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.
Note. Thompson Rivers University, Faculty Council Award, 2025
They lied.
They lied and called it mentorship.
They lied and called it an opportunity.
They lied and called it a calling.
They told me the academy was a sanctuary.
They told me knowledge was sacred.
They told me my voice mattered.
So I gave them everything.
My mornings.
My nights.
My body, bent over screens until my eyes burned and my hands ached.
My stories, trimmed into acceptable methods.
My grief, formatted into theory.
My hope, footnoted into legitimacy.
They told me, Just one more course.
Just one more publication.
Just one more credential.
Sacrifice became the job description.
They dangled permanence like a mirage.
They called precarity “experience.”
They called overwork “passion.”
They called exploitation “professional growth.”
They told me belonging was coming.
Belonging never came.
They took my heart and turned it into service metrics.
They took my mind and turned it into deliverables.
They took my soul and turned it into outputs, grants, citations, and student evaluations that never saw me.
They smiled while doing it.
They thanked me while extracting me.
They called me resilient while grinding me down.
I am angry because they knew.
They knew the system was built on unpaid labour,
on feminised care work,
on racialised and precarious bodies that teach, grade, counsel, and disappear.
They knew, and they kept recruiting.
They sold me the myth of the scholar as a free thinker
while chaining my thinking to funding cycles, metrics, and institutional branding.
They called it education.
I call it extraction.
They stole 17 years of my life
and told me I should be grateful.
They stole my weekends, my sleep, my joy,
and told me I was lucky to be here.
Lucky.
No.
I was useful.
But here is what remained beyond their reach:
My anger is clarity,
It is the sound of a system being named.
They cannot have the part of me that walks into the sea and remembers herself.
They cannot have the part of me that writes without permission.
They cannot have the part of me that refuses to confuse suffering with virtue.
They stole my labour.
They stole my trust.
They stole my youth.
They told me I was lucky.
Lucky to be underpaid.
Lucky to be temporary.
Lucky to be invisible until they needed my labour.
Lucky.
I was convenient.
Lucky had nothing to do with it.
They knew this system runs on people who care too much.
They knew women, racialised scholars, Indigenous scholars, contract faculty, and graduate students carry the weight of the institution on their backs.
They knew.
And they kept recruiting us anyway.
They told me I was a scholar.
Then chained my scholarship to funding cycles, productivity dashboards, and institutional branding strategies.
They told me teaching was sacred.
Then reduced it to enrolment numbers and student satisfaction scores.
They told me my voice mattered.
Then edited it until it fit their journals, their grants, their safe narratives.
They stole years of my life.
They stole sleep, relationships, health, and creativity.
They stole the wild parts of thinking and replaced them with templates.
And they had the audacity to call this a career.
I am angry because I see the architecture now.
I see how the academy consumes people and calls it mentorship.
I see how it extracts love and calls it professionalism.
I see how it eats souls and publishes the findings.
They took my labour.
They took my trust.
They took my youth.
My future is mine to keep.
My anger has direction.
It is a theory.
It is a method.
It is evidence.
It is the moment I stop confusing suffering with virtue.
It is the moment I stop calling harm an opportunity.
It is the moment I take my mind, my body, and my soul back from an institution that never planned to hold them.
They lied.
I believed.
Now I refuse.
Author’s Note
In this poem, they refer to the neoliberal academy: a system of higher education shaped by market logics, metrics-driven governance, academic capitalism, and precarious labour structures. The term names the institutional architectures and policies, and political-economic conditions that extract emotional, intellectual, and affective labour while promising belonging, security, and scholarly freedom that are rarely delivered. The poem is written as a critique of structural and symbolic violence within contemporary universities, and as a reclamation of agency, voice, and scholarly selfhood.