The winter after I quit my tenured professorship, I couldn’t afford a haircut. I stood at the mirror with a pair of scissors to my long hair and cried.
What had I done?
When I had resigned a few months earlier, giving up a lifetime of assured income, insurance benefits, research support, and professional belonging to which so many academics aspire, some acquaintances had hinted that I was making a mistake. I’d received cards from friends saying they were worried about me; from colleagues, eyebrows raised in silence. One old pal warned that we weren’t in our twenties anymore.
To be fair, I was barely thirty-two. And, thanks to my working-class background, I’d already been in the workforce for almost twenty years. I’d never had the irresponsible twenties some enjoy. If quitting my day job had anything to do with age, it wasn’t immaturity but the opposite, the ubiquitous American midlife crisis arriving a decade early.
Those who knew me the best fretted the least. A handful of close friends and family nervously supported my unorthodox move, knowing they couldn’t rightly question my history of good judgment. That judgment had taken me from a prairie farmhouse to an Ivy League graduate school to a middle-class income in air-conditioned classrooms far from the hand-blistering wheat harvests of my youth. I’d carved a life from being disciplined, even self-denying, in a family that tended toward the impulsive.
So why then the desire to leave, to dismantle what I’d built?
Behind such a monumental decision was a confluence of reasons and events—most of which others couldn’t know because I myself was still struggling to articulate them. According to the grapevine, some thought I was running away from, not toward, something. In that way they were wrong. I offered my department, the one party I believed deserved an explanation, the only true reason I fully understood at the time—accurate, if incomplete: my mother’s health. Two months after I had received tenure and promotion, my fifty-year-old mom had been diagnosed with a rare, aggressive breast cancer.
The enormity of her prognosis, in the midst of an already auspiciously difficult year, evoked in me that feeling I sometimes get at funerals. You know the one—when you’re stunned into clarity, rung by humble reckoning with mortality, a dead body at the front of a chapel. When you look around and ask, What the hell are we all doing with our lives?
I’d climbed out of hard-soil origins by being intentionally pragmatic, but my nature was a wilder thing. I quit my job to be at my mother’s side in another state, yes, but also to heed a more selfish call: the old creative yearnings of a girl who hadn’t yet worked herself raw to pay for college, married her high school sweetheart, fought for employment, fixed up houses, planned to have a baby. Before all that, I’d had a different life vision—adventure, travel, and the ultimate Holy Grail: publishing what since childhood I’d quietly thought of as My Book.
I’d never given up those dreams. They had become an amorphous longing, though, as I did what so many of us do in the real world: eke out an authentic enough life that, first and foremost, paid the bills and theoretically allowed me to write My Book in the crevices between other demands. By the time Mom was diagnosed, I’d been chipping away at it for more than a decade. My Book had been a research project when I was an undergrad, my thesis when I was an MFA student. Even then I hadn’t been able to prioritize it while I labored to pay the bills. Soon I found myself in a coveted position with a teaching load of four courses per semester. In such an occupation, a sick mother might be visited over a long weekend, and a book might be written over a summer.
With the sound of my mother’s bell tolling from the near future, my usual order of priorities—job first, then my loved ones and my dreams, wherever they might fit in—felt all wrong. I’d woken back up to the beautiful, savage, heart-ripping reality I once knew as a child, in which moments are to be seized because the next paycheck is never assured. Somehow, not even the promise of decades of salary pay and benefits in a society built around money could lull me back to sleep.
For years I’d behaved as a people pleaser—putting everyone else’s needs and feelings above my own. Now I suddenly had no tolerance for people or actions with even a whiff of bullshit about them. And lo, most academic departments carry more than a whiff. My upbringing as a Midwestern farm girl perhaps had honed my sense of smell. In The Uses of Literacy, cultural critic Richard Hoggart described the experience of being a “scholarship boy” who is “at the friction point of two cultures”: “He has left his class, at least in spirit, by being in certain ways unusual; and he is still unusual in another class.” I was a scholarship girl. Hauling lesson plans across a college campus as a professor a mere decade after I’d hauled feed across a cattle pasture was one hell of a friction point.
As chair of my university’s diversity initiative, I’d found that academia wasn’t the occupational promised land for women, minorities, and other historically marginalized groups that it might have been for middle-class White men. I’d always felt relatively comfortable as a woman in academia, though. It meant jumping through all the usual unfair hoops, but those hoops I knew existed not just at universities but also behind the bars where I’d poured whiskey for tips. Same shit, different pay grade.
What vexed me more was an otherness of socioeconomic class. I was a woman in a man’s world not as a female professor but as a female professor who was the first woman in her family to stay in school past eleventh grade.
My blue-collar origins meant the risk I was taking in leaving my job was more foolhardy than even my most cynical critics knew. I had no firm plan about another job, just a handful of creative project leads, a small retirement fund I could cash in if I had to, and a feeling that couldn’t wait.
When I quit my professorship, it wasn’t the first time I’d taken an economic risk that to some might seem outlandish. My undergraduate college tuition was covered by scholarships, and I worked to pay the rent. But after a low-paying stint at a newspaper, in 2003 I was accepted to an elite graduate degree program. The annual tuition was around $40,000, more than the annual income of anyone in my family. The school offered a small fellowship, and the government would provide up to $18,500 a year in subsidized loans. The rest would have to come from private lenders. I hesitated over the loan documents in my mom’s apartment—aching to go to Columbia but wrecked by the repercussions.
“You’ll regret it if you don’t go,” Mom said. Ultimately, I agreed. For a kid with my origins, I figured, the financial debt was worth the social capital. When it comes to economic risk, what appears reckless to the privileged is often the smartest bet to the poor. By the time I graduated from Columbia and left New York, my bet was upward of ninety grand.
In recent years many have questioned a degree’s value and chastised those who take out big loans to buy one. Most of those critics, I’d wager, never worked a wheat field. Debt burden and being overeducated in an employer’s market is psychologically and financially crushing, yes, but an assured lifetime sentence to manual labor can be more crushing—ask my dad, a brilliant thinker who has given me poems written in carpenter’s pencil on scraps of two-by-four lumber. Most college graduates who are underwater financially at least have fish to eat, and though I loathe debt, I indeed would choose it over starving. It takes a toll but buys a chance.
What would justify my student loans, I’d always told myself, would be a book deal that allowed me to pay them off with one big check. Like those loans, to leave tenure with little cushion to fall back on was a horrible decision on paper. I wasn’t delusional on that point and faced a healthy host of reasonable fears: the primitive terrors of starvation and homelessness, the more luxurious concerns of disappointing colleagues and leaving students.
But at my deepest core, I felt the departure was necessary. Spending much of my life in economic poverty—a sort of freedom in that one has little to lose—had afforded me a wealth of self-knowing. The painful requirements of following through on the feeling were, perhaps, less scary to me than they would have been for someone more privileged. I’d gone without before and survived. I figured I could do it again—though I foolishly imagined I wouldn’t have to.
The university, for its part, wondered how much money I’d need to stay. This response startled me. I’d never in my life considered manipulating an employer for a raise, let alone leveraging the matter of my mother’s health to do so. There was no amount, I said.
They’d hold my position for a year and a half, they said. Grateful, I thought on this, but still the clarity rang through me. I was resigning, I said.
Would I at least sign a letter merely calling my departure a leave of absence rather than a resignation, they asked, so as to preserve department funding for my tenure line in a dangerous fiscal climate?
Here I paused. Amid my flush of individualism I still felt protective of and responsible to the writing curriculum I’d helped build. Signing such a letter might behoove that curriculum and my colleagues, on whom my departure placed the burdens of picking up classes and reassigning my many duties. I was leaving one month into a new school year, putting my files in order as best I could for whoever would inherit them. Within a couple of weeks I’d be rambling across the West toward my mother and a host of adventures. Surely I could sign a letter bending language for the sake of a place, people, and mission I held in high regard. Doing so, I realized, would benefit me too—a way to hedge my bets. If I signed the letter, the job would be waiting for me for a year and a half.
As a child, I liked to reenact a climactic movie scene in which Indiana Jones ducks, runs, and maneuvers through a gauntlet deep inside an ancient temple. He gauges each step to avoid death, only to arrive at a ravine so deep he can’t see the bottom. It’s far too wide to jump. He reads from a diary of secrets guiding him toward the Holy Grail and sees he has no choice but to cross. “Nobody can jump this,” he says, sweating. He’s up shit creek at that point, his dad back at the entrance bleeding out next to a cluster of greedy Nazis.
“It’s a leap of faith,” he says and groans at the pun from God. He puts his hand on his heart like he’s taking an oath, steadies his breath, stretches one leg into the abyss, and sways forward, appearing to the naked eye to be falling to his death. But a stone bridge catches him—invisible by way of optical illusion, it had been there all along. Pretending I was Indy, I used to run and jump along rows of hay bales at the corner of our alfalfa field.
In those years, by necessity I trusted no voice but my own. I believed in myself precisely because so little was expected of me. The knowing that would take me over so many chasms amounted to hearing my highest voice and being true to it.
I considered the requested letter stating a leave of absence. It would mean calling what I was doing temporary when the tuning fork inside me said it was permanent. To sign such a letter, I knew, would not be true.
“I got the silver, but I’m going for the gold,” I had told my mom, who somehow understood. “Silver,” to me, was an economically stable life. “Gold,” to me, was a fulfilling one.
Mom nodded seriously.
“Go for the gold,” she said.
I didn’t write a letter about a leave of absence. I wrote a letter of resignation. I did not apologize. I was intentionally dismantling every aspect of my constructed identity, killing the darlings of a secure life in order to find the story I needed to live. It felt terrifying and grand.
Months later, there I was, standing before a mirror with a pair of scissors, not even ten bucks to spare for a trip to Great Clips. The project leads I’d thought would pan out as income hadn’t. Mom had finished surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation with excellent results in Colorado and had decided to move, at least temporarily, to the Kansas town where I still owned a house. None of my reasons for leaving my job had been justified, it seemed. I was a woman crying while cutting her own hair—a familiar image in popular culture denoting madness. Had I in fact lost my mind when I left my job?
Just over a year earlier I had been eating dinner with my husband, putting an extensive tenure application in three-ring binders, paying into a retirement fund with a handsome match by my employer, renovating a dream house perched on a hill in a college town. It was an unhappy marriage, a sometimes inhospitable work environment, and a too-big house that I both paid for and cleaned. In those middle-class discomforts, though, I’d at least been in sync with the rest of society, I realized, feeling like a self-made pariah.
Now, at age thirty-two, I had no money, no job, no health insurance, no mate, no plan for a roof once the one I was under sold. There hadn’t been a single offer on the house anyway. I’d cashed in my small retirement fund to pay the mortgage, and now my savings were gone. I didn’t even own a car, since mine had broken down one morning on the way to campus not long before I resigned, like even it thought the job was no longer the right place for me. My grandma was letting me borrow her truck, like she had when I was in high school. She had a limited stash of hard-earned savings and had loaned me money to cover bills. It seemed that I had ruined, not saved, my life.
Familiar generational woes were close by, lapping at my feet like the fire of poverty I’d labored to escape. Dad’s house was foreclosed on; he moved into a trailer with his wife, whose painkiller prescription after a car wreck decades prior had led to worse health problems. A close family member confessed to a longtime gambling addiction. Mom and her partner were on the outs, but her health insurance was through his employer, and I worried that she would be uninsured if they broke up. My grandma, dismayed by her daughter’s cancer and exhausted from caregiving, moved into my place and had emotional and physical breakdowns for which I drove her to emergency rooms.
More than one person said to me, in apparent seriousness, “If I’d had the year you’ve had, I would kill myself.”
Indeed I was so beleaguered that I sometimes prayed to leave earth. Of all my troubles, I’d most underestimated the psychological trauma of relinquishing a professional title that commands respect and confers identity in a culture that values productivity above all else—a trauma likely exacerbated by my having been born, by class and gender, to little respect. As a woman who had worked nearly every day since adolescence for some employer, I’d never had so much time on my hands. I felt lost, crushed by the weight of open space and infinite possibility I’d longed for. I wouldn’t hurt myself, I was sure, but I wasn’t opposed to dying in my sleep.
It took a lot to break my spirit. It had never been done. But after that year—the divorce, the cancer, the gossip, the family, the resignation, the return to poverty—I was broken.
So when my former university advertised a search to fill my old position, I did what seemed the only rational thing to do: I tried to get my job back.
A former colleague generously assured me that, while the department legally had to conduct a public search, it was a no-brainer that the gig would be mine if I applied. I wrote a cover letter saying I’d been wrong to leave and sent it, my pride the cost of postage. Like the woman who sells a brooch to buy potatoes in wartime, I cared nothing for pride.
For weeks I awaited word from the search committee, imagining the joys and horrors of returning to gainful employment I’d brazenly walked away from, should I indeed be welcomed back. Then word came:
The search had been canceled.
Amid other budget priorities, the tenure line had been on the chopping block since I vacated it. Funding for the hire hadn’t been approved. I couldn’t return if only because the job no longer existed, for the moment. I myself had vaporized it by declining to sign a letter saying that I might come back.
This news was distressing but also, somehow, a relief. The paradoxical turn of events was so preposterous that it was comical. Rather than feeling destroyed by a final blow, I felt renewed.
I remembered that funeral feeling, recalled the sureness with which I had jumped. I had an eerie sense that some hand had known what it was doing when it signed a letter saying exactly what I intended. It was my own hand.
I’d been a sprinter and a long jumper in high school track—good at running fast and taking flying leaps. This one had turned out to be a very long leap, I thought. The leap of a lifetime. It wasn’t that I’d landed in ruin. It was that I hadn’t landed yet.
In that scary, stomach-turning moment of suspension, I saw, I still had the power to stick my landing. I did so as the only identity that remained after I shed all the others: writer.
I was drawn back to the sort of pages I hadn’t written since before I earned a living by reporting for newspapers or writing grants for nonprofits. I sat down and did the writing that I hadn’t been able to do in a life with the wrong husband and eighty students per semester and office dramas and perpetual committees needing tending. I wrote not to pay the bills, as I had for years as a journalist and professor climbing away from the early shames and pains of my life, but to say what I had to express—which, predictably, were those very shames and pains.
In that moment looking in the mirror with the scissors, in the throes of not just poverty but a return to it by my own action, painfully untethered from the solidarity of the rat race and its comfortable trappings, the world questioning my sanity, I wasn’t sure I trusted myself. I didn’t know what was coming in the next few years: my mother’s health declining, months of caregiving and writing at her side, the repair of ailing family connections, the long-dreamed-of book deal, the paying down of debts. I didn’t know where I’d land—in a bed next to Mom, three days before she died, telling her that I’d dedicate my book to her.
When troubled by uncertainty, though, I’d remember how I felt when I spoke the hardest, most necessary words: This marriage is over. This house is for sale. I resign. I—that woman—had never felt stronger or more clear. She was the one who wouldn’t sign a letter even pretending she might return to her old job if only to keep the option of going back. Perhaps she sensed that, in my proverbial darkest hour, I would try to turn back. She knew I was setting out on the most difficult, rewarding journey of my life. I might not trust myself, I’d think, but I trust that woman.