Why I can’t write a good personal essay

Written by Sarcozona

We have kindly been given permission to reproduce this from Tenure, She Wrote where you can find the original post.

I haven’t gotten a paycheck since my fellowship ran out in 2017. Funding is scarce for students in the end of their PhDs and scarcer still for international students with disabilities, so it’s not too surprising that I’ve been turned down for everything I’ve applied for.

Almost 5 years ago, I wrote with regard to applications for funding and otherwise:

"Use your story and the survival skills you’ve gained to succeed. I use my escape from rural poverty in personal statements to show that I have incredible drive, creativity, and independence."

But I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t make my life a funny, moving, educational story for someone else to judge.

I used to follow my own advice. I turned the ways in which I don’t fit neatly into the world into pat inspiration porn. I talked about disability, adverse childhood experiences, being queer in a culture of religious fundamentalism, childhood poverty, and sexism as obstacles for me to overcome in a story to inspire funders. And I received fellowships that helped me make it through several years of my PhD, a year and a half of unpaid medical leave and many uncovered medical expenses.

But now I’m too tired, too sad, too angry to twist my life into those kinds of narratives. Those things are structural problems reflecting deep prejudices, oppression, & exploitation. I can’t wrap up the things that hurt me the most in a cute package to make someone feel good about giving me money. Funders seem to want a story where cleverness and elbow grease make light work of disability and other “obstacles.” Ultimately, telling those stories was personally destructive because I kind of came to believe those stories over time. And they aren’t true.

A little smarts and hard work and luck can’t make my chronically ill body “productive.” Even if they did, it would only make it alright for me – and that’s not good or fair. Telling those stories for so long made dealing with the reality of living-with-chronic-illness-under-capitalism/being disabled and past traumas really difficult.

As soon as I decided the problem wasn’t me, but the response of people and systems to me, I stopped getting funding. As Dr. Sara Ahmed says, “when you expose a problem, you pose a problem.”

Chronic migraine isn’t an obstacle for me to overcome. It is an illness that I live with. It hurts, it’s unpredictable, and the symptoms are strange and varied. But most of my difficulties would not exist in a less ableist, racist, sexist, and capitalist society – the poor care, the financial anxiety, the relationship power dynamics.

• Migraine would have proper research and maybe even treatment – it wouldn’t be ignored, dismissed, and underfunded in large part because it predominantly affects women (and especially poor women).
• My disease wouldn’t be stigmatized and belittled in popular culture, despite severe migraine being categorized by the WHO in its most severe disability class along with such diseases and conditions as active psychosis, severe depression, quadriplegia, and terminal stage cancer.
• My disease would be less common – I might not even have developed it – if we had the political will to eliminate poverty and abuse and other such negative “social determinants of health”.
• Properly funded health care would ensure I received proper disease and pain management, saving me time, money, and suffering. I wouldn’t waste hours every week on insurance paperwork and scheduling with doctors, commuting and waiting at appointments, coordinating my medical care and researching treatments. I would have access to specialists for my disease. My medications would be covered along with physiotherapy and massage. I’d have funded access to therapy to deal with pain that cannot be treated.
• My PhD wouldn’t have such a short time limit on medical leaves. I wouldn’t lose my income when I am too sick to work. The number of hours I’m able to work wouldn’t determine whether or not I’m allowed to participate in science and research.
• My ability to financially support myself wouldn’t be tied to the number of hours I’m able to work or widgets I’m able to produce.
My immigration status wouldn’t be dependent on my relationship status.
• I wouldn’t be financially dependent on my partner because I could receive disability benefits while in a relationship with someone who had income. Or I would just get paid for working on my PhD.
• Disability support would be enough to live on instead of less than the median rent and I’d be eligible for it regardless of my work history and immigration status.
• I wouldn’t have to rely on friends and family when I’m too sick to care for myself, making it impossible or difficult for me to move or travel – I’d receive funding to employ people (or there would be government aid workers) to help me cook and clean and go about my daily activities.

When I stopped writing narratives that recapitulated ideas about “hard work” and gumption and began talking about structural challenges, about integrating dismantling those structures into my work (or at least getting support to deal with them), I stopped getting funding.

And it didn’t just hurt my funding – my relationship with colleagues has suffered as my attitude has shifted. They like to say things like “you’re so brave” or “it’s so great you always have such a positive attitude” – but when it gets inconvenient or slows me down, if I ask for help advocating for accommodations, or get frustrated with the endless structural barriers my university throws up, they disappear or make excuses or defend those barriers. If I let my good-disabled-person facade drop and express anything but unrelenting cheerfulness, they start pushing me towards the door. It’s not everyone of course, but it’s enough, and it’s people with power, so it matters.

Being “successful” in academia when I’ve faced discrimination and structural barriers has meant parroting oppressive beliefs and mythologies, and I can’t do it anymore.

About the Author

Sarcozona is a graduate student doing research somewhere between ecology and evolution. Their blog chronicles their experiences being sick and queer in academia with lots of asides about the plants, shoes, and books they love. you might also want to follow them on twitter or read their posts on Tenure, She Wrote.

‘Not What I Paid For’: Ableism, Evaluations and the Academic Life

Written by Aparna Nair 

It was that time of year again.

The semester drew to an end and the university sent us enthusiastic email reminders to get students to evaluate our courses. ‘Evaluate NOW’, screamed the emails and signs posted all over campus. This semester, I caught myself instantly deleting that first notification as well as the later more urgent reminders. It was a futile gesture, since I nonetheless made sure to get my classes to fill in the evaluations. But for the first time in my academic career, I was genuinely anxious about the impending possibility of reading an evaluation report. Admittedly, 2017 was uniquely rough. A stressful year teaching seven courses was complicated by personal losses and the low hum of rising anti-immigrant sentiment, making it one of the most difficult of my life. I spent most of the year in a haze of auras, as my epilepsy had become rather recalcitrant.

And then I got these comments in my student evaluations:

I know she is sick. I know that she needs to sometimes bring her support dog into the class. I get it. But she missed classes. I know her TA took over, and that she caught up when she returned. But that is not what I paid for.

I expect more.

I don't want to hear about her illness. She gets paid to do this. WE are paying her to do this. She just needs to stop talking about it.

Even as I type the words, the shame rolls over me.

Evaluations like these raise the question of how academics who openly lay claim to disabled or chronically ill identities should respond when students demonstrate open, almost casual - certainly deliberate - ableism in evaluations. There is nothing in the faculty handbooks, endless trainings and workshops about being confronted with such blatant ableism.

I have lived with epilepsy for a very long time--I was diagnosed at the age of 11. In the deeply traditional and conservative South Asian cultures where I grew up, difference was neither encouraged nor tolerated and conformity was consistently rewarded. As a result of my illness, I experienced isolation, marginalization, derision, stigma and violence. After nearly two decades of concealment, I made a conscious decision to stop pretending that epilepsy was not a serious part of my life. Why, I thought, should I deny something that impinged on my every waking hour in ways that people rarely comprehended? Why did I need to pretend I was ‘normal’ (which my family had desperately wanted me to be) when I knew how illness marked me as different?

So, I ticked off the ‘Yes, I have a disability’ box when I applied for the position I have now, nervous and uncertain as to whether it made me just too marginal for a deeply conservative public university. I lay open claim to an epileptic identity as being part of the reason for my research agenda on disability studies and disability histories in South Asia. I design and conduct workshops on disability in university settings with a wonderful collaborator, and discuss what it means to be a chronically ill faculty member and how to ensure that our classrooms are accommodating and welcoming to disabled and chronically ill students. I publish autoethnographies on epilepsy in South India.

And every semester, my hands still shake when I tell students that I am epileptic in that first introductory session of every course. I strive for a matter-of-fact tone, and tell the classes that while this is not something I would usually share, there may be some times in the semester that my illness becomes uncontrollable and I might need to cancel a class. I then reassure them that this is factored into their syllabus and semester planning and that they will not lose out in terms of learning. Interestingly enough, my disclosure has consistently impelled students to share their own chronic illnesses or disabilities with me in private and I am very grateful for this, since it means I can make accommodations for them and design the class around their needs as well. But I have also come to realise that my initial fears about this act of public disclosure were not unwarranted.

For most of my teaching life, evaluations have always been the space where students expressed themselves anonymously and openly about their professors, without fear of reprisals. Evaluations can be funny and frivolous; trite and tough. Most of us who teach have been embarrassed at some point or the other by what seems to us sometimes unfair, occasionally inapposite ‘bon mots’—from comments on our sartorial choices (‘I loved his t-shirts’ to ‘He wore the same shoes all semester long’) to condemnations of our general affects (‘She is very opinionated! And expects you to agree with her’) to the student’s pondering what on earth we were doing in our chosen professions (‘I don’t know why he is teaching, clearly he is happier in the lab’). But evaluations can also be serious and help us adapt our teaching styles, our evaluation methods, our reading assignments and other pedagogical choices. I learnt that students liked blogging, but that they did not think that they had enough time to work on their exercises in class. I learnt that students will always have mixed opinions about group work, but that it is nonetheless useful. I learnt how the complicated courses I taught on race and empire and disability were received emotively and intellectually, and those responses were profoundly important in developing my courses in certain directions. So I had accustomed myself to opening my evaluations with the certainty that I would find useful information on my course design and assessments along with the more frivolous comments.

But I am at a loss as to how to respond to the casual ableism in my student evaluations, ableism which will become a part of every job application, every promotion and tenure application. It will be misinterpreted and decontextualised by committees and administrations and will eat into my teaching accomplishments or my research portfolio. For many people who see these comments, my epilepsy will circumscribe my abilities and skills.

How then do we respond to ableism in evaluations? I must admit, I am left only with questions. One option is to mention nothing of epilepsy at all in my classes. But it feels dishonest and just wrong.

So I can tell you how I have learnt to cope. I try to focus on the students with whom I seem to be connecting, the ones whose work is wonderful, who challenge me in class and whose presence in my classes is a true joy. And there are many of them. I have begun conducting my own evaluations in class, asking students what worked and what did not—and these are often more detailed feedback for adapting my pedagogical approach in different classes.

My methods do not always work. I sometimes feel like Sisyphus, and wonder if there is any point. I wonder if the affective (and physical) toll of being ‘out of the closet’ in academia is worth it at all.

And, in the meantime, it is more than a month since my evaluation reports were published. I still have not clicked on the link that takes me to the report.

Maybe next month? Or maybe not.

About the Author

Aparna Nair currently works as Assistant Professor in History of Science at the University of Oklahoma-Norman. She teaches on disability, race, empire, medicine and public health and her research explores colonialism and disability in British India as well as the meanings of chronic illness in modern south India. She blogs at disabilitystories.com.