Scholarly Personal Narrative Archives - Page 3 of 5

To the Woman I Was Before I Knew

Reading Time: 4 minutes

A Love Letter Backwards in Time

I have been thinking about you.

The you that walked in the first time, folder tucked under your arm, lesson plan you had revised three times the night before because you wanted it to be right, because right mattered to you in that particular, cellular, uncompromising way it has always mattered to you,

the you that stood at the front of that room for the first time and felt the gravity of it, the privilege of it, the enormous ordinary miracle of a room full of people who had arrived willing to think differently than they had thought before.

I have been thinking about her. About you. About what I want to say now that I know what you did not know then.

You were so ready.

That is the first thing I want to tell you.

You were so ready, and you did not know it. From the student’s side of the room, from the side that would later write you letters, send you emails years later that began with I have been thinking about something you said in class, and I wanted you to know,

you were luminous.

I want to warn you about some things.

The bar will move.

I want you to know this from the beginning, before the first time it moves, before you exhaust yourself reaching for it and find it has shifted just beyond your hands.

The bar is not a measure of you. The bar is a mechanism. It is the system’s way of keeping you reaching, hungry, slightly off-balance, slightly too invested in the next thing to stop and ask why the last thing was not enough.

Reach for the bar because the reaching makes you better. Reach for the bar for yourself.

Do not reach for the bar for them.

Know the difference between a place that is developing you and a place that is extracting you.

The students are real.

This I want you to hold as the true north of the whole nineteen years, the thing that does not shift, the thing the system cannot touch, take, or use without your permission.

When everything else feels uncertain, go back to the students.

You are going to be so tired.

I want to say this without softening it because you deserve honesty more than comfort.

You are going to be tired in a way that goes all the way down, tired in the bone, tired in the place that decides whether to keep going,

and you are going to keep going because you do not know how not to.

But I am going to tell you this:

Give so much. Give everything. And also, in the small moments, on the shore of yourself that belongs to no one else,

give something to yourself.

Give yourself the belief you give so freely to others. Give yourself the patience you give the struggling student.

You deserve your own generosity. You deserved it from the beginning.

You are going to find out that you did not belong there.

Not because of anything that was wrong with you. Because of everything that was right with you, and the particular cruelty of a room that needed you but was not built for you.

This is going to hurt in a way you are not prepared for.

You are going to spend years thinking the problem is you, turning yourself over, looking for the missing piece.

There is no missing piece.

You were always the right shape. The room was the wrong shape.

When you finally understand this, it will feel like grief and like freedom, grief and freedom arriving together the way they always do when something true finally breaks the surface.

I want to tell you about the shore.

You are going to the shore. Far from the institution.

You are going to sit with the sea, which will ask nothing of you,

and you are going to cry the way you needed to cry for years, the real kind, the kind without an audience,

and when you are empty, you are going to find underneath the emptiness the most important thing you have found in nineteen years.

Yourself.

Still there. Still whole. Still luminous under all the exhaustion, the performance, and the careful management of being a person that the institution kept evaluating.

I want to tell you about the poems.

You are going to write poems.

Not as scholarship, not as methodology, but because you are going to discover in the long quiet aftermath of all that noise,

that you are a writer.

That you always were.

I love you.

I love the woman who revised the lesson plan three times. I love the woman who could not walk past the struggling student. I love the woman who agonized at two in the morning over whether she had said exactly the right thing in exactly the right way to the person who most needed to hear it.

I love the woman who kept the actual record, who knew in her deepest self that she was good, that the work was good, that what happened in those rooms was extraordinary even when no one was calling it that.

I love the woman who is standing now on the other side of knowing, worn smooth by it, clarified by it, more herself for it than she has ever been,

still kind, still ethical, still in love with the work and the students and the lantern she carries into every room,

and finally, finally, in love with herself.

You made it through.

I wanted you to know from the beginning that you make it through.

Para la mujer que era antes de saber. Te vi siempre. Eras suficiente desde el principio. Con todo mi amor, desde el otro lado.

For the woman I was before I knew. I always saw you. You were enough from the beginning. With all my love, from the other side.

A smooth weathered piece of wood half-buried in white snow, its grain worn clean and visible, alone in a white field.

Still Here, Worn to Its Truest Shape
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Artist Statement: A footprint stripped by water, time, and winter to its grain.

Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this poem were assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.

The Grief That Comes With Rest

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on grief, loss, and emotional exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

Title: Night Shore

Photograph from “The Grief That Comes With Rest”, image 1.

Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

No one told me
that when the shoulders finally drop,
The tears begin.

That the body, loosening
its long-held grip on vigilance,
would release more than tension.
It would release the unlived hours,
the dinners declined,
the calls shortened,
the visits swallowed by marking,
by meetings,
by the endless proving
that I deserved to remain.

I thought healing would feel like relief.
And it does.
But it also feels like mourning
the woman who said yes
when she meant no,
who signed the third contract,
and the fourth,
who lay awake rehearsing indispensability
because dispensable meant invisible,
and invisible meant gone.

Duelo, the Spanish say.
Grief.
And duel.
As if mourning were a kind of combat,
a reckoning with all that was lost
while I was too busy to notice the losing.

I grieve the braced mornings.
The jaw that forgot softness.
The breath held shallow
like a child waiting to be corrected.

I grieve the writing set aside,
the ideas that flickered
and went dark
for lack of time
that was never mine to hold.

I grieve the woman
I might have become
had I trusted
that I was enough
without performance.

Miriam Greenspan (2003) writes
that no emotion is negative,
only refused.
That grief, if allowed to move,
becomes gratitude.

So I am letting it move.

Here by the sea
where pelicans rest between dives,
where nothing asks to be proven,
where waves keep ancient rhythm
without apology,
I let the tears come
for all the years
I kept dry.

This is what the body knows
that the mind resists:
Safety is what allows grief
to arrive.

The shoulders drop.
The sorrow rises.
The jaw softens.
The unlived life
asks to be mourned.

Healing, I am learning,
moves in spirals
from broken toward whole.
It is a spiral,
circling back
to gather the fragments
left behind
when survival required speed.

El duelo que viene con el descanso.
The grief that comes with rest.
The mourning that waits
until we finally stop.

The pelicans grieve differently than I do.
They dive when hungry.
They rest when full.
They have never been asked
to earn stillness.

I am unlearning.

Here, by the sea,
salt on my face
that might be spray,
that might be tears,
that might be both,
I am unlearning
the fear of rest.

Descansa,
the water whispers.
Rest.

And I do.
And I weep.
And both are holy.

Title: Hammock Between Roots

Photograph from “The Grief That Comes With Rest”, image 2.

Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

References

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Greenspan, M. (2003). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications.

ACADEMIC LENS

The paradox named in this title, that grief arrives with rest rather than with exhaustion, is clinically well-documented. Van der Kolk (2014) observes that the hyperactivated nervous system of the chronically stressed person suppresses grief as an unaffordable vulnerability: one cannot afford to feel the weight of what has been lost while still needing all available resources for survival. Menakem (2017) describes this as the body’s intelligent prioritisation: grief, like other emotions requiring duration and openness, must wait until the nervous system registers sufficient safety to permit it. Levine (2010) calls this the “thaw” phase of somatic healing: as the chronic bracing releases, the feelings it has been holding at bay begin to move through the body. The grief that comes with rest is therefore a sign that the rest is working rather than failing, it is working. Moustakas’s (1961) heuristic inquiry framework suggests that this grief is also data: it tells the researcher something specific about the scale of the loss that has been carried, and about the depth of the healing that the body’s intelligence has been waiting to undertake.

You Are Not Qualified

Reading Time: 3 minutes

They said it with such clean mouths, such pressed collars, such careful grammar,
as if the words were a gift and I should be grateful for the clarity.

You are not quite what we are looking for.

I went home and looked in the mirror for the missing thing,
the gap between my face and the face they had already chosen
before I walked through the door.

I counted my degrees like rosary beads. I counted my years.
I counted the papers, the classrooms, the students who wept at the end of term
and said, you changed something in me.

None of it was currency here.

They smiled while they did it. That is the part that stays,
the smile, the warmth in the room while I was being measured
against a ruler I was never meant to hold.

I rewrote my letter. I softened my edges. I learned their language
the way an immigrant learns to laugh at jokes that are about her.

I applied again.

We had many strong candidates this year.

I bought a new suit. I straightened what was already straight.
I arrived early, stayed late, published in their journals,
cited their names like prayers, sat on the committees no one wanted,
carried the invisible work in both arms like groceries up four flights of stairs,
and smiled, because you must always smile.

We felt someone else was a better fit.

Better fit.

A sock drawer. A parking space. A peg in the right-shaped hole.

I have an education. I have nineteen years.
I have read every book they told me would be enough,
and then the next book, and the next,
following the breadcrumb trail they kept moving just ahead of my hand.

I taught the exact same courses.
I stood in the exact same rooms, at the exact same hour,
holding the exact same ideas they would later decide
required someone else's mouth.

And when they said no, I punished myself with more work,
more late nights, more hours offered up like proof,
like penance, like if I just gave enough of myself
there would finally be nothing left to reject.

The cruelest part is that I believed them.

For so long, I believed the problem lived in me,
in the particular shape of my ambition,
the particular sound of my voice,
the particular way I took up space,
which was always either too much
or so little I became furniture.

I have sat in rooms where the air itself said this was never designed for you,
and smiled, and contributed, and been thanked in the minutes no one reads.

I have been told I am inspiring.

Inspiring is what they call you when they have decided you are a visitor.

You are not qualified.

Say it again. Say it clean.

Let it mean what it has always meant,
underneath the careful grammar,
underneath the pressed collars,
underneath the warmth in the room while the door was already closing.

I am still here.

I am still here, which is its own kind of answer,
though I am so tired of the question being me.

Aquí estoy.

Silhouette of a pigeon perched on a ledge, backlit by a bright sun through a hazy grey sky, photographed through glass.

The One Who Stayed Anyway
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Artist Statement: A pigeon photographed through a window. The bird had chosen the ledge. It was facing the sun.

They Used My Labour and Called It Privilege

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The Structural Poem

A note on this poem. This poem is testimony. It does not include the self-questioning that I do in the essays, because testimony and analysis are different acts. I have chosen to let the poem be what it is.

Let me tell you how it works.

Not the version in the handbook. Not the version in the mission statement with its careful language about community and excellence and the transformative power of education.

The actual version. The one that runs underneath like a current you cannot see from the surface, but that pulls at your legs if you stand in it long enough.

Here is how it works.

They find someone brilliant. Someone who loves the work with the particular love that makes a person do more than is required, give more than is contracted, stay later than anyone is watching,

and they hire her temporarily.

Not because the work is temporary. The work is permanent. The courses run every semester. The students keep arriving. The curriculum does not pause to acknowledge that the person delivering it is unsure whether she will be delivering it next year.

They hire her temporarily because temporary is cheaper. Because temporary does not require the benefits, security, and institutional commitment that permanent does.

Because the temporary keeps her grateful.

And a grateful worker is a compliant one.

This is not a conspiracy.

I want to say that clearly because the moment you name the structure, someone will say you sound paranoid, you sound bitter, no one sat in a room and decided to do this to you.

They are right. No one sat in a room.

That is precisely the point. That is what makes it structural rather than personal. The harm does not require intention. The harm requires only a system that has decided certain kinds of labour are infinitely extractable from certain kinds of people who can be kept just insecure enough to keep extracting from.

The system does not hate her. The system does not see her.

That is not comfort. That is the definition of the problem.

She was called lucky.

She was told she was lucky to have the work, lucky to teach the courses she loved, lucky to be in the room, lucky that the institution kept finding a way to bring her back.

Lucky.

As though her nineteen years of expertise were a gift the institution was generously receiving rather than a resource it was systematically mining.

She felt the gratitude. She performed it beautifully. She understood, without anyone telling her, that the gratitude was part of the contract, the unwritten part, the part that kept the system functioning smoothly, that kept her from asking the questions the system could not comfortably answer.

Questions like: If I am not qualified enough to be hired permanently, why am I qualified enough to carry the curriculum?

Questions like: At what point does temporary become a word that means we will take everything you have and give you nothing you can build a life on?

She did not ask these questions out loud.

She asked them in the parking lot. She asked them at two in the morning. She asked them in the shower, where the sound drowned out the question.

They called it flexibility.

Her flexibility meant no pension contributions she could count on. No sick leave that did not cost her the income she could not afford to lose. No ability to take a mortgage on a contract that expired in April.

The institution called this flexibility.

She called it something else.

She called it the transfer of institutional risk onto the bodies of the people least able to carry it.

And here is the part that makes the grief complicated:

She loved it.

She genuinely, helplessly, and permanently loved the work.

Her love was the subsidy.

Her love and the love of every brilliant, committed, devoted person working on a contract in every institution that has learned that passion is a resource you do not have to compensate fairly because it will show up anyway.

I am not bitter.

I want to say that, and I want it to be true, and mostly it is.

I am clear.

There is a difference between bitterness and clarity.

Bitterness is personal. Clarity is structural. Clarity names the system. Clarity holds the institution accountable without requiring a villain.

I want the structure changed.

I want a world where the next woman, as brilliant and devoted and careful as she has been, does not spend nineteen years as temporary.

She is still in the system.

But she is in it differently now.

She is in it with her eyes open. She is in it with the clear naming of what is happening, why it is happening, and whose interests it serves.

She is in it with this poem, which is not bitterness but testimony.

Not grievance but record.

They used my labour and called it privilege.

They used my love and called it flexibility.

They used my devotion and called it inspiring.

They used my silence and called it professionalism.

I am no longer silent.

Not because I am angry, though I have earned the anger.

Because silence was the last thing they needed from me, which I was still giving freely.

And I am done giving freely to a system that calculated the price of everything I offered and decided it did not have to pay it.

A Coda, in My Own Voice

I am also writing this as the woman who stayed.

The system did not extract from me without my participation. I performed the gratitude. I rehearsed the smile. I spoke well of the institution in rooms where speaking otherwise might have cost me the next contract, and I knew, at some level beneath language, that the performed thankfulness was the unwritten clause of the agreement. I signed that clause every year, in invisible ink, and I knew I was signing it.

I want to say that the love was real, and so was the calculation. Both were true at once. I loved the work and I also kept the love legible to the people who could renew me. I do not think this makes me complicit in the way the system is. I do think it makes me a participant in a quieter way than the poem above lets on, and I owe the page the honesty of saying so.

The structure is what it is. My agency inside it was smaller than the institution claimed and larger than the grievance allows. Both sentences need to stand on the same line.

Aquí estoy. Con los ojos abiertos. Ya no en silencio.

Here I am. With open eyes. No longer silent.

A Letter From the Woman You Are Becoming

Reading Time: 5 minutes

From Future Amy, To the Amy Who Is Almost There

Dear you.

Dear brave, brilliant, bone-tired, still-standing, still-kind, still-carrying-the-lantern you.

I am writing from the other side of everything you are in the middle of right now, from the place you cannot quite see yet because you are still in the thick of the becoming, still in the part of the story that feels more like enduring than arriving,

and I want to tell you what is here.

I want to tell you what is waiting.

First, the practical things, because I know you, I know you need to know the practical things before you can let yourself feel the rest of it.

You are okay.

Financially, professionally, in all the ways that kept you awake at two in the morning doing the mathematics of whether you would make it through another April,

you are okay.

More than okay.

You found the room that was shaped like you. I know you have been looking for it for a very long time. I know there were years you stopped believing it existed,

but it exists.

It exists, and you are in it, and it feels exactly the way you imagined it would feel on the nights you let yourself imagine.

It feels like breathing. It feels like a morning that belongs to you. It feels like walking into a room and the room saying, “There you are. We have been waiting. Come in, come in, stay as long as you like.“

The doctorate is done.

I want to tell you that because I know how it weighs on you, the unfinished thing, the work that is so important and so yours.

It is done.

And it is extraordinary.

Not because a committee said so, though they did, but because it is true. Because you wrote it in your own voice, the voice that took years to trust, the voice that is scholarly and embodied and refuses to pretend that knowing happens outside of a body, outside of a life, outside of nineteen years of labour and love and parking lot mornings.

You wrote the truest thing.

Alonetude is in the world now. People are reading it. The ones who work in the in-between spaces, the ones on the contracts, the ones performing well in the parking lots of institutions that need their labour and withhold their belonging,

they are reading your words, and they are feeling less alone, and that is the work, that is the real work, that is what nineteen years was always building toward, even when it felt like it was building toward nothing.

Now let me tell you about the things that are not practical.

Let me tell you about a Tuesday morning.

An ordinary Tuesday. Not a milestone Tuesday. Not an achievement Tuesday.

Just a Tuesday when you woke up and lay still for a moment, the way you learned to do in Loreto,

and the first thing you felt was not the tightening.

The first thing you felt was yourself.

Present. Whole. Quietly, ordinarily, unremarkably glad to be alive on a Tuesday morning with the light coming through the window and nowhere to be for another hour and a cup of something warm in your future and the work you love waiting for you like a friend rather than a demand.

You lay in it, and you thought oh. So this is what they meant.

This is what rest was building toward. This is what the shore was practicing you for. This is the life on the other side of the performance of a life.

It is quieter than you expected. It is more ordinary than you expected.

It is so much better than anything you expected.

I want to tell you about your body.

Your shoulders come down.

I know that sounds like such a small thing. It is not a small thing. Your shoulders coming down is physical evidence that a woman is no longer waiting to find out whether she is still employed.

Your shoulders coming down is what safety feels like in the body.

You are safe. I need you to hear that all the way down.

You are safe.

The students found you.

The ones who needed you specifically. The ones who were on the contracts. The ones performing fine in the parking lots. The ones who read alonetude and recognized themselves in it and needed someone who had mapped the territory and come back to say I know this place, I know how to navigate this, here is what helped, here is how you find the shore inside yourself when there is no Loreto within reach.

You became that person.

I want to tell you about the writing.

You became a poet.

And you did not even know it.

I know that surprises you. But the line between scholar and poet turned out to be much thinner than you thought, and one morning you stopped trying to categorize yourself and just wrote what the truth required,

and what the truth required, Amy, was both.

It was always both. You were always both.

Tom knows.

I want to say that because I know you worry about whether the people who love you really see the whole of it.

Tom knows.

Not because you performed it less but because you finally let yourself be known the way you always knew how to know others, fully, carefully, without looking away.

And he stayed. Of course, he stayed. He has always been staying.

You are loved. You are chosen. You are someone’s permanent.

I want to tell you what I know now that I wish you knew then, in the middle of it, in the parking lot mornings, in the two a.m. turnings:

None of it was wasted.

Not one morning. Not one contract. Not one raised bar. Not one carefully worded rejection in professional language with warmth in the room.

None of it was wasted because it all became the work.

I want to leave you with something small.

A Tuesday morning. A cup of something warm. Your shoulders are coming down. The work you love is waiting like a friend.

A smooth stone in your pocket.

The knowledge, finally unshakeable, lived in the body, permanent as the shore,

that you were always good enough.

Come forward.

I am here. I am you. I am waiting for Tuesday morning, the open window, and the work that finally looks like what you always knew it was.

Come forward.

You have already done the hardest part.

All that is left now is the living of it.

And the living of it, Amy, the living of it is so very, very beautiful.

De tu yo futuro, que te ha estado esperando con los brazos abiertos y el corazón lleno. Ya casi llegas. Sigue caminando.

From your future self, who has been waiting for you with open arms and a full heart. You are almost here. Keep walking.

Future Amy
Writer. Scholar. Poet. Whole.
Keeper of smooth stones.
The woman who came through.
Still here. Still kind. Still luminous.
Aquí estoy.

A note from the present. I do not yet know whether the woman who wrote this letter will become the woman it is from. That is part of what writing toward her is for.

Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this letter were assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.

The Parking Lot

Reading Time: < 1 minuteAfter the handshake I walked out.

Across the pavement.
Flat light.
The kind that belongs to neither day nor night.

I sat in the car.
The door closed.

I let the thing happen
that I had been holding
through the warmth of the room,
through the careful language,
through the kindness
of people who could see what I needed
and could not give it.

They could see it.
That is the part I am still sitting with.

And then I drove home.
And then I made dinner.
And then I answered emails.

Twenty-five years of that.
Not the crying.
The returning.
The next morning.
The next September.

In the shoulders.
In the jaw.
In the particular way
a body learns to wait
when waiting is the only contract
it has ever been offered.

Someone should have put a hand
on the roof of the car.
Should have stood in the flat light
and said: I know.
This is real.
I see the cost of this.

Nobody did.

So I am saying it now
to whoever is sitting
in a parking lot somewhere
with the engine running
and the building still visible
in the rear-view mirror.

I know.
This is real.
I see the cost of this.

You can drive home now.

The Contract

Reading Time: 4 minutes

They gave me a contract the way you give someone an umbrella after the rain has already started,

a document, a date, a number of months carefully chosen to end just before anything could be called permanent.

I signed it.

Of course, I signed it. I signed it the first time with something close to joy, the particular joy of a person who has worked very hard, been seen working very hard, and is finally, finally being let in.

I did not read the expiry date as a warning. I read it as a beginning.

That is the thing about the first contract. It feels like a door opening. It takes years to understand that it was never a door. It was a revolving one, and you were always going to end up back outside.

The second contract came, and I signed it with slightly less joy and slightly more relief, which is a different thing, relief being what joy becomes when it has learned to be grateful just to still be here.

I was still here. That felt like something. I made it mean something.

Here is what no one tells you about living in one-year increments.

You cannot plan a garden.

That sounds small. It is not small.

A garden requires the belief that you will be there for the harvest, that the thing you put in the ground today will be yours to tend through all its seasons, that the roots go down into soil that belongs to you long enough to matter.

I could not plan a garden.

I could not plan the way people plan when they know they are staying.

I planned the way people plan when they are guests. Carefully. Lightly. Always aware of where the door was.

Every spring it came.

The email, or the meeting, or sometimes just the silence that lasted a beat too long before someone said, “We are planning to have you back.

Planning to.

Two words doing the quiet work of keeping a person just uncertain enough to be manageable.

Do you know what the annual uncertainty does to a body?

It does not break you all at once. That would almost be easier. A clean break, a clear moment, a before and after you could point to.

It is slower than that.

It is the way the shoulders never quite come down. The way sleep becomes a negotiation in the months leading up to renewal. The way you cannot fully celebrate the good semester, because somewhere in the back of every good thing is the question of whether there will be a next one.

And the cruellest part, the part that I am still sitting with,

is that they needed me.

Not abstractly. Not in the way institutions need warm bodies to fill rooms.

They needed me specifically. My expertise. My courses. My relationships with the students. My willingness to sit on the committees, cover the gaps, and do the invisible work that kept things running while they endlessly searched for the person they actually wanted in the position I was already doing.

They used my labour to hold the place for someone else’s permanence.

I was the placeholder. For nineteen years, I was the placeholder.

And they were kind about it. That is the part that makes it complicated. They were genuinely kind. They appreciated me. They said so. They meant it.

Appreciation and belonging are not the same thing. I know that now.

I am tearing up the contract now.

Not in anger. In grief. In the quiet grief of a woman who finally understands what she was signing all those years,

and who is ready, for the first time, to sign something different.

Something that says I belong to my own future.

Something that says my labour is not available for indefinite borrowing.

Something that says I am not a placeholder. I am not pending. I am not provisional.

Something that has no expiry date because it is written in the only ink that does not fade:

the knowledge of her own worth, which was never, not for a single year of all those years, in question.

A Coda, in My Own Voice

I want to say one more thing, before the closing.

I signed each contract knowing what it was, eventually. The first one I signed in something close to joy. The later ones I signed knowing the shape of the door, and I signed them anyway, because the work was the work I wanted to do and because the imagined alternative was a country I had no map for. The institution wrote the terms. I accepted them. I also negotiated, sometimes, in small ways. I also rested when I could. I also taught well within the arrangement and let myself be proud of that.

It would be too easy to write the poem in which I am only the one signed against. The fuller truth is that I was also the one who kept signing, kept hoping the next renewal would feel different, kept producing the goodwill that made the next renewal more likely. Compliance had a quiet payoff for me too. I want the record to hold that line beside the line about precarity.

I am tearing up the contract now. I am also acknowledging that, for nineteen years, I helped renew it.

Aquí estoy. Ya no esperando renovación. Soy permanente en mí misma.

Here I am. No longer waiting for renewal. I am permanent within myself.

A snake plant with its stems intricately braided together, growing in a black pot on a greenhouse shelf, constrained into an elaborate pattern while still alive.

Woven into Something Not of Your Own Choosing
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Artist Statement: I found this plant in a greenhouse, a living thing that had been trained, woven, braided into a shape someone else chose for it. Still growing. Still green. Still entirely itself beneath the pattern that had been imposed upon it. I photographed it because the contract works the same way: take something living and weave it into increments, into one-year shapes, into a form that serves the institution’s aesthetics while the root keeps reaching down regardless. The braid is not the plant. The contract is not the person. Both are still alive underneath.

Poem: They Lied.

Poem: They Lied, a reckoning with the stories that institutions tell about labour, worth, and endurance. A poem of grief and clarity, written from the body of someone who believed them for too long.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

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.

Photograph from “Poem: They Lied.”, image 1.

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 racialized 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 nineteen 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, racialized 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, I chained my scholarship to funding cycles, productivity dashboards, and institutional branding strategies.

They told me teaching was sacred.
Then, I 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.

Aerial view of a blazing sunset above a sea of clouds, with snow-capped mountain peaks visible below, photographed from an airplane window.

Artist Statement: I took this photograph from a window seat, ascending through the smoke and cloud of everything I was leaving behind. Below me, mountains I had not chosen; above me, a sky that had no record of my service. This image sits beside the poem because both of them refuse the ground floor. The poem names the extraction. The photograph holds the moment the body finally rose above it, not arrived, not saved, but airborne. Still moving. Still here.

Translation Note: Where Spanish appears in this collection, it was assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.

Poem: I Did Everything You Asked Me

Poem: I Did Everything You Asked Me, a poem of exhaustion, grief, and the moment of recognizing that full compliance is not protection. Written in the voice of someone who gave everything and was given nothing back.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

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 nineteen 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 in exchange for disposability.

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.

Title: Always on the Outside

Photograph from “Poem: I Did Everything You Asked Me”, image 1.

A woman in a red sweater smiling while looking out an airplane window at a frozen, pale landscape below a white sky.

Artist Statement: I took this photograph somewhere over a frozen landscape, mid-flight, somewhere between the institution and whatever comes after. I am smiling. I want to remember that. Not because everything was resolved, but because the window was mine, and the seat was mine, and no one had assigned me a schedule for the next three hours. The exhaustion in this poem is real. So is this moment. Both are true. I took the picture so I would not forget that the body that carried all of that weight also eventually looked out a window and smiled.

Performing Fine

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The Exhaustion of Always Being Okay

Let me tell you about the morning routine.

Not the one on the wellness blog, not the one with the gratitude journal and the warm lemon water and the ten minutes of mindfulness before the day begins.

The real one.

The one that starts before the alarm, in the dark, in the space between sleep and waking, where the body knows things the performing self has not yet had time to manage.

The body knows it is tired.

Not the kind of tired that a weekend fixes. The kind of tired that has been accumulating since somewhere around year three, when she first understood that this was not temporary, that the precarity was not a phase, that she was going to have to find a way to live inside the uncertainty without letting it show,

because letting it show was a kind of weakness she could not afford in rooms that were already measuring her.

So she learned the routine.

Coffee first. Then the face. Not makeup, though that too, but underneath the makeup, the other face, the one that says I am fine, I am more than fine, I am exactly the kind of person who belongs in this room and is grateful to be here and has no complicated feelings about any of this.

She has been putting on that face for so long that it now comes on without effort. That is the most frightening part. How easy it has become.

She walks into the building.

Someone says, how are you?

Fine, she says. Really well, actually.

And she means it in the moment she says it, or she means the performance of it, which has become indistinguishable from meaning it, which is its own kind of loss.

Four words covering a parking lot morning, a two a.m. waking, a contract that expires in April, a rejection letter she has read enough times to have memorized its careful language, its warm tone, its devastating politeness.

Really well.

The performance has a texture.

She performs well in the meeting where they discuss the course she has taught for twelve years, as though it were hypothetical, as though anyone in the room could walk in tomorrow and do what she does in it.

She performs fine on the committee she did not want to join and joined anyway because she understood, without anyone saying it, that visible commitment was part of the performance, that being seen to invest in the institution that was not investing in her was somehow still required.

She brings the agenda items. She does the follow-up. She volunteers for the subcommittee.

She is very, very fine.

But here is what fine looks like from the inside.

Fine is the shower that runs a little longer than it needs to because the shower is the one place where the performance is not required, where the face can do what it actually needs to do, where the grief gets its ten minutes before being folded up and put away for another day.

Fine is the car parked a little longer than it needs to be, engine off, hands in her lap, gathering herself for the walk across the car park that has to look like a woman arriving, not a woman deciding whether she has enough left to make it through another day of this.

Fine is the student who asks, in passing, “Are you okay?“

And she says yes, of course, just busy, end of term, you know how it is,

and she sees in their face that they almost said more, that they saw something she did not mean to show, and she pivots, efficiently, back to them, back to their needs, back to the performance of the woman who is here for everyone else and fine, always fine, about herself.

She has been performing fine for so long that she has almost forgotten what the alternative looks like.

Not fine lives in the parking lot. In the shower. In the middle of the night, when there is nothing left to manage it with.

Not fine is the body, the body that has been keeping the actual record all along, the body that does not perform, that cannot be convinced by professional language or institutional appreciation or the warm handshake of the person who will not give her the job.

The body knows. The body has always known.

I want to say something about the wellness programmes.

The institution had them. Of course, it had them. The workshops on resilience. The mindfulness sessions at lunch on Wednesdays. The employee assistance programme with the phone number she never called.

She did not call because she understood, without anyone telling her, that needing help within a system that was deciding her value was a risk she could not afford.

The wellness programme was in place, and she performed well through it. Everyone felt good about the Wednesday lunch, and nothing changed about the conditions that were making her unwell.

This is what she would later understand as the perfect performance, the institution’s performance, of caring without changing anything.

She recognized it because she had been performing for so long herself.

She is learning to stop.

Not all at once. That is not how you stop something that has become the texture of a life.

But slowly. In the small moments first.

When the student asks if she is okay, she pauses for a half-second longer before saying “fine.”

Just a half-second of letting the question actually land.

In that gap, small and fragile and very new, she is learning to let herself be not fine,

to let not fine be survivable,

to let one true thing through at a time.

She will not always be fine.

She is already not fine, and she is surviving it, and the surviving is starting to feel less like performing and more like living.

which is its own kind of beginning.

Which is, after all of this, enough.

Aquí estoy. No siempre bien, pero aquí. Y eso es suficiente por ahora.

Here I am. Not always fine, but here. And that is enough for now.