Content Warning: This post contains reflections on trauma, grief, and broken trust. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
I did everything you told me to do.
Every checkbox.
Every whispered rule was passed down like gospel.
I went back to school
When I was already carrying too much,
when sleep felt like a luxury,
When my body kept asking for mercy
And I kept answering with more work.
Seven years for a doctorate,
because I was teaching ten courses a year.
Thousands of students.
Hundreds of names passing through my inbox, my gradebook, and my care.
My days were never mine.
They belonged to the timetable.
To institutional clocks that paused for nothing: no thinking, no healing, no depth.
Morning to night,
grading until my eyes burned,
answering emails in the dark,
hands moving long after my body asked to stop.
I learned to read exhaustion as responsibility.
To mistake depletion for commitment.
To call survival professionalism.
I built other people’s futures carefully,
credit by credit, feedback by feedback,
while mine stalled in drafts and deadlines,
always almost ready, always postponed.
The work held me.
The pace did.
And my body kept the record
long before my CV did.
I collected debt like proof of devotion.
Eighty-five thousand dollars
for the right to keep chasing permanence.
For the privilege of becoming more hireable.
For the fantasy that if I sacrificed enough,
You would finally choose me.
I published.
I turned my life into citations,
my grief into theory,
my trauma into methods sections
that made pain legible and respectable.
I presented at conferences,
stood behind podiums with trembling hands,
smiling through exhaustion
while strangers called me “inspiring.”
I served.
Committees, reviews, mentoring,
equity work, invisible work,
the work that keeps institutions alive
and leaves women depleted.
I won awards.
Teaching awards.
Service awards.
Letters saying I was exceptional,
that I mattered,
that I was indispensable.
And still,
when I asked for permanence,
you chose someone fresher.
You chose someone younger.
You chose someone who had yet to spend decades
making themselves indispensable to survive.
You told me I was impressive,
never quite permanent.
Important
never quite institutional.
Valuable
never quite worth keeping.
They said,
Get more PD.
So I did.
Publish more.
So I did.
Go back to grad school.
So I did.
Be visible.
So I was.
Be excellent.
So I burned myself into excellence.
And still,
I remained temporary.
I am tired.
Tired in my bones,
tired in the marrow of credentials,
tired of translating exhaustion into professionalism.
I am tired of being a provisional life,
a renewable clause,
a syllabus name that disappears.
I did everything you told me to do.
And you taught me, quietly, structurally,
that the rules were never designed
for someone like me
to win.
I did everything you told me to do.
I paid with my body, mind and soul, for the privilege of believing you.
I gave you 17 years of nights, weekends, and ten courses a year on your schedule.
You gave me exhaustion, and called it opportunity.
I did everything you told me to do.
You kept me temporarily.
And I am tired.
I did everything you told me to do.
My mind earned the doctorate.
My body paid the debt.
And you still called me replaceable.
I did everything you told me to do.
You rewarded me with precarity, debt, and silence.
This is how institutions harvest women and call it mentorship.
I did everything you told me to do.
It was never about excellence.
It was about how long you could use me before I broke.
I did everything you told me to do.
You taught me that merit is a story institutions tell
to justify who they discard.
I did everything you told me to do. It was never enough, and that was the point.
Notation: This poem reflects the embodied costs of academic precarity, where institutional narratives of merit and excellence intersect with structural disposability, cumulative educational debt, and chronic overwork.
Written from the body that carried the labour, the teaching loads, the doctoral training, and the exhaustion, it critiques meritocratic promises that mask the extraction of precarious academic labour within neoliberal higher education systems.
This reflection also situates precarity as an embodied form of structural trauma that informs my doctoral research on alonetude as a healing, resistant, and relational practice, an intentional reclaiming of rest, presence, and self-worth beyond institutional validation.
In this closing, “You” refers to the academy as an institution and system, its hiring committees, evaluation metrics, productivity imperatives, and meritocratic narratives that promise stability while structurally producing precarity.
This reflection speaks back to academic systems that demand relentless credentialing, publication, service, and teaching while offering disposability in return.
It situates my embodied experience of denial, debt, overwork, and exhaustion within broader structures of neoliberal higher education, where excellence is extracted from precarious bodies.
This narrative also connects directly to my research on alonetude as a relational, decolonial, and trauma-informed practice of refusal and restoration, a way of reclaiming worth, rest, and presence beyond institutional validation.
I am enough.
Image: Always on the Outside
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker 2026