November 8th, 2016 - Annika Speer
“Come home NOW bitch. It’s bad...” This was the text I received from one of my roomies on the evening of November 8, 2016. My housemates, three male graduate students each from disparate academic disciplines, were watching the election results roll in. The prior night, the four of us had painted our nails red, white, and royal blue, our ring fingernails decorated with the letter H and the forward arrow for the crossbar. We were with her.
The viewing party had started without me as I was still on campus, distractedly delivering a lecture on epideictic rhetoric to my 150-person night class. My roommates, watching the electoral map bleed increasingly and ominously red, continued to blow up my phone.
As an adjunct professor, I was an academic outsider, too expendable to be treated as part of the faculty but also no longer part of a graduate student cohort. Adjuncts do not garner the same benefits or security as graduate students—no healthcare, no stability of contract, no union or negotiating power, and the paltriest of pay. Attempting to keep my floundering academic career afloat, and gambling on the glimmer of potential the part-time position might offer, I’d moved to Riverside, California expressly for this nebulous gig. I was also in a long-distance relationship, so I reaped none of the economic reprieves of sharing rent or resources with a partner. At 35, I found myself too broke to live alone and wracked with shame at my financial and logistical circumstances: PhDemoralized.
My housemates’ camaraderie provided a sliver of silver lining to my precarity. These three guys, all nearly a decade younger than me, were my primary source of community. We joked that we were The Golden Girls and I was Sophia, the surly mother of our dingy rental house on Minerva Court. Thankful for their company, I couldn’t help but feel trolled by Minerva, the goddess of wisdom. How had a PhD led me to so little success or stability?
I glanced at my phone then back at my students; they were equally preoccupied by the election updates. I made a feeble epideictic joke — praising us for our efforts, blaming circumstances for our distraction — and dismissed class early. Cold pizza, a couch, and commiseration awaited me.
Looking back on that night, I wish I could tell myself: It gets better.
It also gets unimaginably, apocalyptically worse.
Over the past ten years my personal situation has improved substantially. Although I struggled for a few years to keep my head above murky water, I paddled from Adjunct to Lecturer to “LPSOE-Lecturer with Potential for Security of Employment” (yes, that insulting word salad was the actual job title) to tenured professor. Doggedly. Still in that same long-distance relationship (the classic “two-body problem”), I now earn a livable wage, own a small bungalow, and have moved from sharing space with three 20-somethings to two rescue dogs. I am in the privileged position of making a living working on theatre and film projects and teaching delightful students who share my passion for the collaboratively creative. I slogged my way into a career that seemed unattainable to the me of 2016.
My personal and professional gratitude is counterbalanced by my existential horror. In hindsight, that 2016 election seems positively quaint compared to the political circle of hell in which we’ve further descended. I think often of my roomie’s premonitory text: “Come home NOW bitch. It’s bad…” On a macro level, just how bad keeps evolving. On a micro level, I try to teach and make art, to value community, and to keep paddling.
Annika Speer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Digital Production at University of California Riverside. Her academic writing has been published in journals specializing in communication, theatre, gender & sexuality, and pedagogy. Her creative nonfiction has been published in a variety of literary journals as well as nominated for “Best of the Net” and the Pushcart Prize.
Annika has donated to the ACLU for immigrants' rights and would encourage others to support them as well. Learn more at www.aclu.org.
