I asked my creative writing instructor, Cecilia Petretto, about how one becomes a professor at TCC. It seems that even though I have some good qualifications, the most I could expect is one class as an adjunct in the summer and possibly a couple more in the fall if I do well in the summer, and that only as an adjunct because of the hiring freeze (it’s everywhere) and that means no benefits. And the pay for one credit is $500. So a 3-credit course would be $1500. Even if I got three classes in the fall, that would only be $4500 for the whole semester. So I’d have to do it in addition to my job, although apparently they are hiring because, as Petretto believed, with so many people unemployed anyway, many are going back to school, though how they would afford it, I don’t know.
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So I don’t see much in the way of that escape. I need my salary as a minimum (and it will be a minimum as next year we don’t even get our step, let alone a raise) and I need benefits.
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And the atmosphere at work is toxic. I have worked really hard to respond well to the kids, but I am betrayed by coworkers and then made out to be the unprofessional one by the administrators. As Analiese aptly put it, I am “getting it” from all sides.
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There is no way out and I started hyperventilating in the shower as I contemplated March, where there is not one day off, and next year going through this. I really don’t think I’ll survive that.
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Tonight I added another thin red line to the inside of my left forearm, the smooth, perfectly white skin marred by my pain. But this one didn’t track inward. It was, I think, a practice line for the real thing. I drew a line across my wrist and thought back to when I did that once before, at the end of my first year, but that one had been drawn out of self-loathing over what a bad person I’d felt I’d become. I feel that now, too, even worse than that time from more mistakes, but the driving force was that if I had no outlet, no escape, I would at least create the illusion of one.
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And I thought about my motivation for cutting my own skin in such a way, repeatedly, and thought, I do it for the day after more than for the moment of. I look at it frequently throughout the day and don’t even have a feeling, a specific feeling in response to that. But my eyes are drawn to it nonetheless. If my insides are so cut up and bruised and battered, if my insides are so ugly and malformed by misery and my weak responses to it, then my outsides should not cry out, “hypocrite!” Maybe that’s the real reason I stopped wearing makeup and let the shadows under my eyes show. Maybe that’s why I don’t dress anymore, but merely clothe myself. And maybe that’s why I cut.
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If this goes on, I’ll have to tell my parents on myself, per our agreement. I couldn’t take my own life without letting them know first. And I had thought often since I made that first mark with my fingernail of what I would say if one of them caught sight of my arm. “Cat,” I would say and shrug it off and hope they don’t think anything amiss with that brief explanation – and hope somewhere deep inside that they do. But I was thinking tonight, with just 3 marks on my arm, of driving to their house tonight and showing them everything and telling them about the cigarettes and alcohol, and ask them one more time if they can please help me. And I almost cried when I thought of them seeing me like this and finally being able to say, “yes.” To be the ones out of everyone in the world to tell me that short, lovely word: “yes.” I thought of them finally seeing for themselves that it doesn’t matter what happened to drive me to this – the important thing is that I’m driven to it.
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And it really is so much more than “I don’t like my job.” I have come to lose so much respect for myself – maybe the effect of the kids never having had it in the first place and the administration losing it for me because I’m unhappy, regardless of how hard I may be trying to do my job well in spite of it. This is the worst job and job situation I can fathom. It is the very thing I had always dreaded about getting a job, but even I with my vivid imagination could not have concocted such a terrible situation. And there is no way out. If I had an expiration date, I probably could keep going. “This, too, shall pass” is probably true but it won’t pass for years and I will not make it that long. And as if work wasn’t enough, I have no faith that I will fall in love, that I will find someone I can actually love who will love me back. And without him, there is no family. I am alone and filled with horror all my days.
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