“Ten years ago I started a company. It wasn’t a unicorn or anything, but after a few years it was worth a couple million dollars. And that was enough for me. I never wanted to be Bill Gates. All I wanted was financial security. And I thought I had achieved it. We had a deal on the table. It seemed like a sure thing. It got so far along that I was sketching out my retirement. But at the last moment it blew apart, and we never recovered. Last Friday I called a personal bankruptcy attorney. I haven’t even told my wife yet. I want her to know the truth, but I don’t want to freak her out. The stress is fucking killing me. And I just turned sixty, so I’m grappling with the notion that I might not be employable. After being successful for my whole life, suddenly I’m a failure. But I’m trying not to let the dark side take over. I’m fighting off suicidal thoughts. I’m measuring my success by how well I can keep my humanity in the midst of this trauma. If I can maintain respect for other people, it helps me feel better about myself. So I’m trying not to snap at anyone. I’m trying not to be vicious with my wife. If I can’t be a successful person right now, at least I can be a good person. And that’s a form of success.”
What they don’t tell you about prolonged periods of introspection and careful observation is the harm that can come from being totally alone in that process, with no one to remind you that feeling, learning, watching, and healing are communal. When lonesome thought is fetishized, you feel obligated to suffer in silence, to see all struggles as individual rather than collective. You tell yourself that maybe you’re just growing apart from things you thought you knew, that you’re not doing healing right, and this must mean you’re just inadequate. And at some point, you obsess over this cultivated lifestyle of being quiet, small, and invisible as a means of personal protection that you feel forgotten about and in the end, you have no one but yourself to blame.
Sometimes I wish I could speak and write like I used to. But the more I see and interpret, the less I speak because I become increasingly aware of my own mental boundaries as well as the structural limitations I didn’t want to know existed. And the less I speak, the more I simply think myself into non-existence – or at least, what feels the closest to thinking but not really living.
What does it mean to be seen without desiring all of the accompanying narcissism that attaches itself to forms of recognition? I’ve been thinking and re-thinking the politics of recognition for almost exactly half of a year. Recognition is something so paradoxical to me, and thinking about it is bound to drive you to a point in your mental health where any mention of soap-bathing, bubble-blowing “self-care” rituals make you want to disappear a little more with each passing day. I wonder what it does to a person to ponder alienation in alienation for this long, in addition to all of the recognition rituals that compensate for it. My heart hurts just trying to wrap my mind around that.
I grabbed coffee with a friend I admire so much yesterday, and I asked her if she was feeling this way, too. She said something I knew to be true, but so desperately needed to hear and be reassured by: “Everyone is feeling this way. This feeling is political, not just personal. It permeates daily life and it’s only getting worse and worse.” And I can feel it all the way from Egypt to the United States, the two places I keep escaping for each other only to find myself retreating again for the other. The current global crisis in capital that is building up is wreaking havoc on so many of us in the most insidious ways imaginable. But even attempting to communicate this is difficult and frightening because alienation is so often strategically pathologized, misdiagnosed as “depression”, and written off as individual suffering. And so, we all suffer in silence.
when you find an academic source that’s perfect for your paper but it’s behind a pay wall
Deciding to cite it anyway base on the abstract, knowing your professor probably won’t go through and look up every source in works cited
if you guys want to read academic papers but they’re behind a paywall, get the chrome extension Unpaywall. when you visit a site that requires you pay for their journal to view the article, the extension will look for other open access sites that will show you the article for free, and it’s all completely legal. all that money goes to the publisher, the writer of the paper gets none of it. https://unpaywall.org
If you can find out an author’s name, contact them. They may be willing to email it to you.For free.
I contacted a few authors back in my college days and they were all willing to share with me directly. AFAIK academic journals don’t pay the people they publish, so the authors won’t lose their shirts over helping out students.
