Content Warning: This post contains reflections on trauma, childhood experiences, and the body’s memory of harm. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
“Precarity lives in my body still.”
A Reflection on Precarity, Burnout, Mental Health, and Stress
I have been trying to write about precarity for three days now. Trying to find language for what it does to a body, to a nervous system, to a sense of self. But every time I sit down to write, my shoulders rise toward my ears. My jaw clenches. The ball in my stomach, that old childhood companion, tightens.
Mi cuerpo recuerda. My body remembers.
This tells me something important.
Precarity lives in my body still. Even here, even now, even after the contract ended months ago. The chronic stress of seven years shaped my nervous system in ways that persist, that compound the childhood trauma I have been exploring in this retreat.
I am writing this to remember. To document how my body still carries the exhaustion, the hypervigilance, the impossibility of rest. Para no olvidar. (So I may always remember.) I write it down.
“The hypervigilance I learned as a child translated seamlessly into scanning for signs of danger in institutional politics.”
When Temporary Becomes Permanent
Seven years of contract renewals. Seven years of wondering, each spring, whether I would have employment in the fall. Seven years of performing gratitude for the opportunity to teach, for the chance to serve, for the privilege of another year.
Siempre agradecida. Always grateful.
Even now, sitting by the sea in Loreto, my body remembers what this felt like. The constant low-level activation. The shoulders that stayed tense for months. The jaw that ached from clenching. The stomach that churned with cortisol.
Never quite safe. Never quite secure.
Siempre casi. Always almost.
Almost permanent. Almost secure. Almost valued. The “almost” became the water I swam in, so constant I forgot there had ever been another way to breathe.
Gill (2010) writes about the psychological costs of academic precarity: anxiety, insecurity, and a persistent sense of disposability. But what she describes intellectually, I carried somatically. My body learned to live in a state of constant mobilization.
Stewart (2014) describes precarity as a mode of keeping people at the edge of their capacity, always managing, always coping, always one crisis away from collapse. This is the architecture of contemporary academic labour. Designed to keep us grateful. Compliant. Useful.
Designed to extract everything we have to give while offering nothing we can count on.
My body still knows this architecture. Still responds to it. Still carries the exhaustion of seven years spent always almost secure enough to rest.
When Old Trauma Meets New Precarity
Here is what I am only now beginning to understand: precarity does different things to different bodies.
For those of us who grew up in environments of chronic threat, where safety was provisional, where love was conditional, where our value was measured by our usefulness, academic precarity does more than create stress. It reactivates every old survival pattern.
Reactiva todo. It reactivates everything.
The hypervigilance I learned as a child, scanning for signs of danger in my father’s footsteps, translated seamlessly into scanning for signs of danger in institutional politics. The compulsive caretaking that kept my sisters safer became the compulsive service that kept me employed. The inability to rest, because rest meant someone might get hurt, became the inability to rest because rest might signal insufficient commitment.
Precarity became the professional equivalent of my childhood home. Uncertain. Threatening. Requiring constant vigilance to survive.
van der Kolk (2014) describes how trauma survivors often find themselves in situations that unconsciously recreate the dynamics of their original trauma. Their nervous systems are calibrated to those conditions. They know how to function under threat. Safety feels foreign, suspicious, temporary.
La seguridad me asusta. Safety frightens me.
I excelled at precarity precisely because I had trained for it my entire childhood.
And this excellence made me exploitable.
Even now, my body remembers this pattern. Remembers how well it learned to function under chronic threat. Remembers the cost of that functioning.
When Exhaustion Becomes Architecture
My body still carries the exhaustion of those seven years. Carries it in ways I am only now beginning to recognise.
El cansancio vive en mis huesos. The tiredness lives in my bones.
Han (2010/2015) writes about burnout as the defining condition of achievement society, a society that exhausts us through internalised demands for optimization. We are tired because we have internalised the imperative to always be productive, always be useful, always be improving.
But for those of us in precarious employment, burnout operates differently.
We could never afford to burn out. Could never afford to slow down. Could never afford to admit exhaustion because exhaustion might mean we were insufficiently resilient, insufficiently committed, insufficiently grateful for the opportunity.
So we performed wellness. We performed work-life balance. We pursued sustainability while working 60-hour weeks on contracts that pretended we only worked 37.
Actuamos como si todo estuviera bien. We acted as if everything was fine.
Hochschild (1983) calls this emotional labour, the management of feeling to create a publicly observable display. But in precarious academic labour, the emotional labour extends beyond managing student interactions or maintaining professionalism in meetings. It includes managing our own awareness of exhaustion, our own recognition of exploitation, our own rage at systems that treat us as disposable.
We learn to smile while drowning.
Aprendemos a sonreír mientras nos ahogamos. (We learn to smile while we drown.)
I became so skilled at this performance that I stopped recognising it as performance. The exhaustion became my baseline. The stress became my normal. The constant activation of my nervous system became just how bodies feel when you are working.
Except bodies are meant to rest. Bodies are meant to cycle between activation and recovery. Bodies are meant to feel safe sometimes.
Los cuerpos necesitan descansar. Bodies need to rest.
My body forgot this. Or perhaps it never knew.
Even now, even here in Loreto, where I am explicitly practicing rest, my body resists. Resists stillness. Resists the absence of productivity. Resists the possibility that rest might be permitted.
This is what seven years of precarity did. Trained my body to believe that rest equals danger. That stopping means being seen as disposable. That value comes only through constant output.
When Individual Therapy Meets Structural Violence
The institution offered an Employee Assistance Program. Six free counselling sessions per year, they said. As if the structural conditions producing our distress could be resolved through individual therapy. As if six sessions could address years of precarity, exploitation, and the constant message that we are valuable only insofar as we remain useful.
Como si la terapia pudiera arreglar el sistema. As if therapy could fix the system.
Ahmed (2017) writes about how institutions manage complaints by pathologising individuals. When we say the working conditions are harmful, they offer us therapy. When we say the system is broken, they suggest we work on our resilience. When we name exploitation, they recommend mindfulness.
This is malperformative care. It expresses concern while refusing to address the conditions producing harm.
My body remembers this, too. Remembers going to therapy, practicing mindfulness, and working on boundaries. And remembers that none of it changed the fact that I wondered, each spring, whether I would have employment in the fall. None of it changed the fact that my value was always provisional. None of it changed the structure, producing my distress.
Nada cambió la estructura. Nothing changed the structure.
Individual solutions cannot address structural problems.
But under precarity, we could never afford to acknowledge this publicly. Could never afford to appear ungrateful. Could never afford to bite the hand that feeds us, even when that hand feeds us only enough to keep us grateful for the next feeding.
So we suffered privately. We broke down quietly. We medicalised structural violence as individual pathology.
And the system continues unchanged.
My body still carries this particular exhaustion. The exhaustion of trying to heal individually from wounds produced collectively. The exhaustion of managing awareness that the problem is structural while pretending the solution is personal.
El agotamiento de fingir. The exhaustion of pretending.
When Your Body Keeps the Score
There is a particular kind of stress that comes from never knowing. The stress of constant uncertainty. Of always waiting. Of living perpetually in the conditional tense.
Si me renuevan… If they renew me… Si consigo otra posición… If I get another position… Si sobrevivo hasta la permanencia… If I survive until tenure…
My body still lives in this conditional tense. Still scans for threat. Still cannot quite believe that the immediate precarity has ended.
“Rest felt like vulnerability.”
Porges (2011) describes how chronic stress dysregulates the autonomic nervous system. When the threat is constant but never quite acute enough to fight or flee, the body gets stuck in a state of mobilization without resolution. The sympathetic nervous system stays activated. The social engagement system shuts down. We become hypervigilant, reactive, and unable to rest even when circumstances temporarily permit it.
Incluso cuando las circunstancias lo permiten. Even when circumstances permit it.
This is what seven years of contract renewals did to my nervous system.
Even when the contract was renewed, I could never relax. Because renewal meant only another year of uncertainty. Another year of proving my value. Another year of being grateful for the opportunity to prove my value again next year.
The stress accumulated. On my shoulders. In my jaw. In the ball in my stomach that never fully unclenched. In the insomnia that became chronic. In the way, I startled at sudden sounds. In the way, I could tolerate zero rest because rest felt like vulnerability.
El descanso se sentía como una vulnerabilidad. Rest felt like vulnerability.
My body was keeping score. And the score said: you are under threat.
Even now, even here, my body keeps this score. Keeps the tally of years spent in chronic activation. Keeps the memory of what it felt like to never be quite secure enough to let down my guard.
This is why I came to Loreto. To teach my body a different score. To practice, in small doses, what it feels like when rest might be permitted.
But the old score persists. Lives in my tissues. Activates when I sit too still for too long.
Todavía vive en mi cuerpo. It still lives in my body.
When Loss Creates Space for Feeling
On May 2nd, the logic of precarity arrived in my inbox. After seven years of contract renewals, the eighth year would be missing entirely.
I had been terminated.
Me despidieron. They fired me.
The ball in my stomach, that old childhood companion, returned with an intensity I had forgotten was possible. Every childhood fear was activated at once. The disposability. The message that my value was conditional. The understanding that I had been useful until I ceased being useful, and then I would be discarded.
I spent weeks in a fog of shame and grief.
Semanas en la niebla. Weeks in the fog.
But underneath the grief, something else was happening. Something I am only now, here in Loreto on Day 22 of my retreat, beginning to recognise.
The termination released something.
I could stop performing gratitude for conditions that were harming me. I could stop managing my awareness of exploitation. I could stop carrying the cognitive load of constant uncertainty, the emotional labour of appearing fine, the somatic burden of chronic activation.
The precarity had ended. Through loss, yes. Through termination, yes. But it had ended.
And I survived it.
Y sobreviví. And I survived.
This created space. Physical space, psychological space, somatic space. The space to finally stop performing and start feeling.
The space to come to Loreto and practice rest.
The space to write this reflection and acknowledge how my body still carries the exhaustion, the hypervigilance, the chronic stress of seven years spent always almost secure.
What My Body Needs Now
I could never have done this retreat while still precariously employed. My nervous system could never have tolerated it.
Rest requires safety. Real rest, the kind where your nervous system actually downregulates, where your body stops scanning for threats, where you can simply be, this requires the felt sense that you are currently free from immediate threat.
El descanso requiere seguridad. Rest requires safety.
Precarity makes rest impossible.
Even when we are actively working, we are planning, strategising, managing, and monitoring. Our nervous systems stay activated because the threat is real. We might be without employment next year. We might be unable to pay rent. We might be valued insufficiently to keep.
These are accurate assessments of structural conditions rather than irrational fears.
What I am learning here in Loreto is that healing from precarity requires first acknowledging what precarity does. In the body. In the nervous system. In the persistent sense that we are always almost but never quite secure.
Siempre casi, pero nunca completamente. Always almost but never completely.
I am learning that the hypervigilance I developed in childhood and refined through academic precarity does remain even after the precarious employment has ended. The patterns persist. The scanning continues. The inability to rest remains.
But I am also learning that these patterns can be worked with. Gently. Slowly. Through sustained exposure to actual safety, through practices that teach my nervous system that rest is permitted, through the radical act of simply being without having to prove my value through productivity.
Sin tener que demostrar mi valor. Without having to prove my value.
This is what alonetude offers. Capacity, as opposed to escape from precarity. The capacity to recognise when my nervous system is responding to past threat rather than present reality. The capacity to choose rest even when some old part of me insists that rest is dangerous.
The capacity to know my worth exists independent of my usefulness.
Mi valor existe independientemente de mi utilidad.
The Ongoing Practice of Recognition
My body still remembers the exhaustion of those seven years. Remembers it in the shoulders that rise when I sit at my laptop. Remembers it in the jaw that clenches when I think about job searching. Remembers it in the ball in my stomach that activates when I imagine another contract position.
Mi cuerpo todavía recuerda. My body still remembers.
And this remembering matters.
Because I will have to return to job searching. I will have to navigate an academic market that treats scholars as disposable. I will likely have to accept another precarious position because stable positions are rare, and I need to eat.
The structural conditions persist. The precarity continues. The threat remains real.
But what I am practicing here is recognition. The ability to recognise when my body is responding to a genuine present threat versus responding to past trauma. The ability to take the rest I can, when I can. The ability to know that my exhaustion is structural rather than a personal failing.
El agotamiento es estructural. The exhaustion is structural.
This matters. Because when I return to precarity, as I likely will, I want to remember that my stress response is accurate. That my hypervigilance is intelligent. That my exhaustion is a collective rather than an individual pathology.
I want to remember so I can fight for structural change while also surviving the present.
I want to remember that my body keeps the score because the score is real. Because precarity produces real harm. Because exhaustion is the appropriate response to conditions designed to extract everything while offering nothing secure in return.
Porque el cuerpo dice la verdad. Because the body tells the truth.
Beyond Individual Resilience
Let me be clear: individual healing is the wrong solution to structural exploitation.
What happened to me, seven years of precarious employment followed by termination, was a systemic issue requiring structural change, as opposed to an individual failing that therapy can fix.
Universities benefit from precarious labour. It is cheaper. It is more flexible. It is easier to manage and easier to discard. The precarity is the design, rather than an accident or an unfortunate side effect.
La precariedad es el diseño. Precarity is the design.
And as long as the design remains unchanged, more scholars will experience what I experienced. More bodies will carry the stress of chronic uncertainty. More nervous systems will be dysregulated by conditions that make safety impossible.
We need structural change. We need stable employment. We need labour protections. We need institutions to stop treating scholars as disposable resources to be exploited until they break.
But structural change is slow. And in the meantime, we survive.
This reflection is about naming what precarity does so we can recognise it, stop pathologising our responses to harmful conditions, and understand that our exhaustion is structural violence rather than personal failing.
Para que podamos entender. So we can understand.
And so we can fight for better while also learning to survive the present.
Why I Write This
I am writing this on Day 22 of my retreat because I need to remember.
Necesito recordar. I need to remember.
I need to remember what precarity felt like in my body so I avoid mistaking its absence for personal weakness. I need to remember that my nervous system was responding accurately to a genuine threat, so I refuse to shame myself for vigilance that kept me employed. I need to remember that the stress, the burnout, the mental health struggles were a collective response to collective conditions, as opposed to individual pathology.
I need to remember so I resist gaslighting myself when I return to job searching and hypervigilance returns.
Because it will return. Because precarity is real. The threat is structural. And my nervous system is responding intelligently, rather than irrationally, to recognising this.
Mi sistema nervioso responde inteligentemente. My nervous system responds intelligently.
What I hope to carry with me from these thirty days is recognition rather than elimination of stress response. The capacity to recognise it, to work with it, to know that I am responding to a genuine threat with appropriate vigilance, as opposed to being broken.
Como en lugar de estar rota. Rather than being broken.
I am responding intelligently to conditions designed to break me.
And I am slowly learning to practice rest in the spaces between threats. To recognise when safety is actually present, even if only temporarily. To allow my nervous system moments of genuine downregulation, even knowing that vigilance will be required again soon.
These small practices matter. They allow us to survive precarity with some part of ourselves intact, rather than solving it.
Nos permiten sobrevivir. They allow us to survive.
What My Body Wants You to Know
If you are reading this from inside precarious employment, if your contract renewal is uncertain, if you are managing chronic stress while performing wellness, if you are exhausted but cannot afford to admit it:
No estás fallando. You are failing at nothing.
Your stress is structural rather than personal weakness. Your exhaustion is collective rather than an individual lack of resilience. Your body is responding accurately to genuinely threatening conditions.
The hypervigilance makes sense. The inability to rest makes sense. The persistent sense of being always almost but never quite secure, this makes sense.
Todo tiene sentido. It all makes sense.
Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: keeping you alert to genuine threat.
“The system is broken. You are whole.”
The system is broken. You are whole. What is broken is the structure that treats you as disposable while demanding you be grateful for the opportunity to prove your value again next year.
El sistema está roto. The system is broken.
I have zero solutions. I know neither how to dismantle precarity from within, nor how to survive it without cost.
But I know this: we survive better when we name what is happening. When we refuse to pathologise structural violence as individual pathology. When we recognise that our collective exhaustion indicates collective conditions that need changing.
And we survive better when we take the rest we can, when we can. Small moments. Brief windows. Ten minutes lying still before your body insists you get up and be productive.
These moments matter.
They solve nothing. But they allow us to survive.
Nos permiten seguir adelante. They allow us to continue forward.
My body still remembers the exhaustion. Still carries the stress. Still activates the hypervigilance.
And my body is telling the truth.
Y mi cuerpo dice la verdad. And my body tells the truth.
Note: This reflection draws from my lived experience of precarious academic employment and connects to theoretical frameworks from my doctoral work on institutional violence and my current thesis on alonetude as healing practice. The ideas here are in conversation with Sara Ahmed’s work on institutional affects, Byung-Chul Han’s analysis of burnout society, Rosalind Gill’s research on academic precarity, and Bessel van der Kolk’s understanding of how bodies hold trauma and stress.
References
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.
Gill, R. (2010). Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia. In R. Ryan-Flood & R. Gill (Eds.), Secrecy and silence in the research process: Feminist reflections (pp. 228–244). Routledge.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2010)
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Stewart, K. (2014). Road registers. Cultural Geographies, 21(4), 549–563.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.