Category: Academic Life & Labour

The Pin

Reading Time: < 1 minute

They gave me a certificate today.

Paper. Official. My name typed above the number twenty-five
as if the years were something they had kept safe,
folded somewhere clean,
waiting to be returned.

And a pin.
Small enough to lose in the carpet.
The size of a period
at the end of a very long sentence.

I held them and said thank you.

I meant it.
I always mean it.
That is not the problem.

The problem is the math.
Twenty-five years.
A piece of paper.
A pin.

I taught from a screen,
from a spare room,
from a kitchen table when the desk was taken.
I taught people who drove three hours to get to campus
and people who could not get there at all,
and I was the reason they got through,
and I know that,
and I am not waiting for anyone else to say it.

But today they handed me something small enough to swallow
and called it recognition,

and I smiled,
and I meant the smile,
and I held both things at once
the way I have learned to hold both things at once,

which is one of the skills
they never put on the certificate.

Aquí estoy. Con veinticinco años. Todavía en pie.
Here I am. With twenty-five years. Still standing.

The Placeholder

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I did not know that was the word for it.

Not at first.
At first it felt like an opportunity.
A gap in the schedule,
a course that needed teaching,
a door that opened just wide enough
for someone to walk through,
and I walked through it
because I was qualified
and I was there
and the course needed teaching.

I taught it.

I taught the next one too.
And the one after that.
I built the expertise they needed.
I became the person
the department could not run without.

That is when I understood the word.

Placeholder.
The one who holds the place
while they look for the person
they actually intend to put there.

The search would open.
National. Competitive.
We want the best candidate.
And I would read the posting
and see my own job
described in language
that did not include me.

I applied anyway, some years.
I want you to know that.
I put my name in the pile
with the careful hope of a person
who has spent years earning the right
to stop being provisional.

And I was thanked for applying.

That is its own sentence.
It does not need more words around it.
Thanked for applying.

I held the place for a long time.
The place was well held.
I held it with both hands
and everything I knew
and everyone I cared about
inside it.

No one takes that back.
The holding was real
even when the place was never mine.

Sostuve el lugar. El lugar también me sostuvo.
I held the place. The place held me too.

The Course Shell

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I built it carefully.

Every module. Every instruction.
The welcome message I rewrote four times
to get the tone right,
warm but not needy,
clear but not cold,
the kind of welcome that says
you are in the right place
even if you are not sure yet.

I built the discussion prompts
so that the quiet ones could find an opening.
I built the assignments so that the person
with three jobs and a baby
could still do good work
in the hours that were actually available.

I thought about them.
I thought about them before they arrived,
which is a kind of care
that does not appear in any metric
and does not fit in any category
on the form where I rated myself annually
and was rated in return
by people who had never seen the course shell,
never read the welcome message,
never watched a struggling student
find their footing in the structure
I had built for finding footing.

The shell outlasted my contract.

I know this.
Someone else teaches in it now,
or a version of it,
the bones of what I made
still holding the shape of my thinking
while my name no longer appears
in the place where names go.

I do not need my name in that place.

I know what I built.
I know who it was built for.
The shell holds the shape of the care
and the care was always the point.

Lo que construí permanece. Aunque mi nombre no esté.
What I built remains. Even if my name is not there.

Slow Violence

Reading Time: 2 minutes

It does not arrive all at once.

That is what makes it slow.
That is what makes it hard to name.

If there had been a single moment,
a clear line between before and after,
a door that closed with a sound,
I would have known what to call it.

But it was not that.

It was the annual renewal
that kept the future always pending.
It was the decade of reached bars
and raised ones.
It was the committee work
that demonstrated commitment
without conferring rights.
It was the expertise that was used
and the belonging that was withheld.
It was the appreciation that was genuine
and the security that was not forthcoming
and the way those two things
coexisted for so long
that I stopped noticing the gap between them.

That is the slow part.
The not noticing.
The way the conditions became the weather,
the way the weather became the world,
the way you stop asking
whether the world could be different
because you are too busy
functioning within it.

I am noticing now.

I am naming it now
the way you name something
after you have finally stopped
being inside it,
after the distance gives you
the shape of the thing
you could not see
when it was all around you.

It was violence.

Not loud. Not sudden.
Not the kind that leaves a mark
anyone else can see.

The kind that lives in the shoulders.
The kind that negotiates with sleep.
The kind that sends you to the parking lot.
The kind that asks you to be grateful
for the conditions of your own precarity.

I am not grateful for that.
I am grateful for the work.
Those are different things
and I refuse to let them be confused.

La violencia lenta deja marcas lentas. Pero las deja.
Slow violence leaves slow marks. But it leaves them.

The One Who Went Quiet

Reading Time: 2 minutes

You stopped posting in week seven.

Not suddenly.
That is not how it happens.
It is gradual, the going quiet.
First the posts get shorter.
Then the tone shifts,
something clipped where there used to be curiosity,
something careful where there used to be reach.

Then nothing.

I noticed on a Thursday.
I noticed the way I noticed everything,
not because it was my job,
though it was,
but because I had been paying attention to you
since week one
and attention, once given, does not stop
because the gradual shape of absence
has become absence.

I sent a note.
Not the official one.
The human one.
The one that said:
I notice you have not been around.
No pressure. No judgment.
Just: I see the space where you were
and I am holding it open.

You came back in week nine.
You did not explain.
I did not ask.

That is a skill they do not train you for.
The knowing when not to ask.
The holding open without condition.
The understanding that some people
come back when they are ready
and what they need from you
is not a question
but a door that did not close.

You finished the course.

You passed.

I don’t know what week seven was.
I never will.
That is also the job.

Caring for what you cannot fully know.
Holding what you cannot fully see.
Staying, so they know the door is open,
even when you are teaching from a spare room
on a short contract
with no guarantee of next semester.

The door was always open.
I made sure of that.

Para los que se fueron un momento y volvieron. Los vi partir y los vi volver.
For the ones who left for a moment and came back. I watched them go and watched them return.

The Bar

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I reached it.

I want to say that plainly
before I say anything else.
I reached it.
Every time they raised it,
I reached it.

The specialization they suggested.
I got it.
The publication they implied was missing.
I wrote it.
The committee work they said demonstrated commitment.
I sat on the committees.
I sat on the committees for institutions
that had not yet decided
whether I was worth a permanent seat at the table.

I reached the bar.

And then I watched the thing I had always suspected
become a thing I could no longer pretend not to see.

They raised it.

Quietly.
Without announcement.
With the particular institutional grace
of people who have never had to say out loud
what they are actually doing.

One more credential.
One more year of experience.
One more thing the committee felt
the position required.

I climbed.
I reached.
They raised.

Twenty-five years of that geometry.

Here is what I know now
that I did not let myself know then:

The bar was never the point.
The bar was the mechanism.
The bar was the way a system
keeps a person reaching
instead of arriving,
keeps a person grateful for the climb
instead of angry about the ceiling.

I am not climbing anymore.

I am standing still
in the knowledge of what I reached
and what that reaching cost
and what it was worth.

It was worth everything.
The ceiling was the lie.

Ya no trepo. Me quedo donde sé lo que valgo.
I no longer climb. I stay where I know my worth.

Sleep in Renewal Season

Reading Time: < 1 minute

It starts in February.

Not the insomnia exactly.
The negotiation with sleep.
The way the mind, which has been cooperative,
starts its own separate accounting
in the hours after midnight,
running numbers you cannot resolve,
replaying conversations that went fine,
rehearsing conversations that have not happened yet.

I learned the feeling.
The particular quality of 3 a.m.
in the weeks before the email.

I learned what to do with it.
Nothing, mostly.
You cannot fix 3 a.m. with logic.
You can only wait it out,
let the mind run its accounting,
try not to add to the ledger
by deciding what the silence means.

The silence never meant what I feared.
Or it sometimes did
and I survived that too.

But the body did not know
the difference between the silence
that was administrative delay
and the silence that was the answer.

The body treated all silence as emergency.
Twenty-five years of that.
Twenty-five Februaries.
Twenty-five stretches of negotiated sleep
that left me less rested
than the work required.

I did the work anyway.
I always did the work.

What I am learning now
is how to sleep in winter.
How to let the silence be silence.
How to stay in the body at 3 a.m.
and tell it:
this is not an emergency.
This is just February.
The tulips are still under the ground.
They are fine.
You are fine.

Go back to sleep.

Estoy aprendiendo a dormir sin esperar. Es la cosa más difícil que he intentado.
I am learning to sleep without waiting. It is the hardest thing I have tried.

Remote

Reading Time: < 1 minute

The word has two meanings
and I lived inside both of them.

Remote: at a distance.
Remote: unlikely.

I worked from a distance.
The possibility of permanence was unlikely.
This is not a metaphor.
This is a description.

They called me a remote instructor
and I was remote from the building,
remote from the conversations that decided things,
remote from the office where the plan was made,
remote from the table where my name came up
and was then not brought up again,
remote from the moment the decision landed
that I learned about later
from a job posting.

I taught people connection
from a place of careful distance.
I taught people to belong
from outside the belonging.

I am not asking you to pity that.
It was also its own kind of freedom,
to be far enough from the centre
to see the shape of it clearly,
to understand the architecture of a place
from standing outside the walls.

I saw it clearly.
I see it clearly.

I was remote.
I was never gone.

Desde lejos. Pero siempre presente.
From a distance. But always present.

Planning to Have You Back

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Every spring the email came.

Or it almost came.
Or it came late, after the weeks of silence
that were their own kind of answer.

We are planning to have you back.

Planning to.
Two words.
I spent a long time not hearing what they said.

I spent a long time making planning mean decided,
making to have you back mean you are wanted here,
making the sentence do work
it was never designed to do.

It takes years to learn the grammar of precarity.
The conditional tense.
The passive voice that has no subject.
The future that is always pending,
always almost,
always dependent on factors
they do not name
and you do not ask about
because asking changes the weather
in the room
and you cannot afford different weather.

I learned to carry April carefully.
I learned what the shoulders do
in the weeks before the email.
I learned to tell my body it was fine
in the specific way you tell your body things
when you need it to keep going.

It kept going.
Twenty-five times it kept going.

I am not asking for credit.
I am asking you to understand
what it costs to keep going
when going is always provisional,
when the ground under the going
is reviewed annually
and renewed
conditionally
and you are grateful for the renewal
because the alternative has no map.

Planning to.

I understand now what they were planning.
I understand now what I was.

I am no longer available for that plan.

Ya no estoy esperando. Soy el plan ahora.
I am no longer waiting. I am the plan now.

Renewable

Reading Time: < 1 minute

The word sounds like hope.

Renewable energy.
Renewable resources.
The thing that comes back,
the thing that replenishes,
the thing that does not run out.

That is not what they meant.

They meant: we can extend this.
They meant: we are not committing.
They meant: you may return
on the condition that we decide
to let you.

Renewable is not the same as permanent.
Renewable is not the same as wanted.
Renewable is what you call a contract
when you need the person to keep working
but you need them to keep working
without the rights that come
with calling the work what it is.

I was renewable.
I renewed.
Twenty-five times I renewed
like a library book
that no one ever decided to buy.

Useful enough to keep checking out.
Not valuable enough to own.

I am not renewable anymore.

Not because I ran out.
Because I finally understood
that I was never the resource.

I was the person.
Those are different things
and I will not let anyone
confuse them again.

Soy la persona. No el recurso. Nunca fui el recurso.
I am the person. Not the resource. I was never the resource.