I want to be honest about this.
I kept signing.
Not because I did not understand.
I understood earlier than I admitted.
I understood the shape of the arrangement,
the way the renewal was not a promise,
the way appreciation was not belonging,
the way the bar kept rising.
I understood.
And I signed anyway.
Because the work was the work I wanted.
Because the students were already there.
Because the alternative had no map
and I had a life organized around this work
and reorganizing a life is its own kind of cost
and I was not ready to pay it.
I am not asking for pity.
I am asking for the record to be full.
The full record includes this:
I was not only a victim of the arrangement.
I was also a participant in it.
I brought my best every year.
I renewed the goodwill that made renewal possible.
I made it easy to keep me contingent
by being so reliably, generously present
that the contingency became invisible.
I did that.
I am naming it not as failure
but as the complicated truth
of a person trying to do good work
inside a system that was not designed for her good.
She did good work.
She also helped the system function.
Both things are true.
She is not ashamed of either one.
She is only finished now.
Finished signing on other people’s terms.
Ready to write her own.
La mujer que siguió firmando ahora firma en sus propios términos.
The woman who kept signing now signs on her own terms.
