank them or seem grateful. The monk says "I set the woman down hours ago, why are you still carrying her?" I think I carry a lot of things longer and further than I need to. I try on these morning walks not to. 

The other image I have is of Andy Dufresne from The Shawshank Redemption. Him walking in the yard and shaking out the pebbles of his wall into the yard. Bit by bit. It's not a project done all at once. He has to do it a little bit at a time and trust that the larger goal he's working to will bear fruit.

And the truth is when I am gone I won't leave any trace. I have no one to leave anything to. I will be survived by no one. I leave nothing behind. I think too that this is part of the reason why I so wish I was part of a community, a collective. Because even IF I left nothing behind, no mark, no trace, the work I had contributed to would continue. Anonymous work, no name attached, but work. Good work. Work that helps.

The other day as I walked, in the quiet and the cold, I realized that I'm forty-five and I still don't fit anywhere. I have spent my entire life wanting to be a part of a collective, a community, to contribute, and have never found it, never found a place where I fit.

I thought I would fit in theatre. 

I thought I would fit in teaching.

I thought I would fit in grad school. Three different programs and never once did I fit. Other book nerds did not want me.

I am tired. I've been thinking a lot about how the older we get the heavier the weight feels. I feel like I'm carrying not just that day's weight but the weight of my entire adult life. That the cumulative weight of all the years, the issues, the voices in my head, the rejections, just press harder and harder down.

In When Harry Met Sally Meg Ryan has a line that it wasn't that he didn't want to get married, it was that he didn't want to marry her.

For a while in college every guy I dated broke up with me then promptly started dating someone else and married them.

I have never had anyone choose me, in my personal or professional life.

I have never had anyone want me to be part of their collective, their community.

While I'm a big fan of reinvention, and the ability to start over, at forty five I'm tired of starting over. I'm tired of not fitting. I'm tired of always feeling like the ground is unstable under my feet, that I never feel secure, like I can put down roots and be a part of something. 

Maybe I just have too much of my mother in me.

Maybe there is something in the center of me that just is not built for stability.

Maybe after a lifetime of constantly moving, uprooting, packing up, packing it in, I don't know how to fit.

Maybe I'm not meant to.

Maybe it does not matter where I go or where I am.

Maybe I'm the asshole.

Cult of Personality: The Failures of Performative Pedagogy

New Amsterdam had an episode in Season Two where Iggy, the psychiatrist, played by Tyler Labine, has the realization that he has made it so his patients, most of them teens, do well with him, connect with him personally, but that this "cult of personality" approach does not ensure that they are successful out in the world with others. That in fact it is a huge hinderence.

I think about this a lot.

I am not an extrovert. I don't like people. I hate social situations and avoid them at all costs. But I love teaching. I love my students. I love sharing information, and hearing their ideas, and seeing their work. I've now been teaching for twenty years (how did that happen, how has it been that long?) and while there are many teaching adjacent things I struggle with and battle, and that make me miserable, the teaching part of it never has. 

But because I am not an extrovert, I have over the years used, adapted, mimicked a bunch of different things in order to BE a teacher. At first I imitated the teachers that impacted ME the most. Then I realized they were pretty toxic, misogynistic models. Then I tried to put on a performance, act. Most will teachers I think will tell you there is a performative aspect to teaching. To entertain, engage, present yourself.

But when I was teaching high school in Albuquerque I realized that I didn't need to do any of that. That I could just be me. Part of this was because the older I got the more comfortable I felt being me but honestly, it had more to do with what I saw reflected in my students. They read for me, worked for me, but more and more I was starting to see them come to me to complain about other work, other teachers, and it didn't feel like I'd given them tools to succeed, it felt like I'd set up an "us versus them" dichotomy that was hampering how they did in other classes and situations.

So I backed off. I consciously build lessons around me NOT performing. It helped during this time that I learned about and started to implement station rotations and more choice in my classroom. My role shifted more to guidance than lecturing, students were asked questions, but had to figure out more answers on their own. I had more energy to help one on one because it wasn't being eaten up by all this other stuff. I started reframing how I answered things, trying to provide a broad overview, reasons, and then let students advocate for themselves.

It worked out really well for them and me.

But I've noticed in my two years in my new job that when I am anxious, or upset, that the performative behavior in the classroom becomes my default, the known. All exacerbated by masks the last year, and the feeling I need to do MORE.

I've also noticed that when I'm talking about scholarship or readings that are about race or gender or institutional or structural issues with both, I tend to be more because I'm so angry. All the time. And I am tired, and recently I'm starting to think about how cumulative it all is, that the weight is just more. So I tend be MORE when emphasizing these issues in what we're reading or discussing. But there's a difference between passion and dedication and narcissism. 

Do I want my students to like me? Well, yeah. But I don't want them to like me, learn from me, but not be able to learn from others. I want them to do well in all their classes. Be equipped to do well in a variety of situations. I don't think any student should be abused and I have real issues with lots of stories about how (nationwide) professors treat students, the inequity, the lack of care, but while I believe it's unjust, so is the world, and to a certain extent college teaches you to navigate those things. I want my students to realize what classes and learning can be, to learn to advocate for themselves, but not by establishing a cult of personality that again, creates an "us and them" mentality.

It can be hard because I am the program coordinator, and students do come to me with larger issues. Issues I need to know about so I can talk to the department chair but also consider when scheduling. And while I've had conversations with students about not assuming mothering gender roles of their women professors, many see me as a mentor. Sometimes they just need to vent. Sometimes they have problems that need solutions. And it's hard to navigate sometimes. I rather not hear about what X professor did that I find personally unethical or just mean. But what do I do once I have? I try to speak in generalities, and get the students to advocate for themselves in ways that will be non-confrontational and help, but sometimes I just wanna say "that's a shitty thing to do and no one should be treated like that." 

On one hand, the last year has lessened a lot of this, students no longer just drop by and sit in my office and chat, so if they have an issue, it's conveyed through email, so there's a difference. I'm sure once we return to being on campus all the time I'll continue to have to find a way to thread the needle.

In class, one strength I have is I know my material, so offhand or tangent questions get answered. And because I'm me, I am enthusiastic about explaining things through poorly drawn stick figures on the whiteboard. But it's also a trap that lends itself to being overly performative. I caught myself doing it last week in my Shakespeare class.

Which is why I've been thinking all week about that Iggy storyline and the cult of personality.

I think part of my struggle is it is hard for me to understand on a fundamental level that I, just me, not acting, not performing, just me, is enough as a teacher. 

I also think that kind of model of a teacher was never one I had, so there is nothing for me to mimic or copy as a way to feel like I know what I'm doing.

One of the biggest lies baby teachers get taught is to develop a teaching persona. I have spent years trying to unlearn this. We serve our students best when we are our authentic, truthful selves. 

I know in my head that especially in a global pandemic, with so many other stressors, that I will do better, be less exhausted, have more focus and energy if I can stop doing the unnecessary and just focus on what is enough. I know in my head that the energy I put into trying to be MORE should be an easy thing to stop doing, and thus provide more energy for all the other things. But it is hard to unlearn things, even harmful things, especially when they are familiar, and you've used them as a support for so long.

But I am tired. And I want my students to do better, with everyone. So I will try to do better. Then I'll keep trying.